About process standards
Standardization – especially amongst knowledge workers – is a word that rarely elicits excitement from those who hear it. On the contrary, it tends to lead to furrowed brows or, if you are lucky, shrugged shoulders. Many people – and I have been there myself – feel like any talk of “standards” or “standardization” is an attack on their personal liberty. After all, “what business does that process have telling me how to do my job!?!”
For those who understand the benefits of standard processes and want to make those benefits available to workers throughout an organization, it is vital that we understand and properly address all valid concerns while clearing up common misunderstandings associated with the concept of standardization.
In this article, I want to look at process standardization from the office and service process perspective – the knowledge workers perspective. In other words, how should we approach standardizing processes for workers whose job mandates creative thinking, problem solving, and navigating unique and changing work conditions? To accomplish this, I will attempt to define standard processes, identify some of the benefits of standard processes, identify and address common objections to standard processes, and finally provide some thoughts to consider when starting on the journey of standardizing processes.
What are standard processes?
Well, I am glad you asked! To answer this question, I will borrow from Mike Thelen’s definition of standardized work, which, I believe, is appropriate to apply to standard processes: “Standardized work is the safest, easiest and most waste-free way of doing a job that we currently know. It is developed and owned by operators, team leaders and supervisors working together.”[1]
Please note that standard processes are developed and maintained jointly by a diverse group of stakeholders. Standard processes cannot and should not be created and decreed from an ivory tower, completely disconnected from the reality faced by front-line workers. This approach may lead to a “safe” or “waste-free” process in theory, but in reality it produces a pie-in-the-sky process that does not, indeed, cannot account for the grey area required when standardizing office and service processes.
Also note that standard processes are not the only way to perform a particular process. Certainly, many organizations – even successful ones – function without defined process standards. In this case, workers are likely given an outcome (a deliverable and due date) and tasked with simply “making it happen” without any concern for means, apart from perhaps some broad policy considerations. Conversely, standard processes help guide a worker to that successful outcome in the safest, easiest, and most waste-free way.
Benefits of standard processes
The benefits of standard processes can be quite vast. To help categorize them, let us leverage our definition of standard processes above. When doing so, we see that standard processes make work safer. Now, in the context of office and service processes, we are not typically referring to safety in the same way those in a manufacturing environment might. Instead, safety in our context is better understood as risk mitigation. Standard processes help an organization control risk. By making clear the “safe” pathway, standard processes outline how workers should perform their tasks in a way that reduces the organization’s exposure to risk. One note here – standard processes also help reduce the risk associated with employee attrition. As experienced employees leave the business, it is important that their knowledge has been cataloged and retained. Standard processes provide a natural repository for such knowledge.
Additionally, standard processes make known the easiest way to complete work. This particular benefit is quite helpful for those workers who are learning new skills or who are being onboarded into the business. Instead of learning through osmosis and navigating the difficult path of trial and error, these workers can leverage standard processes to intake clear and understandable instructions, and reduce the headache often associated with taking on new responsibilities. Standard processes also provide the requisite foundation for improvement – a result of which is to make work easier. As improvement opportunities are identified and implemented over time, standard processes become the channel that communicates those changes to all employees – even the most experienced ones – giving them the easiest way to complete their work.
Finally, standard processes reduce the waste involved in performing work. Now, this waste reduction often results in an easier process directly benefitting process users as described in the paragraph above. However, waste reduction also benefits the organization at large by freeing up resources – human, financial, and material – decreasing the need for re-work, normalizing the customer experience, and allowing more time for improvements to be identified and implemented – a cycle that, when applied consistently, yields superior value and can help separate the organization from marketplace competitors.
Objections to standard processes
“My work is so unique! You just don’t understand. It can’t possibly be captured in a process.”
“What’s the matter? Do you not trust me to do the work right?”
“If my work is standardized then I won’t be needed anymore!”
“We don’t want our employees to lose their ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ by giving them standards!”
Perhaps you have heard people speak like this before – maybe you have even said something similar. It is not uncommon for the talk of standard processes to stir up all sorts of emotional objections. However, these attitudes can be changed. Quite often, simply explaining the benefits of standardization as discussed above and, most importantly, getting the front-line workers involved in the creation and maintenance of standard processes will eliminate the vast majority of objections. Conversely, ignoring the objections and pushing forward with a top-down standardization initiative is bound to slow adoption, create more resistance to change, and result in ineffective process standards.
Even when leaders and workers see the benefits of standards and are willing to work towards them, there can still be practical objections. Where do you start? How detailed should the standards be? How much freedom and flexibility should be built into the processes? All these questions are important and should be addressed. In short – find the maximum level of standardization appropriate for the situation and map the process to that level. Processes that detail how transactions are to be logged in an ERP will naturally be more detailed than processes outlining how contractual negotiations are to be navigated. This is perfectly fine. Experienced front-line workers will have a great sense of the appropriate level of standardization for their processes.
Some random thoughts
This article is not the place to unpack the larger methodology of process management within which standard processes exist. If you want to read more on that, you can check out some other posts of mine here and here.
However, I will conclude with some things to consider when getting started on the process standardization journey:
Realize that there is typically an inverse relationship between the level of standardization of a process and the utility of a process. In other words, when a process is rigidly standardized, the number of work scenarios where that process is applicable will decrease.
A process can be so general that it loses all usefulness and is no help in answering the specific questions that occur in the normal life of a process.
Find the standardization “sweet spot” and map to that: “Nearly all processes benefit by standardizing work (to the degree it makes sense for the specific process being improved) to reduce variation in output quality and the time it takes to complete work.”[2]
Get front-line workers involved in your standardization efforts. Give them an ownership stake in the creation and maintenance of said standards. Among other benefits, this will bring a level of legitimacy to your processes: “[Standard work] is not something certain people develop, then “distribute” to those doing the work”[3]
Standards are guardrails, not roadblocks.
Standardization helps an organization identify when a process is performing as it should and producing normal results.
Non-standard processes cannot be improved: “If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvements can be made.”[4]
I trust you are more encouraged and prepared to pursue process standardization than you were when you started reading. Best of luck as you seek to collaborate with front-line workers and leaders to capture, manage, and share the safest, easiest, and most waste-free way of performing work with others in your organization!
[1] Mike Thelen. isixsigma.com. https://www.isixsigma.com/implementation/standard-work/standard-work-what-it-is-and-measures-of-success/ (accessed January 25, 2020).
[2] Karen Martin and Mike Osterling, Metrics-Based Process Mapping (CRC Press, 2012), 45.
[3] Thelen. isixsigma.com.
[4] Jeffrey K. Liker, The Toyota Way (McGraw-Hill, 2004), 142.
