Today I’m going to be talking about SOP or Standard Operating Procedures, and how to create those within your company. Doesn’t matter if you’re digital, traditional, here are some breakdown and examples of how to get that done. I’m going to keep this super-efficient and fast for you, so let’s dive in.
Essentially, this is a step-by-step instruction compiled by an organization to help workers carry out complex routine operations. SOP aims to achieve efficiency, quality output, and uniformity of performance while reducing miscommunication and failure to comply with industry regulations.
So sounds like a whole bunch of stuff going on, but essentially, it’s a step-by-step breakdown of everything that goes on in your business. Now SOPs are time-consuming: they take time to set up, they take time to train, but I’m telling you, once you train your team on SOPs, and you see them knocking out work and going through your process, it’s going to save you tons of time.
So a lot of work on the front end, not all the work on the back end, it’s really just managing your team and making sure that they’re conducting these actions correctly. As you guys can see on the right side, these are some of our training docs. We probably have at least 75 to 100 different documents, and maybe 30 or 40 plus hours of video. And so, the main reason for this is to create SOP, so I can delegate, perfect the process and then go ahead and manage a team properly.
So, I’m going to show you guys how to create an SOP. I’m going to show you an example of one of ours. On the right-hand side, this is Asana and this is one of our tasks for one of our clients.
We essentially do site edits and site updates every month. So we make sure to check the uptime, we backup the website, we do comment moderation through Quora and through the discussion on the site. We do a visual inspection of the site making sure that there are no pages that are broken, no “404 errors.”
We also delete any unused plugins or themes that are bogging down the website, if they’re running WordPress, if they’re running PHP, or Java, we’ll go through the code to make sure it’s clean. We also verify the contact form, always make sure that’s working properly. And then we send a monthly site update to the client.
So that’s just an example, to create an SOP, essentially the steps are not difficult.
Number one, you perform the task, you actually do the task yourself. If you’re a freelancer or you’re working by yourself and you’re doing a lot of the day-to-day work and you’re bogged down, you’re going to have to itemize all the stuff that you do.
So for me, I was going in and doing the site updates a while by myself, I figured, okay, let me employ my web dev guy, have him do these inspections for us, and then he can send the reports with the project manager.
So when you write down every aspect of the task, make sure you do not miss any details. Think of it as someone that has no relevance to what you’re doing, they have no idea what is going on, and you want to itemize that and make it easy for them.
Then you want to share it with that team member and then record their progress in a task manager like Asana or Trello.
So, let me show you guys an example. This is the one that I just showed you, this is one of our SOPs, we keep them in Google Docs, this was last updated in May, right? And then it has the step-by-step directions for the team members. So for the project manager, they know they need to go to the last report for monthly updates, duplicate it and then add it to the new folder.
Now the web developer opens that report and updates specific slides according to the changes that they’re making. As you can see, I keep it really, really basic: update slide image, log into uptime, robot, screenshot uptime at a dock, right? So very simple and effective.
Now, I don’t only have the directions here, but I have video training: we have video training for every single thing we do within the agency. What we do is we just set up a YouTube channel, we make all the videos unlisted, so you need the URL to see it, and then it looks something like this. This is the breakdown: "What I want to start doing is just creating a quick monthly report".
So, I have my voice over here, I have the presentation here, and then I always—on the right-hand side—have the step-by-step directions to coincide with that. Now if you scroll down here, I also have the breakdown of the times of that video.
So that way, if it’s the project manager, they know they can go straight to this area. If it’s the web dev, he can go straight to 118 to 550. So, he doesn’t have to waste time watching content that he doesn’t need to.
And the only way to access these videos is via the link in this Google Doc. So this Google Doc houses everything for that specific task. As you can see, I went through and I actually went through the report and I literally just walked through step-by-step on what needs to be done.
All the report pages going into WordPress and adding in what we need, and then recapping at the end. So everything is here for all of our team members to see.
And so going back to the presentation—this is a quick one—this is the way that you create SOP within your business. You can do this with anything, even the most difficult tasks can be broken down step-by-step. I’ve seen people do technical SEO, or detailed content marketing strategy by itemizing their process, literally writing down every step, going through it, and creating videos.
Now, this stuff will update, it’ll change. that’s why you want to keep your source files because you’re going to ultimately make updates.
But yes, guys, that’s the recap there, I’ll post an example SOP, so you guys can check that out. And thanks for watching.
