Developing standardised procedures

Whether your concern is quality control or legislation compliance, the basis of all your training and business improvement stems from developing workable policies and procedures for every part of your business. Far from straight-jacketing every employee, you can make the process of gathering and writing the procedures a creative team-building exercise.

Creating a procedure

The process for defining your procedures should be:

1. Decide the types of activity that occur around your business
2. Decide which group of your employees would do those activities most often
3. Assign each group the job of collaborating to produce a list of all the tasks they carry out
4. Ask the group to define whether this is a task carried out independently or as part of a longer process
5. Ask the group to assign a descriptive name to each individual task or set of process tasks
6. Compare the lists and identify any that cross-over between groups. (The aim here is to ensure only one procedure is written for any task.)
7. Assign a person or persons to write up step-by-step procedures for each task. (You may choose to use outside help here to speed up the process and maintain standardised language and structure for the procedures.)
8. Involve all employees in making suggestions for corrections. (Set a deadline for this to be complete and email round reminders.)
9. Collect all finalised copies of procedures and arrange for them to be indexed and mounted on an easily retrievable system, accessible to all

Example

Carter Holt Harvey Packaging Case division in Hornby created cardboard for making packing boxes. The card was formed by a 'corrugator' machine that crimped and glued together two or three continuous layers of thick paper sheets. As soon as the process was complete the layered sheet was cut into squares. Although one or two operators knew the operation of the entire machine and how to produce a number of different products, most operators knew only about their own area.

When an operator who was less familiar with a certain area of the machine was assigned duties on that section, problems arose. Occasionally workers were injured because they were unfamiliar with the risks involved. The challenge for Case was to stop injuries happening and improve the production of quality goods.

Employee input

Several Edutech KM technical writers were assigned to interview workers and observe them as they worked. These observations were written up into draft procedures and the operators worked through them to ensure that everything had been covered.

Throughout this process 'tips' emerged and were included in the procedure. For example: "Note: If the xxxx does yyyy then do zzzz." This was a perfect example of knowledge capture. Safety warnings were included whenever there was a risk to machine or operator.

Once everyone was happy with the procedures they were laminated and stored at the machine workstations. A soft copy was stored on the company's intranet so that at any stage a change could be made to a procedure and a new copy printed and laminated.

Making a change in a procedure may have a ripple effect across a number of procedures. Click here to find out about a company that used employees to help create a troubleshooting database.

Edutech KM Ltd

PO Box 25-241, Victoria Street, Christchurch;
phone: 64-3-337-0234
fax: 64-3-337-0235
info@edutechkm.com
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