Introduction
People often use “process” and “procedure” interchangeably, but there are important differences that — once understood — allow you to correctly document each to boost team clarity and productivity.
Learn the distinction between a process vs. a procedure — explore realistic examples, understand vital differences and discover their distinct advantages.
What’s a Process?
A business process is a set of tasks and activities that accomplish an organizational goal. They’re present in every company and department and vary in length and complexity. For example, designing new software is an intensive, intricate process, while answering a customer question is simpler.
Processes define how your company completes work. They state the desired outcome and describe each step, providing enough information to clarify standards and expectations without going into extensive detail.
What’s a Procedure?
A procedure describes how to complete an activity from start to finish, offering clear instructions on performing tasks and achieving ideal outcomes. Every procedure tackles one step in a process to provide adequate detail. For example, the process “Employee Onboarding” has multiple procedures, including “Creating a New Employee Login” and “Sending and Approving Necessary Paperwork.”
Note that procedures are in-depth but not exhaustive. For guides that cover every minute detail, consider creating work instructions instead.
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Process vs. Procedure: Key Differences
The main difference between a process and a procedure is that one describes the “what,” and the other describes the “how.” Here’s a quick summary:
- Process: Defines the inputs, outputs and activities for a company goal, giving a high-level view.
- Procedure: Explains how to execute a process and its subtasks successfully, including who’s involved and the required resources.
While a process gives a straightforward, broad overview of a company’s work, it won’t offer sufficient instructions to employees, which are especially crucial for new hires. Procedures expand on each step, using action-oriented language to describe how to complete every task. This means that one process typically requires multiple procedures to provide adequate detail.
Process and Procedure Examples
Reviewing realistic examples of processes and procedures can further illustrate their distinctions. Here’s a breakdown of a short, straightforward company process for requesting leave:
- An employee requests leave.
- The manager receives the request.
- They process the request.
- They approve or deny the request.
While this clarifies and structures how an organization handles leave and sets steady expectations, it doesn’t provide direct instructions. Many processes require procedures for each step, but a simple activity like this might only need instructions for requesting leave and processing the request.
Now, let’s examine what one of those procedures — processing leave requests — might look like:
- Confirm which type of leave was requested (such as sick leave, family leave or administrative leave).
- Refer to your department calendar and check for mandatory meetings, events and projects.
- Review schedules for relevant teammates, including individuals in similar roles or with dependent tasks, and look for leave overlap.
- Check the requesting employee’s remaining leave balance and work schedule.
- Compare leave type, remaining leave balance, department calendar and teammates’ schedules to determine whether to approve or deny.
Procedures can be an excellent all-in-one resource. For instance, the above guide can provide even more information by linking to a glossary of different leave types and a company policy on approving leave.
6 Advantages of Defining Processes and Procedures
Here are six critical benefits of defining processes and writing clear procedures.
1. Enhance Efficiency
Clarifying how your company operates allows employees to complete their work quickly and successfully. You’ll prevent hours of wasted time searching for information, passing tasks to the wrong person and redoing incorrectly executed steps.
Transparent processes and procedures ensure that employees always understand expectations so they can continue with their day and maintain a steady work cadence.
2. Increase Compliance and Security
Organizations need a well-defined system for managing sensitive information and ensuring security. Transparent processes help you adhere to laws and company policies by describing how to handle customer and employee data and follow ethical practices, like auditing AI software.
3. Identify Bottlenecks
Examining business processes involves reviewing every step and checking for bottlenecks, challenges and inefficiencies so you can correct and prevent them.
For example, a sales manager might discover that half of the sales team is still manually converting contacts to leads in the CRM, even though the organization recently automated this process with software. By documenting and sharing a relevant procedure, they can inform their team of company standards and increase productivity.
4. Simplify Training and Onboarding
Joining a company is overwhelming, and it isn’t easy to acclimate to new work methods. Defining your organization’s standards gives new hires a firm understanding of expectations and helps them ramp up successfully.
This transparency also reduces training efforts for managers. When new employees have clear instructions for completing their work, they perform better and quickly become functioning team members.
5. Maintain Consistency and Quality Standards
When all employees execute a task in the same way, it encourages company consistency, improves productivity and supports your brand’s reputation of reliability. Having clearly defined processes and procedures sets a firm quality standard, enhancing your competitive edge and customer satisfaction.
For example, a service team that uses a standardized troubleshooting guide and call script creates a more fluid, professional customer experience.
6. Improve Knowledge Sharing and Retention
Knowledge is an essential company resource, and defining how your business executes tasks and completes projects is crucial for retaining and communicating internal know-how. Clear procedures retain organizational knowledge and techniques, helping new hires adjust to their roles and ensuring continuous improvement — you can only know what works and what doesn’t if you record your processes.
Why You Should Document Processes and Procedures
While defining procedures is an excellent start, creating comprehensive documentation for each task is crucial. Build a consistent, accessible knowledge base filled with processes and workflows to elevate your employees’ understanding and retain company information for years. This is effortless when you use process documentation software like Scribe.
Scribe helps you create thorough, visually digestible instructions instantly. Turn on our browser extension or desktop app, execute your procedure as usual and our AI tool will generate an accurate step-by-step guide.
With Scribe Pages, you can combine multiple Scribes to create a cohesive knowledge base with consistent documentation structures, helping employees take in information and navigate instructions faster.
Scribe also adds annotated screenshots, so all your procedures have helpful visual aids — without the heavy lifting on your end.
Write Better Procedures in Minutes With Scribe
Well-documented guides are essential to an efficient workplace, but manually creating them can take weeks or longer. Luckily, Scribe can help.
Scribe is the ultimate tool for standardizing processes and procedures. Get started with one of our 100+ templates — then fill in your process and build procedures for each step using our Process Generator. This tool captures keystrokes and mouse movements as you work, translating your steps into a cohesive guide with images and links.
Sign up for Scribe for free and define what makes your company unique.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Procedures Part of a Process?
Yes, procedures provide directions for correctly executing a step within a greater process. Each process typically has several procedures — one for any step complex enough to merit instructions.
How Do You Identify a Process or Procedure?
Examine the task and determine if it describes “what” something is or “how” to do it. If it’s a general overview of what a series of tasks accomplish, it’s a process. If it’s a descriptive set of instructions, it’s a procedure.
Are Procedure and Process Synonyms?
From a linguistic standpoint, yes — they both mean a series of actions to achieve a result. But they’re very different in business terminology, where “process” means a set of tasks and “procedure” refers to step-by-step instructions on completing the process.
