Create more structure in your business activities using standard operating procedures. Not every organization will benefit from this kind of standardization. It really depends on you, the business owner or manager, to determine if there are work processes that can be duplicated every day within your company and if it’s worth teaching those processes to employees through SOPs.

Routines
Well-written SOPs explained visually through a flowchart or annotated illustrations, if needed, make it easier for employees to do their jobs. They don’t have to guess how you want a task done because they can follow a procedure made easy to reference on the computer or as a printout. Through a standard routine, employees enjoy more predictability in their jobs and can hone their skills on each task to raise their overall performance.

Quality Control
Your customers depend on a product or service to be of a certain minimum quality. SOPs help you reduce the errors, or variations, that occur in the mass production of a product or the duplication of a service. For example, if you own a factory that builds toy cars, you want SOPs for quality control. You want each car model to be the equivalent of the car before it on the production line. With SOPs in place, you can use your employees and managers to discard products that fail to pass tests for quality control.

Performance Management
Establishing SOPs throughout your organization makes it easier to conduct employee performance appraisals. Write each employee’s job description as a collection of key SOPs. Give the employee a target level of outputs for each SOP in her job description. Determine her productivity on each SOP based on the corresponding level of outputs. Although an employee’s performance appraisal doesn’t have to include all procedures that she performs, you can select the procedures most crucial to her job or to your company’s bottom line. It’s also easy to compare the performance of employees who perform the same SOP as a component of their jobs.

Replication and Growth
As your organization grows, you may decide to set up different locations where employees will replicate the work processes of the original location. Having SOPs makes it easy to replicate processes