Standard Operating Procedures

Succinctly put, standard operating procedures provide precise instructions for employees to follow while performing specific tasks within your enterprise.

They are detailed step-by-step processes that follow best practices, and organization-specific protocols for various tasks and activities. SOPs are essential for maintaining consistency, ensuring quality, and promoting efficiency. With well-established SOPs, everyone on your team should be on the same page, which can translate to a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.

As you embark on crafting SOP materials or enlisting third-party experts for this task, it’s crucial to keep the objectives of standard operating procedures in mind.

The chief objectives of an SOP include clarifying your company’s operations, ensuring consistent processes for reliable results, and addressing important safety concerns. Moreover, SOPs prevent miscommunication regarding policy directives and task execution.

With proper documentation, you’ll maintain consistency in products and processes, promote accountability amongst workers, and get through turbulent times when expanding your operations with new managers and worker groups.

First, you’ll want to talk with key stakeholders regarding their objectives and what they need to prioritize and cover through SOPs. You need a strategy and infrastructure in place that clearly defines the high-level scope, and start the discussions on how the SOPs will need to be managed, updated and ultimately delivered.

This holds true whether you’re describing how an employee should clean or maintain a particular machine on a shop floor, updating your employee onboarding materials for new recruits, providing steps for completing tasks using your accounting software or maintaining regulatory compliance through safety procedures.

Think about the perspective of new employees or employees who need to learn about a new way of performing tasks. Anticipate the questions they might have, and consider what main points you want to emphasize. The sooner you think about these issues, the better it will be for your documentation process.

It’s necessary to be patient and think carefully about what you need to include before you start writing. Define your target audience and the SOP’s scope, then brainstorm optimal approaches for presenting the material. Or, make sure you have time to discuss the procedures with third-party experts who will be writing the documentation for your company.

It’s also useful to establish project milestones, which means you need to know the deadline for finalizing the SOP and delivering the end product to users. Companies should proactively anticipate challenges during SOP development. This includes verifying that key individuals will be available to answer questions. You don’t want to find you need to wait for someone to return from a vacation to get the information you need.

Every SOP document will be different, according to the needs of the organization, the nature of the company culture, and what you want to prioritize. But, no matter the medium or format, there are some common characteristics of SOPs for you to keep in mind as you develop your content or hire third-party experts to handle this task for you.

To start the document, you should come up with a title as soon as possible. This will help determine the scope and purpose and solidify what you and your team need to include. For example, it might be a guide to maintaining customer privacy when handling sensitive information, an employee safety manual, or instructions on how to use the company’s own internally developed, custom software.

Next, your SOP should include an introduction with a summary overview of what the reader can expect to get out of the material. Organize the content so workers can quickly turn to the section they need when addressing a question, finding out the company’s approach to doing a particular task, or monitoring a process. Formatting and structure can help here, discussed further below.

You may choose to list your company guidelines or aspects of the company culture that you want to emphasize. This could include details such as always putting customers first or having a rule that you must respond to an inquiry within 24 hours. You might also need to list company regulations or state/federal laws that apply to the work described for greater context, but this varies based on your industry.

After that, start developing a list of core processes. This may include explaining how an employee packs up items for shipment to a customer efficiently in a manner that keeps the products from breaking. It might outline how to write a response to a customer complaining on social media about your products or services. If you get stuck on this step, ask your employees about their daily responsibilities.

Many standard operating procedure documents will note what employee is responsible for completing certain tasks or monitoring the progress of different jobs. Additionally, SOPs usually include the specific steps of a process with clear instructions that everyone, from newcomers to seasoned employees, should be able to follow.

Employees might grow complacent when carrying out routine, standard tasks if you don’t spell out the specific steps they need to take. Be as detailed as possible. That’s the key to keeping employees working in the same way every time.

When explaining how to do a certain action or task, it’s useful to provide a summary at the end of each section, highlighting what the person should have learned. For highly technical or specialized topics, provide a list of terms and definitions to help make sure everyone is on the same page and there is no room for ambiguity. You might also need to spell out certain things that employees should never do.

Each organization will have different priorities for structuring a significant document like an SOP. Typically, you will focus on the most important topics first, and outline your ideas in a clear and logical manner.

Generally, they include a title and purpose section to explain the procedure’s significance, followed by a scope description to define its boundaries. The main component of the SOP are the procedure steps, which are laid out in a coherent sequence, often supported by visual aids. You may rely on diagrams, flow charts, checklists, and summaries for each section. Using these formats, offers several advantages for enhancing the clarity, comprehension, and execution of processes.

Diagrams and flowcharts – visually represent intricate processes, simplifying the understanding of sequential steps, decision points, and dependencies.

Checklists – condense tasks into concise lists, acting as quick reference guides to ensure that every critical step is completed in the correct order. This promotes efficient execution, reduces errors, and maintains consistency across team members.

Summaries – provide a brief overview or key takeaways, when positioned at the beginning or end of each section. This allows team members to grasp essential points without delving into the full details.

These visual aids and concise elements standardize procedures, expedite the onboarding of new team members, and facilitate cross-functional communication. By offering clear guidance through each process step, they mitigate errors and enable teams to work more effectively.

Moreover, visual representations simplify complex processes, aiding in the identification of inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement. In cases where compliance and audits are necessary, these aids can provide a documented record of actions taken. Overall, integrating these visual and streamlined components into SOPs significantly contributes to improved usability, team performance, and operational efficiency.

After you’ve finished your first draft, have someone who habitually follows the procedures confirm the steps are correct. Once they give it the green light, it’s best to have someone who is unfamiliar with the processes follow the SOP document to see how well they meet its objectives. When a person falters, you’ll know where to revise the document.

Continue to refine the process until you have your final draft for approval. Then, the owner, manager, or supervisor will need to sign off. After that, it’s simply a matter of distributing the SOP document to the appropriate people.

Ideally, only experienced topic experts will create your SOPs. This approach not only ensures the accuracy and reliability of the procedures but also saves time for your employees who need to focus on other tasks. Your enterprise may not currently have talented writers on staff who are capable of researching and putting together a standard operating procedures manual. That’s no reason to delay putting together SOP documentation for your team, clients, or customers.

For best results, engage with a professional company providing comprehensive technical writing services, such as Contiem. We’re proud of the reputation we’ve developed in the industry for being a leader in content creation. That’s why large Fortune 500 enterprises and governmental organizations from around the world rely on our services to hone their message and present their documentation in a well-crafted package. We do this on time and within the budget specified, so you can leave the details to our team while you focus on your business.

To learn more about our approach to the SOP development process or to get started outsourcing technical writing services with us, get in touch with the experts at Contiem today.