How to Write Standard Operating Procedure with Examples & Template

How to write an effective Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

There is no official standard that will teach you how to write an SOP. But there are some steps you can follow that will help you to organize your thoughts and plan the most effective path to standardizing your procedures.

1. Define the scope

Before starting any SOP document clearly define the scope of the document, your SOP must solve a specific problem and be easy to understand. Example: “Employee onboarding”, the scope of this document is very clear just by looking at the title. The document should only cover the essential details about this title.

2. Gather information

Once the scope is defined gather as much information as possible. Most of the time a Standard Operating Procedure document is created to streamline existing work. So you’ll know exactly how that’s done currently, once you have all the data it’s easy to put it together in a structured format.

3. Choose the format

Decide the best possible format for the topic. The majority of the cases it will be either documenting the process in the document (Document360, Google Docs, Microsoft Word) or in the form of a Checklist.

4. Complete the draft

At this stage, you are good to complete the first draft of the SOP.

5. Review with stakeholders

It’s important to get the buy-in from all the stakeholders involved for that specific SOP. If we take the same example “Employee onboarding” you might have a few departments and people involved in that process, your Recruitment team, HR team, IT assets team, and Facilities team.

So everyone should clearly understand the document and provide their feedback. You can utilize the “Discussion” feature in Document360 to get reviews and respond to reviews of the Standard Operating Procedure.

6. Publish

Once you get approval from all the stakeholders who are associated with the specific SOP document, you can publish the document in a centralized internal knowledge base that’s accessible to everyone. If you are using Document360, the SOP is already in a centralized knowledge base, (if written in Microsoft Word) you might also use Microsoft SharePoint or Google Docs.

7. Promote

Sometimes it’s not enough to just create and store the SOP document in a central repository, you need to actively promote that content to all the stakeholders. One of the biggest challenges with SOP is often the SOP documents are left unnoticed and kill their original purpose.

So you need a mechanism to constantly make sure it’s used actively. Document360’s “Notification” feature can be used for this purpose, both for initial publishing and also for constantly notifying users whenever there are an amendment and new versions.

8. Review and Amend

This is pretty standard. Most organizations don’t look back at their processes after defining them, having a “don’t fix what’s not broken” attitude. More often than not, though, there are a lot of benefits to be gained from improving the process. Document360 comes with a few in-built features to address this “Article Versioning”, “Review Reminders”

9. Analyze usage metrics

First, you need to define the right metrics. You can’t improve something you can’t measure. You need to constantly check the adaption of the published SOP documents. Imagine after spending so much effort and producing an SOP document and after 3 or 6 months you notice no one is using it, it is such a waste of effort.

Document360 Analytics features help to see key metrics like how many visits, leading SOP articles, search terms used to find SOPs, Feedback comments, etc

Formats of Standard Operating Procedures

All SOPs have in common is the systematization of the individual steps performed in the implementation of a repetitive task to create an overall quality system. There is no one-size-fits-all all. Similarly, no one tool fits all.

The end goal of Standard Operating procedures is to make sure the end-users understand the procedures well to perform their activity. Try to use the tools you are already using and complement them with tools that will achieve the goal.

Let’s take a look at some of the formats of Standard Operating Procedures

User Documents

Standard Operating Procedures are represented as standard documents in the majority of the cases. This will be more educational helping the employees and users to understand a process in a systematic and repeatable way.

Examples: How to perform code review, How do set up a new vendor in the banking system, Employee onboarding, and exit procedures. For this scenario, you can use either Document360, Google Docs, or Microsoft Word (along with SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Confluence, etc.) I’ll cover later why Document360 is a better option in this case.

Check Lists (Business Process Automation)

This is one of the common forms of SOPs. The majority of the time a procedure will have a predefined set of activities someone needs to perform in sequence.

Examples: Blog publishing, pushing a new release into production, QA final sign-off process, and so on. For this scenario, you need to use some Business Process Automation (BPA) tools like Kissflow, Tallyfy, Process.st, etc

Infographics

This is similar to user documents, but some processes are better explained using powerful graphics for users to understand. Here is a great example: How not to look ugly on a webcam you could have put these steps either on a document form or checklist form, but creating infographics makes it powerful and engaging for the users. There are various infographics-creating tools like Canva, Piktochart, Venngage

Diagrams/Flowcharts

In some cases, the standard operating procedures will be a flow of logical steps that can be better represented in the form of flowcharts or diagrams. Example: How to escalate a problem, Lead flow from signup to sales. Tools to create flow charts /diagrams Lucidchart, Creatly, Whimsical

Wiki/Collaboration

In certain cases, where a lot of people are involved in updating the standard operating procedures regularly, then an Internal Wiki or a Collaboration tool will be ideal.

Example: Daily/weekly agile stand-up meetings, Team meetings, etc. In our case, we use Microsoft OneNote for our daily/weekly engineering team meetings, where all the developers and testers update their progress. And for one to one meetings, we follow the Level 10 format from Traction with a standard structure across the company which is maintained as Wiki in Microsoft Teams. You can also use modern tools like Notion.so, Coda

Structure, Template, and Categorization of an SOP document

SOP Structure:

The standard operating procedures on its own should have a standard operating procedure for how each document will be structured.

