5 key reasons your processes erode over time

People do things differently, it’s just how the world works. And it’s not a bad thing – if they didn’t, we would still be using paper money and riding horses. But differences in attitudes and ideas can cause tension within your company so it’s important to know how to handle it, and where to look for potential problems.

People often think that processes must be documented (either in a word document or a physical file) but the reality is that this often doesn’t work. People won’t look at them, and it creates a backlog of pointless documenting work, which becomes one of the reasons people tend not to like processes.

There are a few reasons your processes might erode over time:

1. Great ideas

You want to manage the business, and you don’t want people’s creativity to be dampened. The trouble is that sometimes your employees’ great ideas aren’t exactly what you want. Maybe there’s something in their suggestions that make sense, but throwing out everything that has gone before feels too drastic.

The ideal would be to sort their better ideas from the weaker ones, and then merge only the best aspects of those ideas into your chosen process, rather than ignoring them altogether or allowing staff to go rogue (which can be tempting to keep them happy, and allow them to show flair and initiative). Great ideas are a positive thing: if they are not harnessed at all this will lead to frustration. But boundaries are important too.

2. Not-so-great ideas

Giving people the freedom to stray from the process often makes them stray in a direction you don’t want them to go. They may undermine, ignore a step or bypass/eliminate a part of the process that is really important to you as a business, but doesn’t seem important to them because they’re coming at it from a different perspective.

Their intentions, and ideas for improvement, may not be the best, but ignoring initiative can backfire. Certainly, you want to avoid creating chaos. But I strongly believe that something can be learned from almost every suggestion or idea, and that the only stupid question is the one that isn’t asked. So hear out – and look for a positive angle to – all ideas, even if you can’t carry them forward.

3. Forgetfulness

People forget. With any kind of process, there are likely to be multiple steps involved. Rather than document the steps that most people will need to take, we try to store them in our heads, and then we pass these stored processes around from one person to another over time. We then expect everybody to get it all right. When they don’t, we blame and criticise them.

This is a common source of frustration for business owners/managers, and of employee demotivation which leads to workplace stress. As humans we’re creative, and if we feel engaged at work it’s natural to come up with inspired ideas and want to implement them so we can shine. What we’re not so great at is remembering to do 20 things, consistently, without ever missing a step, time and time again.

It’s quite handy that we live in a digital age, where computer programs and apps can do all of this for us – serving up reminders and prompts, supporting staff at hectic times when their minds might go blank, with a motivational and reassuring checklist they can check tasks off against. And if they want a paper copy to have in their hands, that’s easily provided too.

Humans – especially busy ones, with a lot on their plates – will always forget things. Rather than force the impossible – perfection by rote – wouldn’t it make more sense to provide people with the tools to support them in getting the process right?

4. The ‘can’t be arsed’ (CBA) contingent

With any process, there will always be dissenters: those who deliberately decide they’re not going to perform a particular step of the process which they believe to be superfluous or tedious. You’ve explained that it’s important, made this very clear, and trained them how to do it. However you haven’t convinced them that they actually need to execute that particular task, so it seems perfectly justifiable to them not to bother. Again, this is a human problem. People develop workarounds to get jobs done more efficiently, especially if they are pushed for time. But, more often than not, it’s because they haven’t truly appreciated (or been told) why it needs to be done, that they conveniently skip a step. They cannot see the bigger picture, because no one has taken the time to paint this for them.

The solution to this begins with being more transparent about the overall process, why it exists and why it has been designed in a certain way. Understanding the wider context can change their perception and bring them into line, of their own volition.

5. ‘Nobody told me’

The ‘Nobody told me’ scenario, which can sound a lot like someone not taking responsibility for doing what’s expected of them, is typically the result of miscommunication. While there may be a process in the file, it could be that this isn’t being referred to when a job is done. Or that people don’t refer to a documented process because it’s gone astray or doesn’t exist. Perhaps the preferred way to do the job may be recorded only in people’s heads, and/or is something that has evolved gradually over time – so that the filed version is a few iterations behind, and has yet to catch up.

These five issues all cause problems to processes. You will end up fighting the processes and causing tensions within your staff. If you work to fight this and harness the power of your people instead, you stand a much better chance of learning and improving.

To discover how to improve your processes and harness the power of your people, read The Dirty Word: The word that fills people with dread is the key to business freedom out on 1st August by Alister Esam, Innovator, Investor and CEO

Written by Alister Esam

Prepared by Ebony Ximines-Parke