Improve Quality, Productivity, and Morale with Process Standardisation

Andy McComments off.

Imagine if your support staff had no set guidelines for handling a customer services ticket.  It would be like you pulled in a group of random people from the street, sat them down at the helpdesk, and expected to see a job well done.

That’s essentially what you’re allowing when you fail to standardise processes. Your company’s operations consist of tasks that must be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis to ensure that it runs smoothly. But if these processes aren’t standardised, you’re risking (or even inviting) chaos.

What is process standardisation?

Fundamentally, process standardisation describes the establishment of a set of rules, guidance or parameters governing how people in an organisation are supposed to complete a given task or sequence of tasks. To give you a simple example, here’s standardised process for drawing a happy pig — a popular exercise when learning Lean Six Sigma:

Standardisation can be applied to any process, any task or procedure that is relevant to the organisation: answering the phone, completing payroll, taking down client information, keeping track of tasks, any tasks.

With that in mind, let’s look at the benefits you get with standardised processes.

The benefits of standardisation

Fundamentally, standardisation means that colleagues have an established, time-tested process to use.

When done well, standardisation can decrease ambiguity and guesswork, guarantee quality, boost productivity, and increase employee morale.

Some benefits of standardisation are as follows:

• Improves clarity — because a standard process will eliminate the need for guesswork or extra searching
• Guarantees quality — because work is done in a pre-defined, optimised way
• Promotes productivity — because your employees won’t need to ask around or comb documentation to get answers
• Boosts employee morale — because employees can take pride in having mastered the process and refined their skills
• Perfects customer service — because every ticket is handled in the best possible way

Standardisation decreases ambiguity and guesswork

The first and most obvious benefit of process standardisation is that it decreases the potential for ambiguity and guesswork.

Any complex task is likely to have some gray areas or edge cases. The trouble with this is that time spent on guesswork is time wasted. With a clear set of instructions to work from in order to complete a task, employees will spend less time trying to figure it out and more time actually doing it.

Think about the tasks you have had to teach other people. How much time and effort did you spend teaching them to do things that came naturally to you from years of practice? How many times have you had to deal with a mistake that someone made because they guessed, and guessed wrong?

This is where standardisation comes in. Effective standardisation of procedures means that there is one correct, agreed way in which to complete a particular task, which is defined in terms of a clear, measurable end result.

Standardisation guarantees quality

If a lack of standardisation means more ambiguity, one unavoidable consequence of this is going to be less reliability and less consistent quality.

This is because not all approaches to any given task or procedure are created equal: there are better and worse ways to answer the phone, take down important information from a customer, and send status updates to your team.

One of the most important ways in which standardisation can help to guarantee quality is by minimising the chances that crucial details will be overlooked. For example, if you have a template for policy and procedure documents, you can use that to reduce the chances that someone will omit crucial information.

By standardising the processes your organisation depends on — and enforcing those standards — you will be guaranteeing the quality of the finished result.

Standardisation promotes productivity

Broadly speaking, standardisation is associated with leaner, more functional performance, meaning your organisation can cut waste, and do more with the available resources.

Standardisation promotes productivity by eliminating inefficiency. This is the result of eliminating ambiguity and providing quality control: tasks are completed in a more efficient manner, and there are fewer quality control issues from tasks that were not completed correctly the first time around.

Another benefit of eliminating alternative procedures is the reduction of unhealthy competition and conflicts.

Let’s say your organisation has three different semi-formal systems for keeping track of workflows, each of which has its own constituency within the organisation. Three different groups of people, three different systems — the conflicts are inevitable.

Even if all three systems are about equal in productivity, trying to coordinate them across your organisation will probably lead to competition and conflict between the three different factions.

If everyone learns the same way of doing things and sticks to it, it will be easier for teams to work together. This means more productivity by virtue of synergy, and less time wasted trying to communicate across gaps in understanding and practice.

