How Do You Make Policies and Procedures Work?
Every organization writes policies and procedures with good intentions, yet the documents so often sit unread in a binder or a shared drive. Customers and readers alike tell us how difficult it can be to keep their policies and procedures up to date, and how quickly good work drifts out of use. Ask yourself: do your procedures actually work if nobody follows them?
Due to the ever-increasing rate of change, your policies and procedures can get “stale” (ineffective) very fast. A document that was accurate last year may quietly fall out of sync with how the work is really done today. So what else goes wrong with procedures, and how do you make your policies and procedures work in practice?
What Does It Mean to Make Policies and Procedures Work?
Making policies and procedures work means the documents are current, easy to find, clear enough to follow, and actually used on the job. A procedure that works reflects how the process is really performed, guides the people who need it most, and is kept alive through revisions rather than frozen the day it was signed off. When those conditions are met, procedures stop being shelf-ware and start doing the job they were written for: training people, protecting quality, and making results repeatable.
The rest of this article looks at why employees do not follow procedures, and then walks through a practical system for keeping your procedures useful over time.
Why Don’t Your Employees Follow Procedures?
There are a lot of reasons for people not following procedures. Here are some of the most common, along with what to do about each one.
How Long Should a Standard Operating Procedure Be?
One reason might be that your standard operating procedures (SOP) are too long. If you have 35-page-long procedures, especially if that is all text, it is probably not fair to expect your employees to understand them, let alone use them. At that length, there is a very real risk that your procedures are unclear, overly complicated, and just plain boring. Keeping procedures short and under seven pages will help with understanding and usage.
Out of Date Procedures
Another reason procedures may not be up to date is that they are not followed. If your people were using the procedures as written and taught, they would be more likely to notice when things are out of date or out of sync with other company practices. Revisions are a healthy indicator of ongoing use, and revisions help to create effective procedures. Procedures that are written on with notes and comments are prime candidates for a procedure update. Formal revision control is not just good hygiene; it is a core requirement of the ISO 9001 quality management standard, which treats documented information as something to be reviewed and kept current, not filed and forgotten.
Employees Can’t Find Procedures
Perhaps your people cannot find your procedures, or possibly they are unaware that you have a procedure for this or that activity. Maybe because it is not right in front of them, they are assuming you do not have a formal procedure at all. Nonexistent or uncontrolled procedures imply that your quality management system is out of control. Consider using procedure management software to automate your procedures and include a search function for easy retrieval.
Procedures Are Too Simplistic
There is also the possibility that your procedures are too simple; that is, they are too broad and general to suit a specific situation. If your procedures are not directly to the point, and do not offer information specific to the process your employees are working on, they will not be used. Consider simple procedures for deletion, or add more information to improve the procedure so it fits the real task.
Poorly Written Procedures
Poorly written procedures are as bad as generic, simple procedures. If your procedures are incorrect or confusing, your employees will not use them either. Consider hiring a technical writer to at least edit your procedures, so the language is precise and the steps are unambiguous.
Poorly Designed Procedures
Sometimes procedures are simply not designed for ease of use. Either they are hard to navigate in themselves, or their formats are inconsistent. Formats that are inconsistent across departments and work areas are a frequent source of confusion. Consider using a procedure style guide to standardize your procedures so every document looks and reads the same way.
Who Are Procedures Written For?
It helps to think about who procedures are written for when designing your procedures. Procedures are primarily designed to be training aids. Frequent, experienced users do not need procedures often, if at all. They should periodically review procedures to be sure they are current, but on a day-by-day basis they are not your target reader.
Occasional users need reminding, but it is novice users who need procedures the most. They will need the guidance of a procedure until the process has become ingrained.
How to Make Your Policies and Procedures Work
To understand how to make your procedures work for your employees, you need to pay careful attention to the following:
- Develop a system that keeps your procedures current using intranets, social media constructs (blogs, wikis, and the like), document management systems, software, or new knowledge management systems.
- Keep your procedures concise, clear, and to the point, with no tangents or extraneous material.
- Use pictures, graphics, and examples to illustrate objectives.
- Make your procedures available where they are needed most.
- Develop a system with easy access (see point 1 above), make them searchable online, or make them part of the job (see point 4).
- Revision control is required for ISO and must be part of the job (see points 1 and 4).
- Eliminate generic procedures entirely.
- Keep procedures updated and useful (also see points 1 and 4).
- Create and maintain a common, easy-to-navigate format for your documents.
- Instill the discipline to follow procedures in your organization by making the process “owners” part of the procedure development.
Point four is worth dwelling on, because availability is where most systems quietly fail. Procedures that live where the work happens get used; procedures buried three folders deep do not. This is also why mature safety and quality programs bake documented procedures into daily operations rather than treating them as reference material. The approach behind OSHA’s recommended practices for safety and health programs is a useful model here: written programs are expected to be living documents, reviewed on a schedule and owned by the people who do the work.
Now that you know the secret to writing effective (that is, useful) policies and procedures, what are you waiting for? Pick the one procedure your team relies on most, and make it current, findable, and part of the job this week.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why Don’t Employees Follow Procedures?
Employees usually stop following procedures when the documents are too long, out of date, hard to find, too simplistic, poorly written, or poorly designed. In most cases the procedure is not wrong so much as unusable, so the fix is to make it shorter, clearer, current, and easy to reach on the job.
How Long Should a Standard Operating Procedure Be?
As a rule of thumb, keep a standard operating procedure short and under seven pages. Procedures that run 35 pages of dense text are unclear, overly complicated, and unlikely to be used. If a procedure has to be long, break it into shorter linked documents and use graphics to reduce the text.
How Do You Keep Procedures From Becoming Out of Date?
Keep procedures current by putting them into active use and running formal revision control. Revisions are a healthy indicator of ongoing use, so treat marked-up copies and comments as prompts for a procedure update. Document management or procedure management software makes this easier by tracking versions automatically.
Why Can’t Employees Find Their Procedures?
Often the procedures exist but are not right in front of the people who need them, so employees assume there is no formal procedure. Nonexistent or uncontrolled procedures suggest a quality management system that is out of control. Procedure management software with a search function makes procedures easy to retrieve at the point of work.
Who Are Procedures Really Written For?
Procedures are primarily training aids for novice and occasional users, who need the guidance most until the process becomes ingrained. Frequent, experienced users rarely need the step-by-step detail day to day, though they should periodically review procedures to confirm they are current.
