Adding Consistency to Your HR Playbook

If you don’t have your company’s HR best practices written down, they’re just your personal best practices. In addition, there’s no standardized way of doing things—consistency—from person to person.

Take offboarding, for example. Your best offboarding practices might actually be the best. They might be seamless and leave former employees raving about their time at your company.

Meanwhile, another company’s offboarding best practices might be different than yours, and when someone leaves there, doing so might feel more like a bad breakup.

That’s where standard operating procedures (SOPs) come in. By documenting your HR department’s best practices, you can ensure consistency. Regardless of who runs the process (from hiring through offboarding), SOPs keep everyone operating the same way.

So, here’s a quick, four-step guide to writing SOPs.

Step 1: Do It

You can’t create an SOP for something you don’t know how to do yourself. Try writing an SOP for what is currently your responsibility. If you're about to have a new hire start, focus on building SOPs for onboarding. You can worry about documenting everything else later.

Pro Tip: For big initiatives like onboarding, try building SOPs for the smaller tasks rather than tackling your company’s entire onboarding process at once.

Build out all your processes—from adding new hires to software to meeting the team—as separate micro-SOPs. That will be easier to tackle, and you’ll feel accomplished with each step.

Before you start writing anything down, perform the process you want to standardize. When stopping to do the task, you’ll refresh your memory on the nitty-gritty details of how it’s done. And you’ll document the actual process rather than the ideal one.

Step 2: Document It

Did you get the right results? Do you perform that task the same way every time? If you answered no to either of these questions, go back and fix the process. If you answered yes, it’s time to start documenting.

In as much detail as possible, explain how someone would do the task. (Hint: It should be how you just did it.) The goal is to document the SOP so clearly that anyone on your team could do it. This includes the who, what, where, how, and why. Otherwise, you might leave space for interpretation, which could change the outcome. Also explain any niche knowledge or technical jargon that might confuse someone.

Step 3: Delegate It

When you think you have everything documented, assign the task to someone else with only the SOP as a guide. Then, let them run with it.

This person should be someone who has never done this task before and has minimal background knowledge because if they can do it using just the SOP, then anyone can, which is the goal. They should be able to complete the task and get the right results.

But if they need some help (this is usually the case for the first few drafts), take it at face value. What are they asking you questions about? Where did they fall off? Go back and fix your documentation then pick someone else and try again.

Step 4: Revamp When Needed

A lot of HR teams hesitate to write SOPs because the process is always evolving and improving. And once the SOPs are documented, employees stop trying to find bigger and better ways to get things done.

But we’ll let you in on a secret: Getting your SOPs ready to roll out is the hardest part. Now that you’re here, it’s all about updating them with the latest information.

So, document your company’s best practices and nominate process owners of each SOP to be the ones responsible for updating the content. Everyone else should follow the SOPs unless they communicate that they’re testing a new way of doing things.

When your team finds a better way to do something, your process owner will update the SOP for everyone. Trainual is great for this because everyone automatically is notified that SOPs have been updated.