Podcast EP 109 | Why Building SOPs and Procedure Manuals Can Be a Waste of Time

Many scal­ing com­pa­nies try to cap­ture all their Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures or SOPs in an effort to do things in a more con­sis­tent man­ner. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this often does­n’t work and does­n’t pro­duce the intend­ed effect.

Many end up with bulky SOPs and pro­ce­dures that seem ​‘right’ but aren’t deliv­er­ing what the com­pa­ny and the team real­ly need, and the doc­u­ments become unused, and sim­ply clog up servers.

In this episode of the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast, Kevin Lawrence and Brad Giles dis­cuss why build­ing SOPs and pro­ce­dure man­u­als can be a waste of time — and what best prac­tices to do instead.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:12

Hi, and wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing we talk about is build­ing endear­ing great com­pa­nies. My name is Brad Giles, and as always joined today by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo, Kevin. How are things in Van­cou­ver today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:27

Thanks. Good. Brad. Things are good. Look­ing for­ward to today’s show. It’s a very inter­est­ing topic.

Brad Giles 00:35

We’d like to start with a word of the day. As always, Kevin, what might you have for word of the day to day or phrase?

Kevin Lawrence 00:45

Yeah, I would say that the end of the word of the day today is tired. This is a record­ing to the end of a 14 hour day. This is the start of our 14 today. So it’s a bit of a long one. Yeah, so tired. And I guess resilience is the oth­er side of it. I can always keep going. I just know that. You know, I might pay for it lat­er. But I guess Yeah, tired would be the word. But the pos­i­tive side of that is resilience.

Brad Giles 01:11

Awe­some. Mine would be team. And it’s just that, you know, ah, we were talk­ing about Ted las­so before. And he’s got, you know, he, it’s a fab­u­lous show that Ted las­so show. And he’s got so many corny, you know, things to talk about team, like Team work makes the dream work or what­ev­er it is. But it’s, you know, there’s a lit­tle bit of thought, you know, behind that, and that is, you know, we need to have effec­tive teams, so tired. Teams. That as far as I’m gonna go with that.

Kevin Lawrence 01:49

That’s good. Well, you don’t want to have a tired team. You want to have resilient team. That’s what you want. Awe­some. Awe­some. All right. Well, let’s dig into today. So today, we’re talk­ing about why SOPs or stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures, or pro­ce­dure man­u­als can be an absolute com­plete waste of time, or they can be awe­some. But we see so many times that peo­ple put a lot of ener­gy into build­ing these things. And then with­in no time at all, they’re all but for­got­ten. And peo­ple are con­stant­ly doing things, not accord­ing to the SOP, and we’re will­ing, why haven’t you read it? And they’re like, read what? And just how it can be. It’s a won­der­ful inten­tion to do these things. But often, they don’t get the return of the ben­e­fit from it that they could, and should

Brad Giles 02:42

Yeah, it real­ly is a bit of a bar­ri­er to scal­ing because peo­ple can under­stand, like, it’s born of pure intent, like peo­ple want to have con­sis­ten­cy. They want to have things work well. But I mean, it so many times we’ve seen these ini­tia­tives file or failed to deliv­er what’s promised. And it’s just, it’s, it’s just so annoy­ing. And it’s like, and it’s annoy­ing to the point where when you are i We’re prepar­ing for this, we’re just say­ing that it can be a com­plete waste of time, we did have a lit­tle bit of an arm wres­tle to say that they are absolute­ly a waste of time, and we dialed it back. But it’s just we’ve seen it so many times where they’ve failed. I’ve had it in my com­pa­nies, in client com­pa­nies in friends, com­pa­nies. Yeah, it’s such a wise comment

