How Standard Operating Procedures are Effective for Training Employees?

Every business has the need for training its employees to ensure there is a level of consistency in working systems and less chaos. Training of employees is not a one-off affair and it remains a recurring event. It can start from induction training to on-the-job training (orienting employee about the job process). A new employee can be put at ease with an established and documented set of SOPs than none at all. It also applies to circumstances when the employee is promoted, shifted to a different role/ department. In all such events, an SOP can play a vital role in getting the employee acquainted to the culture and nature of work within the organization. In this write-up, we seek to spell out advantages associated with SOP for employee training: Advantages of SOP for Employee Training  One of the critical advantages of SOPs with employee training has to do with the contribution of the human element in influencing outcomes. Here the emphasis is on reducing on-the-job errors with SOPs led training that help reduce the percentage of errors to a considerable extent. Here is a look at overall advantages of SOP for Employee Training and development:

• Improves Job Performance: Humans come with varying abilities to perform a job. But this lag in performance can be improved through adequate training. A ‘poor performer’ can be turned into an asset to the organization through the use of SOP led training. By communicating the finest details and exact measurements related to a job, the employee becomes more capable and productive.

This enables him to carry out his responsibilities with a better perspective than before. The crux here is the transfer of subtle technical know-how through SOPs that at times gets restricted to the minds of a few experienced hands in the organization. By implementing SOPs and making them a part of the SOP creation process, this know-how gets documented enabling knowledge transfer within the organization. Creates transparency with Job expectations: Every organization that incorporates SOPs for training purposes have the distinct advantage of being able to communicate the expectations quite clearly. In the absence of a document like the SOP, it becomes tedious to communicate the expectations related to the job process. And at times when it is defined vaguely, it puts both the employee and the supervisor in a dicey situation. Moreover, with SOPs when expectations are clearly defined it becomes motivating for the employee to improve job performance. While it becomes easy for management to monitor job performance. In either way, it is a win-win situation for both stakeholders.

• Supports the Idea of Continuous Improvement: Including experienced employees with in-depth knowledge of the job process during the creation of an SOP can be integral to continuous improvement. Such employees through their continued exposure to the job process are able to gain valuable insights into improving efficiencies.

Such knowledge can be easily documented through knowledge transference by closely engaging with the employees during the SOP creation process. This will ensure that the ‘learning’ phase of a new employee gets reduced to a relatively shorter period of time. Hence SOP will become the go-to document for all employees who go through a period of struggle for learning a new job process.

• Become an Accuracy Controlled Enterprise (ACE): Employees working an ACE are masters at what they do, to enable the organization to become a world-class company. The focus here is on including – target, tolerance and test (3T) into the work procedures. In other words, a target gets specified, a range of acceptable tolerance gets defined and the proof test is run to check whether the task was done right.

This ‘3T’ gets embedded into the SOPs and gets communicated to the employees during the training phase. This can ensure that the employee performs the task to a high level of accuracy during the first time itself. An ACE with the help of SOPs is able to standardize work procedures with built-in quality assurance.

• Self Paced Learning Tool: It is a known fact that SOPs tend to reduce the need for classroom training among employees. Exhaustive and well-written SOPs can function as a self-paced learning tool allowing the employees to learn at their own pace and comfort. Meaning SOP manuals would function as the only knowledge resource required by the employees to master their job processes. This can free up a lot of time and resources that get invested for face-to-face training. Moreover, employees become more confident about knowledge retention and skill sets without relying on a superior or a supervisor to improve on-the-job performance.
• Improvement in SOPs – Effective Video SOPs: The improvement of technology has also resulted in enhancements in how SOPs get implemented. Video-based SOP training is catching up fast at various companies. It minimizes the intervention from humans towards training. With the internet and associated technologies, it is becoming increasingly easy to disseminate training material. Employees can be served video-based training material over the internet allowing them access to training at their workplace desktops or mobile phones. This kind of SOP training has the potential to subsequently replace all classroom-based training and with accelerating technology trends, video-based training might even become interactive down the years.
• Vast Scope for Implementation: SOPs by no means should be restricted to a few functions in the organization. Rather the effort should be on raising the awareness and applicability of SOPs across the organization. This can ensure all job-related processes in the organization is done with efficiency, quality and uniformity in performance. Every business function needs to be inculcated with the need to train their personnel with SOPs and raise the performance bar.

How Business Process Experts (BPX) implement SOPs in organizations? BPX comes with a long-standing reputation of being a premier organization in India when it comes to the implementation of SOPs. It is known for creating a standard operating procedure for training department and SOP for training employees. We believe SOP for training and development is critical for the long term sustenance and growth of an organization. Standard operating procedure for training and development is an integral service offering coming from BPX. That said, SOP implementation from BPX follows two aspects that make it different from consulting companies that operate in the same sphere, which are:

• Seamless Integration: As a process consulting agency BPX believes that any SOP that gets implemented in the organization must be in-sync with available IT systems in the organization such as available software platforms and applications like CRM. Unless the SOPs get integrated into the IT systems in an organization, it may not find practitioners among stakeholders within the organization. BPX considers this vital to SOP implementation.
• Implementable & Paperless: An exhaustive SOP might not really serve the purpose if it is cumbersome to implement. BPX during SOP creation, make it practical enough to be implemented on the ground. Further, BPX believes that the ideal medium for implementing SOPs is through online documentation process which improves the relevance by making it accessible and increases the scope of SOPs getting implemented across the board.