To be sure, it’s unlikely that three different systems for keeping track of workflows, or performing any other important task, will be equally effective. Even if they were, it would still make sense to standardise in order to reduce conflict.

Standardisation is good for employee morale

The key thing to remember about standardisation and employee morale is that standardisation will help employees to feel a sense of achievement and pride. Standardisation does not have to mean dreary monotony and lack of creativity; it can (and should) mean standards anyone can master, and take pride in honing.

As Walter McIntyre writes in Lean and Mean Process Improvement:

“If managed properly, standardised work establishes a relationship between people and their work processes. This relationship can enhance ownership and pride in the quality of work performance. The result is high morale and productivity.”

As a general rule, everyone wants to know if they are doing a good job or not—and they want to know how to achieve that distinction. Not knowing if one is doing one’s job correctly can be very stressful. Having to apologise for inadequate or incorrect work can be humiliating as well as stressful. If one did not understand performance standards to begin with, it can also be extremely frustrating.

If processes are governed by standards that teach employees to do efficient, high-quality work, the employees are more likely to take a sense of ownership and pride in the work that they do. Instead of uncertainty and inefficiency, the employee will have a prescribed way to accomplish their assigned tasks which actually works. The result is likely to be greater employee morale.

What this means is that the connection between standards and employee morale is fundamentally about employees being able to take pride in achievement. If the standardised process is efficient, avoids needless frustration, and guides employees to achieve something meaningful and worthwhile, employees will have every reason to take pride in the work they are doing.

Standardisation means better customer service

Great customer service is the logical outcome of a team with less ambiguity, higher output quality, better productivity, and increased morale.  Standardisation can address customer service directly through standardised processes for talking with customers and methods for centralising information.

Standardisation can also improve customer service indirectly. If your organisation is more productive and efficient, the result will be better outcomes for your customers. The more you can produce with your available resources, and the shorter your lead time and the happier you can make those who rely on you and pay for your products and services.

Now that we’ve seen some of the benefits of standardisation, let’s address the common concerns.

Your concerns about standardisation, addressed

Although there are many benefits of standardisation, the idea of subjecting processes and procedures to one correct way of doing things may be a cause of alarm for people who are not used to it. Common concerns about standardisation generally revolve around the idea that standardisation means boredom and loss of individual creativity.

As we’ll see, these concerns are misplaced…

Concern #1: standardisation means monotony and boredom

By definition, one correct way of doing things means uniformity. For some people, this will inevitably sound monotonous and boring.

The key thing to understand here is that by removing ambiguity and establishing a standard by which to evaluate performance, standardised processes can help employees to feel that they are actually accomplishing things at work. It is far more likely that your employees will feel an enhanced sense of accomplishment, not boredom, if you give them standard processes that help them to achieve what they need to get done.

When a task is done to the prescribed standard, it’s 100% done. And checking off boxes gives us a welcome hit of dopamine!

Concern #2: standardisation destroys creativity

A related concern is the idea that if you standardise crucial processes in your company, the result will be a workplace that does not promote innovation and creativity. The essential fear here is that standardisation means an organisational culture that leeches away all individual thinking and new ideas, replacing vibrant diversity with a monoculture mentality.

Here it is important to not conflate standardisation with a lack of innovation. Again, standardisation is the elimination of alternatives which are inefficient and conducive to conflict. By eliminating inefficiency and needless conflict in your organisation, you can help everyone to free themselves from needless wastes of their time and energy to focus on innovation in areas in which it really matters.

The irony here is that in fact, by standardising processes, you will be streamlining operations in a way that helps everyone to do more and be more effective team members.

And of course, if someone in the organisation discovers a way to improve a standardised process, the organisation can investigate and possibly adopt it. There is no reason a standardised process cannot be changed over time if circumstance, experience, and innovation indicate that it is indeed time for a change.

 

 

standardisation, standards Posted in: Change management, Productivity