Whether you’re self-employed, have a team, or work for a company, documenting your processes is key to success.
Not only does it help you stay organized, but it can support new employee onboarding, streamline your work, mitigate risk, and even position your business to be sellable.
But knowing where to start can be challenging.
Here’s our guide on why you should be documenting your processes plus seven easy steps to get started today.
Why Documentation is Key for Success
Some people love documents and processes, and others don’t. And on top of that, each person has their own organizational style influenced by personality, workplaces, or other people. That’s why there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to process documentation.
But no matter where you fall, there are many objective benefits to documenting your processes:
- Onboard new staff: Bringing new staff onto your team is easier and faster with proper documentation. New hires understand exactly what you’re all about and what’s expected of them. It also empowers them to learn something for themselves with a guide rather than always asking questions.
- Streamline work and save time: Once things are documented, you take the guesswork out of it. A process means you can jump right into a task rather than wasting time thinking about the best approach.
- Create a roadmap for future success: If you want to scale and grow your business in the future, you need a small business roadmap of where you want to go. Documenting your processes is the first step because it provides a base to build from.
- Increase sellability: Thoroughly-documented processes and procedures make it easy for someone else to pick up your business and run with it. This increases its attractiveness to a potential buyer in the event you want to sell.
- Mitigate risk: Industries like law, finance, or real estate have a number of compliance factors to follow. Documentation proves compliance and can help with any potential legal issues that come up.
- Reduce ambiguity: Documenting your processes creates clarity. This allows you to provide consistent results over and over again instead of changing the approach each time.
- Find areas for improvement: Getting your thoughts and ideas out of your head and onto paper can help you look at them objectively. By documenting processes, then, you can identify areas for improvement and see what worked and didn’t work.
- Increase profits: There’s no guarantee here, but it’s likely that the other benefits listed here can help increase profits through increased efficiency, better planning, and time savings.
7 Steps for How to Document Your Processes
1. Take Inventory
The first step is to take a look at everything you’re already doing. Retroactively evaluate the tasks and projects you already do and determine what needs to be formalized into a process.
A good place to start is breaking things down into time periods:
- Daily routines: What do you do every day? This could be answering emails, managing a schedule, taking appointments, or anything else specific to your work.
- Weekly and monthly projects: Zoom out a bit and look at things that need to be done on a weekly or monthly basis. This might be financials, marketing strategy, or creating content.
- Long-term goals: What do you want to work on in the future? Examples are a new product launch or expanding your team.
Once you have things broken down into specifics, you can identify what should be documented in a process.
The rule of thumb for determining what needs a process is if it is a repetitive task that adds value to your company. One-off and low-value activities don’t need to be written down in a process.
2. Use the Right Tools
Choosing the right platform and business management tools to document your processes is key to their longevity and success. If you select something you find confusing or too much work, you’re unlikely to keep it updated.
Here are a few examples of popular tools to look into:
- Trello: Kanban-style project management system that makes it easy to visualize what’s happened and what’s coming up.
- Airtable: This low-code platform allows you to build collaborative apps to customize your workflow.
- Todoist: Based on the premise of a simple to-do list, this app can be as complex or simple as you want.
- ClickUp: Project management software that helps teams stay organized with any type of work.
If you work as a solopreneur or are self-employed without a team, you may not need interactive software to document your processes. You may choose to create a Google Drive with your processes documented on Docs or Sheets or simply write something out in Microsoft Word.
It doesn’t have to be complex—it just needs to be clearly documented and accessible by those who need to use it.
3. Create Templates and Guides
Once you’ve chosen your platform or tool to document, think about making templates and guides for each task or project you want to formalize into a process.
There are two key ways to do this:
- Step-by-step guide: Some tasks require the same steps over and over again. Document them in a simple list-style format that people can follow.
- Template: Great for anything visual or design-related, templates allow you to “copy and paste” the template each time, requiring you to only tweak, edit, or swap out relevant information for each task.
4. Get Granular
Write your documents, guides, and templates as if they’re intended for someone who has no idea what you’re talking about.
The way to do this is through granularity—it’s all in the details!
If someone is new to your business, industry, or specific tasks or projects, they need details. Broad ideas or directions such as, “write an article” or “prepare marketing materials,” won’t help them out.
Here are some details you may want to include:
- Dates, timelines, or deadlines
- Visual guidelines such as brand colors, fonts, or images
- Specific people to include or reach out to, complete with contact information
- Written guidelines such as tone, formatting, fonts, etc.
- Reference materials or resources
- Step-by-steps of what to do, how to do it, and where to find the necessary assets and information
The details will be specific to your organization and industry, but the key is to not be afraid to get too granular when you’re creating your processes.
5. Include Audio-Visuals
Whenever possible, supplement written documentation with something more engaging. This is particularly important if you intend for other people to learn from and follow your processes.
Here are a few ideas to try:
- Screenshots: Include real-life images of someone going through a process. This is helpful if you’re explaining something technical online.
- Videos: How-to videos can be super helpful for people to learn how to do something. Most people absorb information better when they see it in action. One powerful tool for creating step-by-step videos is Loom, which allows you to record your screen in real-time and produce a quick tutorial video.
- Examples: If you’re documenting how to write a press release, for instance, include examples of others your company has published. This lets someone see a real-life example and get a sense of what is expected.
6. Identify KPIs
Attaching your process documentation to business outcomes is key to success. Try to identify a handful of KPIs (Key Process Indicators) that are relevant to each process. If you aren’t able to do so, you may want to re-evaluate this specific task or project and the value it has for your business.
Just a few of many small business KPIs include:
- Finances: Revenue, income, sales acquisition
- Lead generation: Inquiries, new clients
- Audience: Content creation, engagement, conversions, marketing reach
This not only ensures you’re focusing on important tasks, but it helps other people know what the end goal of each process is.
7. Review Them Regularly
Once your processes are documented, build a schedule to regularly review and revise them. You could do this on a quarterly basis or at specific milestones, such as onboarding someone new or starting a new project.
When reviewing your processes, consider bringing other people in to help you. This could be colleagues or team members that have roles and responsibilities directly related to the documented processes.
Or, you can ask outside family, friends, or professional connections to review your work and ask for feedback. They can identify gaps or ask questions to help you clarify and hone your processes.
Process documentation can look any number of ways—the key is to just do it! There are so many advantages to defining your processes and it can help you scale, grow, and thrive.
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