It's Past Time for a New Approach to Policies and Procedures
There is strong evidence that organizations are NOT getting the results they want from their policies and procedures. How do we know that the conventional methods aren’t working very well?In most organizations:
- Employees readily admit they don’t trust or read “the official P&P manual.”
- Operations run by “tribal knowledge.” It’s all in employees heads and passed down from person to person
- Preventable waste and inefficient process variations are epidemic.
- Managers have a hard time setting and enforcing consistency and quality work standards.
Why are businesses still struggling?
Organizations have been writing policies and procedures to standardize operations for decades and decades. You’d think they have it down by now, but just look around and you see that it’s just not working Why? “Old-fashioned” thinking and misconceptions take people down the wrong path immediately and cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars in wasted time and missed opportunities. Many people think of P&P development solely as a writing or a clerical function, when in fact, the very exercise of examining how your business works — or how it should work — allows you to gain greater understanding of your business and how to address the problems facing it.
A Newer, Fresh Approach
Just shifting your thinking about policies and procedures can mean the difference between having an effective “system” for continuous improvement and hundreds of pages of haphazard documents and wordprocessing files that no one uses.
Instead of focusing on just writing everything but the kitchen sink and sticking it on a shelf or network drive, concentrate on creating “good systems.” It’s time to streamline business processes and create business systems that are intentionally designed to DRIVE good performance outcomes. Leaving things to guesswork and chance is just too risky. For a fresh approach, exlpore how COMPROSE’s Operation Mapping and Zavanta software can help you revolutionize your approach to writing policies and procedures.