It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a month since the coronavirus hit our area hard. A month ago at this time, the kids were still in school, and only a handful of cases had been reported. It’s fair to say most businesses were not taking steps to prepare by getting the processes and procedures in order. And with everything else going on right now, business owners may not have had time to get them sorted. But it is incredibly important that it gets done, now more than ever. Unfortunately, this crisis is not over, and it’s your responsibility to make sure your company can continue to run smoothly if you or your key employees are taken ill.
What can happen? Small businesses have a lot to remember and keep track of right now. If a key employee gets sick and is unable to share institutional knowledge, what will you do? If remote workers have no manual to rely on, how will they know what steps they should take to make sure they are following important policies? It’s time to take steps to make sure that things aren’t falling through cracks. There’s a great article on AVmatters.com that helps explain why it’s important to document processes and procedures. (These reasons are applicable to any company, not only audio-visual firms) Here’s part of what they wrote:
“It supports confused roles and activities”
From time to time (there has been) the frustration from executives and managers that they have defined roles and responsibilities within the organization, but employees still act like they don’t know what they need to do. Once we talk it through in many cases it hasn’t been they didn’t know what they needed to do (process) they didn’t understand how they needed to do it (lack of procedures). When you define the details of what needs to get done, it can bring clarity to a confused environment.”
“Consistency”
Consistency is the most important reason for documenting processes and procedures. With them it allows you to have a playbook for how you can train others to complete a task which will help you in delivering a consistent experience to a customer.”
“Analyze and improve efficiency”
Where organizations struggle in trying to understand how efficient their business runs is they don’t have any or all of their processes and procedures documented. When you can sit down and walk through the journey map of each process, process owners can audit more easily if the current procedures, personnel, software resources related to the process are still up to date, the best to have in place or need an overhaul to streamline the process.
How VersaTel Solutions can help – Our new service, Process Management, is designed to help make sure your systems run smoothly. How does it work? We’ll interview your employees and figure out what your standard operating procedures are. Then, we’ll figure out which procedures are worth keeping, and which ones may need to be changed or dropped altogether. Our team will boil all of your varied processes and procedures into one efficient, easy to follow operations manual and disperse that information to everyone in your business, no matter where they’re working from these days. If we can help you in any way, reach out to us.