How To Effectively Document Procedures (With Examples)

Business procedures define how your company completes work. Whether dealing with daily operations or emergency strategies to address project delays, it takes time to hone procedures that let your organization keep pace with competitors.

But the effort’s well worth it. Organizing company procedures helps every team member adhere to a consistent quality standard, increasing the performance and efficiency of current and new employees.

Discover how to document your processes with our actionable guide and find inspiration from realistic procedure examples.

What’s a Business Procedure?

In business, the definition of a standard operating procedure (SOP) is: A documented series of organizational processes dictating how to complete specific activities for desired outcomes. These documents set firm company standards by ensuring employees complete processes the same way every time. 

Step-by-step procedures are also necessary for setting new hires up for success. Building SOPs for crucial company processes and compiling them in a centralized procedure manual ensures new employees quickly acclimate and align with team expectations.

Companies typically shape their procedures over time using data and trial and error to produce the most effective, efficient processes. This means it’s vital to meticulously archive and continuously review these guides.

Why Are Well-Defined Company Procedures Important?

Detailed procedures create repeatable success, set a firm quality standard and bring order to cross-departmental business operations. Defining efficient how-to guides also boosts productivity, in turn helping your team outperform competitors. 

Here’s more on the benefits of documenting your business processes:

• Improves efficiency: Team members who follow documented procedures can complete tasks faster while maintaining quality.
• ‍Boosts company consistency: Documented procedures help every employee complete their duties similarly, elevating consistency org-wide. For example, having every customer service agent use the same company greeting when they answer the phone promotes professionalism and reliable outcomes.

• Enhances employee training: Standardized procedures give new hires a great first impression of your organization. This also helps them ramp up and learn your methods faster.
• Reduces error: Step-by-step instructions ensure employees avoid common task mistakes.
• Mitigates risk: Well-outlined processes mitigate risks, such as injuries in a manufacturing plant or sanitation concerns in a healthcare facility.

Processes vs. Procedures

The meanings of “procedure” and “process” are distinct. A business process is a series of work activities, and the procedure is the instructions describing how to complete the process.

For example, a business process might be approving employee leave. This describes the activity, while the procedure would lay the steps out like a guide. The steps could look like:

1. Review the leave request.
2. Evaluate the impact of the employee’s absence.
3. Approve or deny the request.

Remember that business processes and procedures differ from work instructions, which detail processes in even more detail than SOPs. For more insights, read our complete guide on work instructions.

Policies vs. Procedures

Policies define the overarching values and behavior leaders expect, like an employee code of conduct, safety standards and dress codes. And procedures dictate how employees complete specific work tasks. 

Like procedures, policies also contribute to consistency, but they do so by defining your company’s ideals for behavior, inclusion, safety, sustainability and privacy.

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How To Document Business Procedures: 7 Steps

Successful process documentation is critical to enjoying a productive workflow. Learn how to create procedures effectively using our guide and Scribe’s AI browser extension.

1. Plan Out the Procedure

Define the procedure you want to document and map it out by gathering crucial information, including the people and responsibilities involved. It’s best to consult whoever typically completes the activity, such as an employee or a subject matter expert. This ensures you don’t miss minor but essential details.

Also determine which platform to use at this stage. When you use Scribe to capture and document processes, you can ask the employee in charge of the task to perform the activity as usual, and our AI tool will automatically build a step-by-step guide.

2. Choose a Good Title

Choose a relevant, understandable title to label your procedure. Select something concise and descriptive to make it easy for employees and stakeholders to find within your organization’s knowledge base.

The title improves searchability and ensures employees don’t confuse very similar SOPs. For example, the SOPs for “How To Answer Customer Inquiries” and “How To Troubleshoot Customer Problems” must be distinct enough so an employee doesn’t open the wrong one and waste a customer’s time.

3. Introduce the Procedure

A procedure’s introduction is a short description highlighting its purpose and importance. Familiarize employees with the process quickly so the coming steps are easy to understand and don’t raise any questions.

A quick introduction also helps employees determine whether or not they found the correct SOP when similar procedures exist in the knowledge base.

4. Highlight and Describe the Steps 

Break down the procedure into clear sequential instructions. Order these steps logically and be as concise as possible, providing detail without getting too wordy. Don’t be afraid to add substeps to larger tasks to break them into simple chunks.

This step executes itself when you use Scribe to document SOPs. Scribe’s browser extension turns any procedure into a how-to guide by taking screenshots and generating accurate text for each step.

Here’s an example of an SOP created with Scribe, titled “Update Your Slack Status.” A user built a helpful procedure in just 19 seconds by switching on Scribe and going through the process as usual.

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5. Add Relevant Media and Resources

Visual media is a great way to elevate your SOP. Images, screenshots, videos and graphs can illustrate complex concepts and break up large walls of text, increasing comprehension. And they help visual learners grasp procedures more quickly, which improves company accessibility.

It’s also a good idea to add links to valuable resources that aid employee understanding, such as external articles, YouTube videos and relevant internal documentation like other SOPs.

6. Include Tips and Warnings

While listing the steps may seem sufficient, providing readers with common mistakes and tips makes for an even more comprehensive process overview. You can use this “best practices” section to explain your reasoning behind crucial steps or suggest approaching the task with a specific mindset.

Additionally, a warnings section helps employees stay mindful of potential roadblocks, safety concerns and challenges. For example, an SOP could instruct editors to run content through Grammarly but warn them that the tool’s suggestions aren’t always accurate, instructing employees to trust their best judgment.

7. Implement Your Procedure and Continuously Improve

Review and edit your procedure, then get feedback from various process-relevant employees. Once you’ve revised it, publish the guide to your company’s knowledge base and make sure your team knows how to access it.

Documentation is never “one and done” — put someone in charge of following a set maintenance schedule to review your SOPs. We recommend reviewing SOPs annually, but frequency depends on the specific process.

Business Procedure Examples

As you consider which business processes you’ll document first, here are some procedure examples to kick-start your brainstorming. First, here are a few industries and their example SOPs:

• Customer service: New Customer Account Creation Procedure.
• Finance: Customer Credit Worthiness Verification Procedure.
• IT: Customer Troubleshooting Procedure: macOS and iOS.
• Human resources: New Employee Onboarding Procedure.

And here’s a more thorough example.

Customer Problem Resolution Procedure

Introduction: Resolving customer issues efficiently and satisfactorily showcases our people-centric values. Practicing patience and kindness and thoroughly following these steps ensures we keep people calm, expertly solve their problems and provide excellent customer service.

Resources:

• A computer.
• Internet access.
• Access to the customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Steps:

1. Greet the customer.
2. Listen attentively and clarify the problem.
3. Add the issue to the CRM.
4. Provide the most common solutions from our list.some text
   1. [Provide a link to your list of solutions.]
5. Confirm the solution worked.
6. Thank the customer.
7. Document the issue as resolved in the CRM.

Expertly Organize Procedures With Scribe

Well-defined procedures improve team-wide task consistency and reduce frustrating mistakes. And building, editing and sharing this documentation is easy with Scribe. Our free AI procedure writer follows along as you perform a task, taking annotated screenshots and accurately logging each step.

‍Sign up for Scribe and create an extensive procedure database for free.