You’re spinning a lot of plates.
As a small business owner, it comes with the territory.
There are so many things going on from day-to-day, it’s a challenge to keep an eye on everything.
As a result, things can fall through the cracks especially when it comes to your employees.
Whether they quit unexpectedly or suffer a health issue that forces them to leave, if you don’t have processes documented for their job duties, you’ll be left in a big panic.
Without documenting, you’ll scramble to figure out how things were done and where passwords are and so on.
It’s stress you don’t need.
Entrepreneur.com’s, George Deeb has some insights on how you can avoid all of that:
1. What needs to be documented?
So, take a pause and think about all the areas of your business that need to be documented.
- Where do all my customer contacts reside?
- What was the last conversation my sales team had with my contacts?
- What is our desired layout for all marketing pieces and brand messaging?
- What techniques or phone scripts do we use to convert leads into sales?
- What should we be upselling to clients?
- What is our handoff procedure from sales to operations?
- What is your policy for handling customer complaints?
- Who has access to our bank accounts and accounting systems?
- How should we be collecting unpaid accounts receivables?
- What rules do we follow in building our technology code?
- And, the list goes on and on.
2. Training benefits from documentation
Yes, it is a daunting task . . . the first time.
But, once it is done, it can be easily maintained and updated from there.
And, most importantly, it serves as a really good tool to train new employees with. So, not only is it a way to protect yourself from losing institutional learnings locked away only in the heads of your employees, it is a great way to come across as professional to new employees, to help them better understand the processes needed for their jobs. And, the faster a new employee is onboarded, the faster they are producing valuable results for your company.
3. How documentation should be stored
Make sure these processes are centrally stored on your internal drives and are accessible to all employees that need to have access to such files. Perhaps segmenting your procedures by key department (e.g, sales vs. operations), and by level of role with your organisation (e.g., vice presidents have access to more than Managers). You don’t want 100 percent of employees having access to 100 percent of your sensitive files for security reasons.
So, make sure only the people that need to
have access to those files, get access to those files.
4. Emphasising the importance with your team
And, make sure the importance of having these processes documented is trained into the DNA of your company. Let them know it is part of their job, to make sure these processes are documented, learned and followed by their teams. And, most importantly, updated as they may be changed over time. Most processes are typically not set in stone, they are fluid with the needs of the business or its customers.
So, keeping the processes updated is critical to make sure new employees are learning the most current procedures.
5. . . . without over-processing your company
That said, you don’t want to suffocate the life out of your business by having too many procedures. You want your organisation to remain as flexible and nimble as the market demands require.
So, it is much less about have a “process tsar” enforcing all your processes and making a militant environment for your staff (where they will most likely quit), and much more about letting your employees know the importance here, and having them tackle it in digestible pieces as they have time. But, they do have to make time.
So, I know it is a pain in the butt, but get your processes written down while you can, before you actually need it.
You certainly don’t want your chief engineer leaving for another company before he clearly has documented all the “patches” only he knows exist in the millions of lines of code in your technology.
And, for those of you that ignore this warning, prepare for a rude awakening when you need it most.
George, thank you for the suggestions.
So, what are you waiting for?
Be sure to get started on documenting your processes before life gets in the way then you’ll forget.
If that happens, eventually your bookkeeping business will pay the price.
