Process! by Mike Paton

Author:Mike Paton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781637741375
Publisher: BenBella Books
Published: 2022-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

—Albert Einstein

Based on what you’ve learned through observation and evaluation, it’s now time to document and simplify the process. Keep this work at a high level. You’re focused on the major steps, the 20 percent that delivers 80 percent of the results. A major step is one of the five to twenty-five things you need to get right every time to get great results. Putting together an attractive compensation and benefits package is probably a major step in your people process. Figuring out which font to use in your employee handbook is not.

For each major step, briefly explain the who, what, when, where, and how with a series of substeps, which some people refer to as procedures or standard operating procedures (SOPs). If you’re using a step-by-step checklist (one of many ways to document and simplify a process), the major step will be followed by two to five bullets. They provide clarity, but at a much higher level than the detailed SOP manuals that many organizations compile and then rarely use.

The goal is a simple and clear explanation of the major steps in a process that will immediately help a new employee consistently execute the basics of his or her job. Think one-page checklist, not three-ring binder. If you can’t describe a process clearly and simply enough to achieve that result, either your process is too complex, or you need to understand and explain it better. See the sample on the next page of a documented and simplified HR process.

In The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, surgeon and best-selling author Atul Gawande illustrates the impact that a simple checklist can make on even the most complex of processes. He cites examples from high-stakes operations like hospitals, airlines, and construction companies. Even for seasoned experts with thousands of hours of training and experience like doctors, nurses, and airline pilots, Gawande proves that using simple checklists covering the absolute basics will vastly reduce critical and sometimes fatal mistakes.

Johns Hopkins Hospital, for example, instituted a five-step checklist to reduce the infection rate among ICU patients when using central-line catheters:

1.Wash your hands.

2.Clean the patient’s skin.

3.Wear protective coverings and put sterile drapes over the patient.

4.Avoid placing a catheter in the groin where infection rates are higher.

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