How do you sustain something positive in your life? Many times, people will tweak a recipe for years to find that perfect family “best”. Imagine making changes and tweaks throughout the years to sometimes create a winner…and sometimes…create something a little less than desirable.
Why do people write these changes on a dirty worn recipe card? Its simple really. They want to remember what works and what doesn’t. Imagine trying to rely just on memory. How would we pass this family favorite on without some record of what makes it a favorite?
We have been using standardization for years. Our grandparents’ gardens flourished, and kitchens exploded with tempting aromas because of this standardization. Wouldn’t it be silly to just throw away all that knowledge? Let’s build on what we already know.
We must keep track of our changes when we try to improve any process. After each improvement, that new way becomes the new standard.
Any task we tackle is likely to have some gray areas or questionable parts of the process. Its important we set a clear path of instructions to complete that task. If we take the guess work out of the process, our associates will spend less time dealing with uncertainty, and actually spend more time completing the job. If we remove this uncertainty we will remove the variations possible to complete the task at hand.
Lets take another example…
Imagine if the power company had no set guidelines for handling a power outage. Let’s say they staffed their entire call center with random people pulled off the street. Now take a minute and visualize how the first few minutes of a power outage might go. Instead of the normal, calm, tracking and reporting of areas affected, there would probably be total chaos. That’s basically what we allow when we fail to standardize our companies’ processes.
Everyday we have tasks and functions that need to be completed over and over again. Perhaps we do these things hourly, daily, weekly, or even monthly. Regardless of how often we do these repeatable tasks, if we don’t have some sort of standardization when doing them, we are inviting not only chaos, but leaving the door open for some very unhappy customers. In some cases, these situations can actually put our customers in danger. No matter what product or service we supply, the need for standardization can’t be denied.
Standardization can be applied to any task, procedure, or process that is important to our organization. Whether we are onboarding a new associate, taking someone’s blood pressure, or selling someone a vehicle, it only makes sense that we would want to determine the most efficient, and best way to do the task. We must make sure everyone is following the best process identified at the time, and treat that as the new standard.
Can we make changes after we have the new standard in place? Of course we can. As a matter of fact, our success depends on those new changes. However, if everyone is not following our established standards, these new improvements will be impossible to validate. How will we even know if a new improvement is indeed an improvement at all?
Not all approaches to a process are created equal. Chances are we have determined a best practice for the job. Let’s make sure we adhere to the current standard best practice to produce a quality part, or service, to our customer. Only when we consistently follow our standardized process will we know if we’ve made an improvement to our current way of doing things. Without following our standard, how can we compare our suggested improvement?
Without this comparison, my family might be adding raisins to our potato salad!
