Writing SOPs that people in your company actually follow

Most companies have tried to write their procedures. There is a folder somewhere with forty documents, written in a burst of good intention, that nobody has opened since. Meanwhile the real procedures live in the heads of three people and get taught by shadowing, which works until one of the three leaves.

Standard operating procedures that get followed are a different thing from documentation. They are short, they live where the work happens, and they are written with the people who do the work. Here is the method we use to build playbooks for companies across British Columbia.

Pick the first ten by pain

Do not start with an index of everything. Start with the ten procedures where a mistake costs the most. Usually that means the ones that cause rework, customer complaints, safety incidents, missed invoices or a phone call to the owner at nine at night. Ask the team which tasks they are nervous about doing when the usual person is off. That list is your first ten.

Ten done well and used beats forty written and ignored. Once the first ten are embedded, the next ten come from the same question asked again.

If you need a quicker filter, look at the last ten times you were called after hours or the last ten customer complaints. The procedures that would have prevented them are the ones to write first.

Write it with the person who does it

Sit with the person who does the task and watch them do it. Record the screen or the process on a phone with their permission. Then write the steps as they actually happen, not as the owner imagines they should. Where the person has a better way than the official way, the procedure should capture the better way.

This matters for adoption. People follow procedures they helped write and resist procedures handed down. It also matters for accuracy, because the owner's version of a task is often three years out of date.

Keep the owner out of the drafting where possible. Owners write the aspirational version, the one with twelve steps nobody does, and the team reads it as a rebuke rather than a tool.

The format that survives a busy day

Put the procedure where the work happens. Inside the scheduling tool, on the job sheet, pinned in the team chat for that function, or printed and laminated in the van. A folder on a shared drive is where procedures go to be forgotten.

• A checklist, not an essay. Numbered steps, each one an action, each one short enough to read while doing it.
• The trigger at the top. When does this procedure start, and who starts it.
• The done condition at the bottom. How the person knows it is finished and who they tell.
• The exceptions. What to do when the normal path does not apply, and who to call.
• A screen recording or photo where words would take a paragraph.

Give every procedure an owner

Each procedure has a named owner who is usually the person who does the task most. They are responsible for changing it when the work changes and for teaching it to new people. A procedure without an owner is a document. A procedure with an owner is a living standard.

Review triggers are events, not dates. A new tool, a customer complaint, a near miss, a new hire who found a step confusing. When any of those happens, the owner updates the procedure that week. A quarterly glance at the full list in the planning meeting catches anything that slipped.

Making the procedures part of the operating rhythm

Procedures become real when they are used in onboarding, referenced in the weekly meeting when something went wrong, and tied to the scorecard for the role. When a mistake happens the first question is whether the procedure exists and was followed, and the answer leads to either training or a fix to the procedure. That one habit, applied consistently, is what turns a folder into a system.

One more habit helps. When a new person asks how something is done, the answer is the procedure, not a verbal explanation, and if the procedure does not exist that is the signal to write it that week.

We build SOPs and playbooks for companies that want this done in weeks rather than hoped for over years. The owner's part is to pick the first ten and to resist writing them personally.