What are Standard Operating Procedures?

Standard Operating Procedures, or SOPs, are a great way to standardize processes across a team. SOPs provide clear, step-by-step guidance about how to work through a process. PennState describes the value of SOPs as follows:

Well-written standard operating procedures (SOPs) provide direction, improve communication, reduce training time, and improve work consistency.

They're used in virtually all industries, and prove especially useful for scenarios that have a variety of different potential outcomes. By moving through a decision tree, the person following the SOP reaches the right outcome based on the scenario at hand.

Standard operating procedures can also take the form of checklists, where someone is tasked with completing a list of items that roll up into the completion of a broader objective. They provide specific, actionable guidelines for what constitutes a task that is completely done.

Common Challenges with Implementing SOPs

When learning how to write standard operating procedures, there's often the concern that your team won't follow them. If they're not going to follow them, the effort to create them was in vain and that's a frustrating experience. Some of the more common reasons that SOPs aren't followed when they're rolled out include:

1. The process is so complex that an SOP document is still too hard to follow.
2. Most SOPs aren't interactive, and people make mistakes while following them. This can result in poor customer experiences and wrong answers.
3. The SOP tells the follower what the process is, but it doesn't help them craft a response or message at the end of the process.
4. The SOP is buried in another tool or system, and people don't know where to find it - so they don't follow it.

How Text Blaze Addresses These Challenges

Text Blaze brings SOPs to life, turning them from static documents or confusing flowcharts into interactive guides that are available directly inside the tools where you're already doing your work. This article provides best practices for creating SOPs in Text Blaze, so you can create procedures that your team will actually follow.

Best Practices For Implementing SOPs

Proceed Through the Process One Step at a Time

Long, complex SOPs can be intimidating, especially if you're in a role where quick responses and high volume are expected of you, like customer support roles.

Structuring them in a way that presents the process step by step in the most digestible way is important. Don't make your team wade through super-long documents where they have to jump around from section to section to find what they need.

Using Text Blaze's rules, or conditional logic, feature, SOPs can be presented one step at a time. You can avoid showing unnecessary steps or alternative paths that aren't relevant to this specific scenario, and make the process more digestible to the user of the SOP.

In the example below, you'll see that each step of the process is presented only when the previous step is complete. The next step that's presented is dynamic and conditional on what the previous step's response was.

The best practice of avoiding information overload is absolutely key to a successful SOP rollout.

Make SOPs Interactive, and Validate Accuracy in Real-Time

Typically SOPs are static documents that someone follows: they read through a written guide, or they follow a flow-chart. As the author of an SOP, you cross your fingers and hope that people actually follow these steps accurately.

Using a tool to bring SOPs to life can help with this. By having your SOPs be interactive, the person following the guide will get feedback in real time about whether or not they're following it accurately. You can put "sanity checks" in place periodically throughout the SOP to help ensure that steps aren't overlooked or important processes aren't skipped.

Using Text Blaze's real-time validation feature ensures that processes are followed accurately. If there are outcomes that are not possible based on certain conditions, or someone makes a mistake during one of the steps, they can be alerted to the error while following the SOP, instead of after they've already provided the wrong answer or took a misstep.

Below is an example of an SOP a salesperson might use to determine who on their account team can assist a prospect or customer. Text Blaze will ensure that the right action is taken regardless of the scenario.

Help with Messaging, not just Outcomes

While it's great that an SOP can lead you to the correct end of a process, it leaves the user of the guide stranded at the end when it comes to messaging. They likely still have questions: what's the right thing to say at the end of the process? What's the approved company language for this scenario?

Final outcomes in SOPs shouldn't just be a single line of text telling the reader that they've reached the end. They should know that they've reached the end, and it should also provide them with very specific instructions about what to say or signal now that they've reached a final decision. One example might be to include specific, company-approved language for anything being signaled to customers.

Text Blaze can save users up to 28 hours per month by eliminating repetitive typing. As a best practice, the conclusion of your SOPs should provide specific language to be used in the response or message that comes from following the SOP. Text Blaze can automatically write that message for you, in any system where you do your work.

SOPs that are Available Everywhere

This is probably the most common reason that processes aren't followed: people have to go out of their way to find the SOP, and often they don't know where it is or what to search for to find it.

When publishing your SOPs, you'll want to put them in places where people know to look for them, and include a many keywords as possible to help someone find it when they need to. Follow up publishing your SOPs with clear communication to teams as to where to find what they need. Hands-on training to run them through the processes helps solidify their knowledge as well - it's a lot to ask to have people learn solely from written documentation like an SOP with no additional training.

Text Blaze provides a variety of ways to access your SOPs in virtually any tool or system, in context with where your team is already doing their work.

Simply type a keyboard shortcut (for instance, /sop) to open the SOP, or select it from a menu that's available anywhere you're working.

Key Takeaways for Creating Great SOPs

Providing teams with guidance and clarity about how to approach different processes is the key to having a team that runs well and efficiently.

By using Text Blaze to power your SOPs, you can further increase your efficiency. Bring your SOPs to where your team is doing their work, make them interactive so they're easier to follow, add validation to ensure they're followed accurately, and go through the processes one step at a time to reduce confusion.

Want to turbo charge your work with templates and snippets? Text Blaze is the fastest way to do that.

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