Kevin Lawrence 03:36

So let’s, we’ll talk about the wrong jobs. They’re not suit­ed for the jobs. So you think if you give them a bunch of train­ing wheels and guardrails that there’ll be bet­ter? Well, no, that’s how you build a bureau­cra­cy, a bureau­cra­cy and a bureau­crat­ic mediocre com­pa­ny, by get­ting the wrong peo­ple in jobs and try­ing to give them a whole bunch of sys­tems and pro­ce­dures to keep them from doing dumb things, when in real­i­ty, you should prob­a­bly just put them into jobs that they would be smart at or capa­ble at. So if you’ve got a real­ly klutzy per­son, don’t make them the per­son serv­ing the food. Now, we would know that in a restau­rant envi­ron­ment, but in busi­ness­es, when the fix­ing the wrong peo­ple with pro­ce­dures and process­es is a hor­ri­ble approach, try­ing to fix account­abil­i­ty, with pro­ce­dures and process­es is also usu­al­ly a bad approach. So there are great approach­es, con­sis­ten­cy, shar­ing ideas of how to do things more effi­cient­ly, com­mon view of how things should flow, lack of con­fu­sion, all that good stuff. But let’s just make sure we’re solv­ing the right prob­lem. And then once you’re there, we’ll talk about how to do it right.

Brad Giles 04:48

And so, think about it as if you were dri­ving up a moun­tain, okay, rather than hav­ing an enor­mous book say­ing this is every­thing that you’ve got to do. We’re kind of advo­cat­ing let the per­son be are respon­si­ble for their dri­ving up the moun­tain, but then put a cou­ple of guardrails there, you know. That is much, much bet­ter way to deal with it, because I love it. Because no one is going to read the man­u­al, you’re going to write a 20 3050 page man­u­al. And it’s going to cov­er every cir­cum­stance in every sin­gle sit­u­a­tion, and peo­ple won’t read it, or they won’t under­stand it, or it won’t cov­er, it won’t cov­er it at a lev­el. So it just does­n’t work.

Kevin Lawrence 05:37

And there are peo­ple who will read it front to back. There are, but they’re just a small sliv­er of the pop­u­la­tion. And gen­er­al­ly, that’s we’re try­ing to get every­one on the same page. Go ahead, right?

Brad Giles 05:50

That’s a great pick­up, that’s a great pick­up, it might work for some peo­ple, and maybe even the peo­ple who write the man­u­al are pas­sion­ate about that stuff. Yes, he’s gonna get the aver­age employ­ee to walk in the door and get them up to speed and get them to do things the right way, and have respon­si­bil­i­ty and account­abil­i­ty for that. The big man­u­als won’t do that.

Kevin Lawrence 06:11

I don’t ever read a man­u­al. I mean, I just more like I just tried to do it. And I’m not say­ing that’s good, or just there’s cer­tain per­son­al­i­ties that are more or less like, so let’s go into this thing about like, this is a great thing to come up with SOPs, you just got to make sure it’s core and part of how you oper­ate in your busi­ness. And I want to cre­ate a dis­tinc­tion between doc­u­ment your stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures, which is like his­tor­i­cal cap­ture, ver­sus con­stant­ly an iter­ate and improve the process­es and how we work. That’s what we want to do. We want to give peo­ple tools to con­stant­ly iter­ate improve how we work, which is clos­er to lean, and Six Sig­ma and that kind of think­ing Kaizen ver­sus mak­ing ency­clo­pe­dias. Right, we’re not in the ency­clo­pe­dia mak­ing busi­ness, that’s not a lot of help these days. Even if it’s dig­i­tal, it’s about help­ing peo­ple to do their work con­sis­tent­ly, at a high­er quality.

Brad Giles 07:09

Look, a great exam­ple here would be a smart­phone. Imag­ine if you got an iPhone, you went to the shop and you got an iPhone, and you brought it back, and you open up the box, and there was a thick, 50 page man­u­al that you need­ed to read before you start­ed using the phone. That’s not how user expe­ri­ence works nowa­days, maybe it worked 3050 years ago. But nowa­days, it does­n’t work that way you want to pick up that phone, and maybe the phone helps you to under­stand how to use some of the basic func­tions. But then it’s so intu­itive, that you’re able to be effec­tive at using the phone with­out read­ing a mas­sive manual.

