“Why aren’t our procedures working?”
“How can I get my people to follow our procedures?”
I'm often asked these questions by facility leadership when I come onsite for a procedure program quality assessment. Most of these organizations have had written procedures in place for a decade or more, they do their best to keep them updated as equipment is modified, and they consistently bring up "procedure use" in incident investigations. When something goes wrong, they revise the paper or put more paper in place. It will always be easier to change paper than change people.
The most important step of the journey in my procedure program assessment is speaking with and observing operators, technicians, and workers. They are burdened with a growing world of expectations on how to do their job - sometimes to the point where success is impossible. Some of the feedback I hear from them include:
“Our procedures are way too long”
“They’re written by Engineers and Managers who have no idea how to actually do the job.”
“SOPs are outdated.”
“Too hard to find the procedure I’m supposed to use.”
Often the answers to the manager's questions lie between the lines of the answers I hear from their workers. They're not using the procedures because the procedures stink! And we stink them up further when we revise them after an incident!
The likelihood of someone using a tool is heavily dependent on how that someone views value in that tool. I often see an identity crisis in a facility's procedures: SOPs, Guidelines, Work Instructions, Job Aides, Checklists, One Point Lessons, Procedures, Task Sheets, and the list goes on. All of these have instructions for how a task should be performed, yet they each carry a different brand - different formats, different processes for maintaining them, different sign off requirements, and different repositories. Workers have formed their own opinions for which of them are valuable- in some cases, none!
Meet the author: Nate Rightmer
This identity crisis often stems from a lack of a formal plan for how to deliver instructions to workers. We call this governance. Without governing how procedures will be organized, the organization can't control how procedures will be used. Fixing the organization of procedures is the first step in shortening the procedures workers complain are too long, and making the procedures that are too hard to find incredibly intuitive and simple to find. The first of four pillars of governance to a sustainable procedure program is the Document Hierarchy.
Our whitepaper on Document Hierarchy - Planning for More Usable Procedures provides a functional roadmap from which any regulated, risk averse industry organization can build their plan for organizing documents.