What is Standard Work? Standard work is a guide to follow when completing tasks. It’s a set of instructions on “How to” do a task step by step. I can not stress the importance of Standard Work enough!! Having standard work in place will make you and your employees much more efficient with day to day tasks!
- When you or your employees are all working on the same thing at different times, having something to look at as a reference is very helpful. It will help keep things consistent. Consistency is key. Like we’ve said in previous blogs, this will also make it easier for your team to pick up where you left off when you go on vacation!
- Having standard work in place will also make training new employees much easier. Instead of spending hours teaching simple tedious tasks multiple times over, have standard work documents they can refer to when completing tasks and are learning the ropes. This will save you so much time and give you more opportunity to teach the crucial items!
- We have systems in place that help automate our workflow. If there is something you can automate in your business, we suggest doing it! Why would you do it if you can put something in place to do it for you! TECHNOLOGY! If you need help with this, let us know! Don’t make the mistake of saving money by wasting time, after all, time is more valuable than money in the long run.
- Be sure that when you are putting the standard work together, you are very detailed! Take screenshots/photos of each step. Explain everything in depth. Remember, this is a guide, an exact “how to” if you will. We need employees to follow standard work to provide consistency. Plus, if there is a suggestion on how to improve processes, we now have a documented record of what we have done over time. This will help evaluate growth and opportunity for the future.
To sum things up, yes, putting standard work together can be a bit time consuming. It is worth it in the long run, your time is important! If you think you can just wing it and grow without having standard work in place, it is going to be a loooong road ahead. In short, we’ve learned that having these documents in place offer not only efficiency, consistency, and the ability to automate your business but also create a detailed guideline for growth. You can always revise, but how hard is it to remember what/how you did things years ago?…. Pretty hard right? Yep, that is why there is so much emphasis on this topic.
-Legacy Frontline Team