Standard Operating Procedures People Will Actually Use

Operations: Deliver and run the business

You have probably seen the binder. It sits on a shelf in the office, three inches thick, made during a burst of good intentions, and nobody has opened it since. When a new hire asks how to do something, someone says, “Just watch me.” The knowledge stays in one person’s head, and the binder collects dust.

The procedures were written for a filing cabinet, not for a person standing in a truck, a kitchen or a customer’s living room with about ninety seconds to spare.

Write it for the person doing the work

A standard operating procedure, or SOP, is just the way you do a repeatable task, written down so someone else can do it the same way. That is all. The reason to bother is simple. If the work only gets done right when you do it yourself, you do not have a business yet. You have a job with extra worry attached.

Here is the distinction that matters: a procedure for the record versus a procedure for use. A record is thorough and covers every case. A tool for use is short, and gets read at the moment of need. Choose the second one every time.

Keep each SOP to one page. One task, one page. If it will not fit, you have probably bundled two tasks together, so split them. Write it in the plain words your crew uses, not the words you would use in a contract. Start each step with a verb: check, place, photograph, send, lock.

Then add pictures. A photo of what a properly finished job looks like will do more than a paragraph of description. So will a photo of where the shutoff valve is, what the plated dish should look like, or how the display should be set at close. People copy what they can see.

What goes on the page

Every good one-page SOP answers the same handful of questions. You will find a blank layout in the Standard Operating Procedure Template on the Resources page, but you can also do it on a plain sheet of paper.

• The name of the task and who does it, in plain words
• When it happens: at opening, after each job, every Friday
• What you need before you start: tools, materials, access
• The steps, in order, each one short, with a photo where a photo helps
• What done looks like, so nobody has to guess
• What to do when something goes wrong, and who to call

That last line is the one many people skip, and it is the one that saves you the phone call at nine at night. If a step can fail, say what to do about it. If the answer is “call me,” say that too, and say when it is worth calling.

Write it with the people who do the job

Do not write these alone in the office. Watch the work, or better, ask the person who does it best to walk you through it while you take notes and photos. They know the shortcuts and the traps that you have forgotten. Then have someone who has never done the task follow your page, step by step, while you stay quiet. Every place they stumble is a place the page is wrong.

Then put it where the work happens. Laminated in the van, taped inside a cabinet door, saved on the phone everyone already carries. A procedure buried in a shared folder that nobody can find is the binder all over again.

Finally, treat it as living. When you find a better way, change the page and date it. Ask your team once a quarter which pages are wrong or missing. If people are ignoring a procedure, that is information. Either it is too long, or it does not match how the job really works, and you should find out which.

Where do you start? Not with everything. Begin with the tasks that cause the most trouble when they go wrong, the ones you train over and over, and the ones only one person can do. Three good pages beat thirty ignored ones.

What it takes

Choose one task that you or one person on your team does in the same way every week. Spend twenty minutes writing the steps and taking photos, get it onto one page, and hand it to someone who does not normally do that task. Watch what they do and fix the page. That is your first SOP. Each procedure after it takes roughly thirty to sixty minutes to write, photograph and test, and the first one always takes the longest.

It is free if you use your phone camera and a word processor. Printing and laminating a few pages costs a few dollars.