How do we keep on top of things?
An unfortunate reality of the current times is that we will see some of the people in our teams fall ill over the next few weeks and months. And their illness and inability to work may stretch for weeks instead of days. That starts to introduce risk and jeopardy to the quality and timeliness of the services we deliver to our clients, be they internal or external.
One of the simplest and most immediate things you can do to protect against this is to start building out some process and procedural documentation. These "how-to's" and "go-by's" will help people step into a role that they are not familiar with, and give them a chance of grasping what is required of them quickly.
There are several assets that you can build out in support of skills transfer, such as:
- Policies: the correct courses or principles of action underpinning an operation; a statement of intent implemented as a procedure or protocol.
- Process overviews and process maps: the related tasks or methods that together turn into an outcome.
- Procedural directions: the prescribed ways of undertaking a process or part of a process.
- Systems guides: sequenced how-to's with screenshots supported by narrative with error and fault diagnostics.
- Checklists, with clear sequencing and dependencies.
- Video tutorials: '"follow me" style visualise aides.
- Cheat sheets: desk top aide memoirs; short 1, 2, 3 memory triggers for quick reference.
Everyone knows this makes sense and indeed lots of companies may have put some or all of these assets in place when they implemented their operational systems. But things will have changed. Tasks, methods, and procedures will have evolved over the years as the business has changed and people have rotated through the role.
Now is a really important time to get this up to date. We know the internal and external workforce is going to take a hit during the coming weeks and months. We'll need people to step into jobs and roles that they are not fully familiar with, and we'll have new temporary colleagues thrown in at the deep end without a smooth handover, with the added challenges of having to work remotely.
Your friendly and familiar Professional Advantage consultants likely know a lot of the processes and procedures across your operations. We also have the skills, tools, and techniques, including remote work-shopping, to be able to uncover and document the real-world processes throughout your business.
If you need some help building your process catalogue, you can contact your Client Management Team, email info@pa.com.au, or contact us through this website.
