Here’s How Improving SOPs Can Help You Grow Your Business

Businesses have standard operating procedures (SOPs) to educate employees on performing uniform tasks to ensure quality and consistency. They also assist in onboarding new talent, upskilling current team members, and promoting a culture of knowledge sharing. In addition, these procedures can boost productivity, promote appropriate resource allocation, and improve existing processes by creating a central repository of information. During my time at Uber, I saw how important it is to have a practical knowledge management system in place with SOPs, so I set out to tackle this problem in a way that can help businesses of all sizes have the power to scale internally.

How can businesses address the need for SOPs while reducing the time spent creating them? Flexible workflow documentation tools allow companies to streamline the creation of SOPs by enabling team members to capture workflows in real-time as they work. Equally important is the ability to easily and quickly edit SOPs as they change without having to reinvent the wheel. The right workflow documentation system makes SOPs the byproduct of how teams work and can be updated to match the needs of a growing business.

On an average, employees spend 19 percent of their workweek searching for information to do their job, which creates frustration and translates to hours of lost time. In addition to affecting an organization’s overall productivity and bottom line, it also directly impacts the quality and consistency of output as people may be performing the same task differently. A knowledge management system with a repository of SOPs ensures that everyone on the team has access to the same information when needed and empowers employees to be their best at work.

In addition to creating standardized practice, organizations should strive to develop a culture of knowledge sharing and continuous improvement. For example, by capturing the best practices from top performers and sharing them across teams, you can celebrate great work and improve the team’s efficiency and outcomes. In addition, when employees call out sick– like the 7.8 million that called out sick in January of 2022– SOPs allow ill employees to transfer their work to other team members during an absence, reducing the likelihood of a project or task stalling or slipping through the cracks.

SOPs remove the complexity of miscommunications and poorly communicated instructions. Nearly 70% of managers aren’t comfortable communicating with their employees, and more than 57% of employees report not receiving clear instructions from their managers. SOPs can bridge the gap in communicating how work gets done by making processes understandable and easier to implement.

When onboarding new hires, a knowledge hub of procedures and documented workflows will help standardize training efforts, shorten the learning curve, and improve the employee experience. Great employee onboarding can improve employee retention by 82 percent by ensuring access to knowledge and SOPs new hires can get up to speed quickly and painlessly. This is also a good time to audit and update SOPs . New hires using the SOPs can flag unclear or out-of-date steps, helping businesses find inefficiencies in their process documentation.

Knowledge management supports retention and engagement by increasing employee satisfaction. Giving employees the tools and resources they need to do great work translates to a better sense of belonging and fulfillment. Companies that have happy employees are proven to outperform competitors by 20 percent .

Neglecting SOPs can cause many consequences, including inconsistencies across the company, poor customer experiences, and a less engaged workforce. On the other hand, knowledge management leads to better workflows, improved customer experiences, and ultimately, prepares you to scale and grow.