Kevin Lawrence 07:51

I mean, we’re exag­ger­at­ing here. But it would almost be like, every time you went to send a text, you’d have to go and read the process for send­ing a text. I mean, that’s over­ly sim­pli­fied. The key is, is that it’s great to have stan­dard pro­ce­dures, do it for the right rea­son, not just because you have bad peo­ple in your com­pa­ny, and do it in the right way, which we’ll share. So those are point num­ber one here today is now that we set the tone map­ping and refin­ing your core process­es is a huge val­ue add for most busi­ness­es, it absolute­ly is the key that we’re get­ting Ili­ja to hear today is you have to get the new updat­ed soft­ware Terms and Con­di­tions. Do you read the whole thing before you click Agree? Most peo­ple know they’re doing it to cov­er their butts legal­ly. And we’re sign­ing away a whole bunch of bad things. I just I know we don’t have pri­va­cy any­ways. So it’s like you know, but the real­i­ty is, there’s so many things that you don’t fol­low the man­u­al. And, you know, there’s this great book called The Check­list Man­i­festo. And what it found is in all kinds of stud­ies are try­ing to basi­cal­ly kill less peo­ple in hos­pi­tals. That was one of the stud­ies in the book. And they tried every­thing. And they would sit and they would brain­storm SOPs for surg­eries and for clean­li­ness, because infec­tion is a big prob­lem in med­ical pro­ce­dure, but there’s lots of oth­er rea­sons. And they did all these Su and all the stuff they test­ed, it did­n’t work. Final­ly, what they found, and this is what I call oper­a­tional­iz­ing an SOP is and this is the sto­ry in the book is that if the sur­geon that basi­cal­ly to make sure that less patients died, when the sur­geon goes to do surgery, they had check­lists, they would­n’t fol­low them. They put a tent card, a piece of paper fold­ed almost, you know to make like a like lit­tle moun­tain on top of the tools the sur­geon would use for the surgery. And the pro­ce­dure was the nurse would pick it up read out the list. It was not a wall was not an iPad, and this lit­tle basic 20 cent 10 card and a nurs­ery go num­ber one, which, you know, there was things in there about hav­ing extra blood on hand in the hos­pi­tal in case the patient need­ed extra blood beyond the nor­mal. And they would have a list of all the things Oh, did you wash your hands, because wash­ing our hands was anoth­er one of the real­ly thor­ough wash scrub­bing in. And there was a few things that peo­ple might for­get. But there was sev­en items. So this it had to be sim­ple. And it need­ed to be in the mid­dle of the work­flow so that you could­n’t miss it. So sim­ple. And in the mid­dle of the work­flow, you could­n’t miss it no dif­fer­ent than the toll booth on the high­way, you can’t miss give, there’s no way or you can miss giv­en them the mon­ey. They’re gonna get the mon­ey no mat­ter what. And it’s, it’s think­ing about process that way. So that it makes it a heck of a lot easier.

Brad Giles 10:59

Some peo­ple look at man­u­als and think that it can pro­vide a point of count­abil­i­ty. So the man­ag­er envi­sions we put every­thing into the man­u­al, so that when some­one does­n’t fol­low the man­u­al, when they don’t fol­low the process that’s writ­ten in the man­u­al, we can say to them, Why did­n’t you do what it says in the man­u­al, but it does­n’t work. It just does­n’t work. It’s too com­pli­cat­ed. Peo­ple don’t read it, as we said ear­li­er. And peo­ple will we’ll just say, Oh, I for­got about it, or I did­n’t do it or some­thing. So it can become some­thing that peo­ple will wor­ship. But in actu­al fact, it does­n’t add the val­ue that we’re real­ly look­ing for. So we’ve got to make it simpler.

