Introduction
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Successful businesses run on procedures that enhance efficiency and productivity — while minimizing time investment.
But you can’t do that without process documentation and distributing these procedures throughout the organization to reduce the back and forth.
In this article, we’ll talk about step-by-step procedures, why you need them and how you can begin creating them to set solid frameworks that pave the path toward organizational efficiency and success.
Step-by-step procedures takeaways:
- Step-by-step procedures are essential for enhancing team performance and efficiency.
- They ensure accuracy, act as a single source of truth, help replicate previous success, and boost operations and productivity.
- To document procedures, identify which ones are worth documenting, gather information from internal subject matter experts, choose a tool for documentation, strategically inject procedures into operations, and continuously refine them.
- Documentation improves understanding, retention, and implementation of critical processes, leading to streamlined operations and success.
What are step-by-step procedures & how are they beneficial?
A procedure is a set of instructions that tell a person how to perform a task by breaking it into smaller, actionable steps. While there are a lot of examples of procedures in business, one of the most common examples of a procedure is a Standard Operating Procedure that details how to approach and perform a specific for consistency.
For example, if you want to teach new employees how to modify events from Google calendar as part of their onboarding, here’s a procedure you can use.
![Allow guests to modify events in Google Calendar](https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/616225f979e8e45b97acbea0/674fc6419a8300dae05a0d1f_67007985ba72cc57d3efc44a_66d6261673be262e4ffb5397_659f1bf2e40ab78fcdf5d08a_modify_google_calendar_n6m3.png)
Here are some benefits step-by-step procedures:
- Ensures accuracy. A standard procedure takes you through a visual route to guide each action you should take to perform a task successfully. There's minimum scope of error since it’s super detailed and documented by an expert (or their input) with visuals and walkthroughs.
- Acts as a single source of truth. Every leader in your organization likely has a different way of doing a similar task. Even new employees might come in with unique, valuable processes. Business procedures will act as the single source of truth to ensure consistency, performance and brand alignment.
- Helps replicate previous success. While there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for success, doubling down on best practices can help you replicate the same results. With documented procedures, you can get your entire team on the same level, enhance cross-functional collaboration and increase your chances of succeeding.
- Boosts operations and productivity. Instead of experimenting to find new ways of doing things more efficiently, refine existing plug-and-play procedures for use in relevant situations to enhance your team’s productivity and streamline operations.
Use procedures to level up your team's efficiency
Documentation makes critical processes easier to understand, retain and implement.
This matters even more when it comes to operational tasks like procedures.
It determines your team's efficiency, takes the load off of the senior team, streamlines processes and promises success.
Use the best practices mentioned in this article to start recording your step-by-step procedures and boost your team’s operational appetite — one step at a time.