• Title
• Article Metadata
• Executive summary
• Glossary terms
• Table of Content
• Main Content

SOP Template:

Having a well-defined structure (SOP Template) for your standard operating procedures brings consistency across all your documents. The above points are just for your guidelines and you can tweak it according to your company fit. Here is an example.

Document360 single sourcing feature can be used to define this standard repeatable feature in every SOP document.

Categorization

Over some time when your company matures with processes and many SOPs soon, you’ll start seeing a new problem coming, grouping/structuring/organizing them in a well-defined way so people can find it and use it easily.

What’s the point of writing an SOP document if no one can find it or use it? Put a plan in place on how you want to create an organization-level or department-level (if you are big) category structure in place to organize your SOPs

Document360 can help you to achieve this through a couple of features organize using multiple projects or have a clear folder structure and hierarchy using the category manager.

Benefits of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)

SOPs can also provide many benefits, such as minimizing the chance of miscommunication, affording comparability, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Here is the list of tangible benefits of having well-structured SOPs

• Enforcing best practices
• Making processes scalable
• Onboarding employees
• Ensuring regulatory and standards compliance
• Preventing process failures
• Reducing errors and corrective actions
• Improving communication (with SOPs, everyone is on the same page)

If you are looking at a long-term view, as a business owner, at some point, you might want to sell your company. Just like your client list and products, your Standard Operating Procedures can add value to your company. Well-documented routines that are being used send a positive message to the future owner that your company is organized and can run without you.

Also Read: 10 Benefits of Creating SOP for Your Call Center

Example scenarios

To understand better why SOP’s are required in an organization, let’s take a couple of real-world examples from our own experience.

Example 1: Recruitment and Hiring Process (Organization level)

When we were smaller we didn’t have a dedicated recruitment team, onboarding team, HR department, and the IT department. Pretty much all the tasks related to hiring and onboarding were done by either the founder (me) or one or two senior people in the organization.

Today we are close to 130 employees and with all the above-mentioned departments in place in total, there are about 8 people involved in bringing a new employee into the organization.

This is were standard operating procedures (SOP) become crucial to make the process seamless, giving clear guidelines on each and everyone’s responsibilities, making it repeatable and reducing dependencies on any individual.

The way we do it at Kovai.co (parent company of Document360) is by clearly defining the SOPs. As I mentioned earlier, Standard Operating Procedures can be represented in various formats.

In our case, it’s a combination of Microsoft Teams with various channels, policy and procedure manual documents in Document360 along with flow charts (from LucidCharts).

As you can see from the above picture, for every step in the recruitment process right from finding talent to the exit of the employee it’s well structured. There is a different Microsoft Channel to list the roles (represented with D prefix) by the department.

Once hired we have set of Standard Operating procedures like an approval process, onboarding process (email creation, laptop allocation, etc), performance feedback after 3-6 months probation, employment confirmation, and if someone resigns, the exit process (represented with T prefix).

The only way you can scale a business is by clearly defining your standard operating procedures and constantly tweaking and improving it as your organization grows.

Example 2: Customer Success Routines

At Kovai.co we have dedicated customer success teams for each of our products. Their primary job is to book appointments with our existing customers and have periodic calls every 3-6 months once to understand product usage, get any feedback, and pass it on to the engineering team.

We have a well-defined process and standard operating procedure for this activity, here is a real sample from our existing Document360 internal SOP project.

As you can see the instructions are clearly defined to detail “try to keep the content in a single line”, and “UK Time”, so if we bring someone new to the team, it will take a few hours to 1 or 2 days to get up to speed on the process.

Without these SOP the team won’t be coordinated and they will all record in whatever way they think is appropriate. Again this process evolved inside the company over time.

Challenges in adopting Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

As I mentioned earlier in the document, bringing SOPs into the organization is a big investment and a cultural change, which needs to be addressed in a systematic way for the success of the implementation.

Some of the common challenges you’ll experience adaption SOPs

• Outdated SOP’s
• Non-involvement of employees
• Missing Feedback loop
• Easy to consume

Outdated SOP’s:

Your SOP documents are living documents. It’s not typically done and dusted (the majority of the cases). Hence it will require constantly updating them so it’s not outdated. An outdated document is a useless document.

If SOPs do not reflecting the current working process (even a slight deviation) then it become useless. You can easily address this problem by using the Document360 Review Reminder feature you can set a reminder once the article is published to make it stale after a period. Example 3 months, 6 months, etc. You can then review, amend, and republish it.

Non-involvement of employees:

This is another major challenge, if nobody is using the published SOP then it’s pretty much useless. You need to have a process to constantly review the metrics, and usage of SOPs and do some push (ex: highlighting it in meetings, taking it to senior management to give a push, etc).

Document360 Analytics capability will help you get the metrics highlighting things like views, reads, popular articles, likes, dislikes, etc.

Missing Feedback:

You need to get people (employees) involved to mature your standard operating procedures. If left in the silo then you cannot identify the real challenges in the process.

Document360 can help you solve this problem by giving options for the readers (not stakeholders/reviewers) to give feedback on SOPs like whether they like/dislike or even give explicit comments about certain sections of the article.

Easy to consume:

The more simple you keep it, the chances of getting adapted become more real.

Document360 provides two different interfaces a Knowledgebase management portal for people who write/manage standard operating procedures and a simple Knowledgebase site focused on readers with great search, category visualization, and feedback options.

Transform your SOPs into a streamlined, accessible knowledge base. Give Document360 a try!

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