Kevin Lawrence 11:48

Yes. And it’s got to work for a major­i­ty of the work­force. And that goes back to upfront that we talked about. Was this man­u­al writ­ten for an A play­er or a low B play­er. Right? That right? And every­thing was it built for like at the end of the day, sys­tems that will work for low per­form­ers will dri­ve high per­form­ers nuts because they will feel con­strained. And your metaphor Brad have on the moun­tain road trust that they’re going to fig­ure it out guardrails and a cou­ple spots, a cou­ple of signs where there’s extreme dan­ger, let them fig­ure it out and trust them. Right. So every­thing I look at, is it built for an A play­er, because the com­pa­nies that we work with, we want the envi­ron­ment to work for a play­ers, we want the oth­er ones to get adjust­ed quick­ly. But if the low per­form­ers are well sup­port­ed, over­ly sup­port­ed, that means a play­ers are prob­a­bly going to hate it.

Brad Giles 12:43

Yeah. So the quick test there is your stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure man­u­als, or are they writ­ten for a play­ers or B minus players?

Kevin Lawrence 12:56

So we’ve talked about that, you know, that third point you we’re touch­ing on that is that, you know, peo­ple think these lead­ers, these man­agers can pro­vide account­abil­i­ty, maybe I mean, high per­form­ers are account­able. Any­ways, it’s about edu­ca­tion, guid­ance, and defi­cien­cy. Num­ber four is the solu­tion is about mak­ing these things sim­ple. And part of the process for get­ting the work done, like we talked about, but the key here is with­out headache and fric­tion, so imag­ine an E com­merce, you have to give them your cred­it card infor­ma­tion and stuff like that. Some of those forms are night­mares, some check­outs, you might have to give your address twice.

I buy almost every­thing I can online, you select what you want in your cart, you get to pay­ment and it clicks Apple Pay Per Click Apple Pay, I dou­ble check. It’s the right cred­it card and the right address I want to ship it to and I click it, it looks, it scans my face make sure I’m me and then it’s done. So that as a user expe­ri­ence that is nice and easy, right and no dif­fer­ent than if you’re using Uber or one of the routes or one of the food deliv­ery apps or you know, many, many pieces of soft­ware that make it very easy is your SOPs shipped from a user per­spec­tive should be easy and make doing the work easy. So even these man­u­al should be easy and sim­ple. And that’s hard. It takes more work to make this stuff real­ly, real­ly sim­ple. So use your UX think­ing or user expe­ri­ence think­ing on your inter­nal process­es. And again, broad use exam­ple of an iPhone set­ting I set up last night before a meet­ing with our team here, a new iMac. You know how long it took me to set up?

Brad Giles 14:43

Sev­en min­utes, maybe

Kevin Lawrence 14:45

Sev­en on my end and then I ran for a while in the back back­ground and down­loaded my stuff from my Apple account. I mean, the biggest prob­lem I had is I did­n’t remem­ber because they want­ed me to log in and get pass­word for a dif­fer­ent one of my com­put­ers as a secu­ri­ty So I did­n’t remem­ber the pass­word or which com­put­er was which pass­word, but it was easy. But it was. And next thing, you know, with­in 30 min­utes, every­thing is work­ing. And it’s func­tion­ing at 80% of the func­tion­al­i­ty I need. I mean, I need my IT guy to do a cou­ple of things with some inter­nal Arlecchi­no, Share­Point and stuff. But the point of it is, it was so damn easy. It was just a few key but­tons, it was easy to fol­low. It’s like it was made for incred­i­ble ease and joy. And that’s what your should be in the direc­tion of ideally.

Brad Giles 15:35

So apply user expe­ri­ence think­ing from soft­ware, apply that think­ing to inter­nal process­es. That’s what we’re say­ing here, right? How will the user if they’re an A play­er, how will the user respond to these inter­nal process­es? Yep.

Kevin Lawrence 15:56

There were five, and then you just what is the rhythm to read, look at these and remind peo­ple remind the key peo­ple involved with this is so basi­cal­ly, what is the tim­ing? When we step back, hey, let’s just look at how we do this and give this a lit­tle revamp what’s work­ing, what’s not work­ing, gath­er some user feed­back and tweak it, maybe it’s quar­ter­ly, maybe it’s month­ly, maybe it’s any I don’t know. But they’re, you know, there should be some­body who owns each of these process­es. One of these, we did­n’t call it a broth­er should be an own­er. And there should be some rhythm to reset it and tweak it on our, you know, on a con­sis­tent basis, so they don’t get for­got­ten and become dust col­lec­tors, or, you know, serv­er fillers.

Brad Giles 16:38

You know, I remem­ber hear­ing Jim Collins talk about the way that he deals with inter­nal process­es is quite sim­ple. Each per­son has a seat, a seat on the bus, as he puts it. And each per­son they have what he calls 10 com­mand­ments for their role. And with­in those 10 com­mand­ments, once per year, you do an annu­al review, and you need to update rewrite, edit, improve those 10 com­mand­ments. So what that means is what are the 10 things that one must do to make this role a roar­ing suc­cess. I love the sim­plic­i­ty of it. And it’s kind of like we said the guardrails or the signs as to this is how you suc­ceed, but we’re not dig­ging into every sin­gle bit of what you do.

Kevin Lawrence 17:27

So what we’re talk­ing about here is SOPs and how you make sure there are dust col­lec­tors and serv­er fillers, and that they’re active­ly used in peo­ple’s roles. So the first thing is map­ping them. And refin­ing them is a huge val­ue add for most busi­ness­es, you just got to make sure you’re doing it for your high per­form­ers, not for peo­ple that should change jobs or change out of your com­pa­ny. Peo­ple don’t read man­u­als, and we know that we don’t often read the terms and con­di­tions for soft­ware and things you eat. Got­ta keep that in mind. We don’t unless we have to. And some lead­ers think that man­u­als and SOPs can pro­vide a point of account­abil­i­ty. Why did­n’t you see it in the man­u­al? Peo­ple aren’t read­ing them. And it’s dan­ger­ous. And you know, as we found out in, you know, in the book, The Check­list Man­i­festo, most of the stuff peo­ple don’t remem­ber, even even if it’s life crit­i­cal, you need to make it very, very sim­ple for peo­ple to use.

Brad Giles 18:23

The solu­tion is about mak­ing these things sim­ple, and a part of the process for get­ting the work done. So you have to fol­low the process in order to actu­al­ly get the work done. And with­out cre­at­ing a headache or fric­tion along the way. And that is the way that we put it is think about apply­ing UX or user expe­ri­ence think­ing to your inter­nal process­es, then num­ber five, hav­ing a rhythm to relook at them to come back and re ana­lyze and make sure that they’re not over­cooked. There’s not too much there, that it is actu­al­ly sim­ple and easy to use for the expe­ri­ence there. And we gave the exam­ple of Jim Collins who said he has 10 com­mand­ments for each role. What a great chat we’ve had today, Kevin.

Kevin Lawrence 19:10

So please do stream­line your process­es. But don’t for­get the part about inte­grat­ing it into the oper­a­tions of the roles and then keep­ing it alive and refin­ing them on an ongo­ing basis. We’re here to help make things work bet­ter not build encyclopedias.

Brad Giles 19:27

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. And the title being that SOPs and build build­ing man­u­als can be such a waste of time. If you are so inclined, you can find Kevin and I and the growth whis­per­ers pod­cast on YouTube just by search­ing obvi­ous­ly the growth whis­pers Kevin has a quite inter­est­ing newslet­ter that he puts out each week you can find him and that newslet­ter at to Lawrence and co​.com. And I have a news let­ter which alleged­ly could be poten­tial­ly inter­est­ing. And you can find that at evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au along with all of the work that I do and the peo­ple that I work with, and so hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s episode of the growth whis­per­ers and hope that you have a great week.