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The Ultimate Guide to Creating SOPs

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Are you looking for a way to streamline your business operations and make things run more smoothly, even when you’re not around to oversee everything? Would you like to have clear and concise instructions for your employees to follow so you can finally take that well-deserved vacation?

If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, then creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) could be the solution you’ve been looking for.

SOPs are step-by-step instructions that outline exactly how a task should be completed, and they can be an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes. Not only that, but they also help ensure that tasks are carried out correctly and efficiently. Ultimately, SOPs can help free up your time so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

yvi SOP - Ask Yvi

Creating an SOP may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. This ultimate guide will show you how to create SOPs that work for you and your business. Plus, I’ll throw in a FREE template so you can get started right away!

Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about creating standard operating procedures for your business.

Video Transcription:

[00:00:00] You want me to do, what? And that’s how many employees and employers feel about SOPs. In this video, I’m not only going to show you and tell you what SOPs are, what makes for a good SOP. How do you quality control SOPs? How do you set it up in ClickUp? No, I’m also going to give you the exact template that we are using with my clients.

[00:00:28] And you don’t even have to write it yourself. You’re going to get the template right at the end, ready for you to download and plug in right into your ClickUp. SOP stands for Standard Operating Procedures. And it pretty much just a fancy word of saying, how do you get something done? And how do you show somebody how to get things done. It is one of the most crucial pieces when you really want to scale your business and go on vacation, becoming the CEO of your business rather than just another employee. Now, a good set up on writing procedures should have enough information for new team members while not being overwhelming for established team members.

[00:01:18] And that’s where most of the issues come in. As you saw with my lovely team member, Tessa. She had a whole bunch of folders with post-it notes in it, and all the things. As an established team member, she doesn’t need that much information. As a new team member though, that learns this process and all the ins and outs of it.

[00:01:40] They’re going to need that much information, but they also don’t need all of that information for every single process when they start working. They need to be able to easily access that information when needed. How did you know you really have good information for the newbie and enough information for the newbie while not overwhelming your team members?

[00:02:06] Now let’s focus first on having enough information for your newbies. There’s an easy track. Let somebody that has never gone through the task, go through your SOP and read it, work through it. Having somebody new go through your SOP and read it through will help you check if all the steps that a newbie needs is in your Standard Operating Procedure, but that also means there’s a whole bunch of information in there that your established team doesn’t need. So how do you actually quality control for your established team? You have your team take a look at it, but stay tuned because the moment we dive into how to actually set up these Standard Operating Procedures within ClickUp, I’m going to show you a trick that will make this really easy.

[00:02:58] And with that, why don’t we go take a look on how we set up Standard Operating Procedures internally and with our clients. As you can see right here, we also make it visually appealing. We have a cover on the top that represents the workflow we are talking about. We have our title. We also have some additional information right away that right up in the menu item up here, you can look at the history of this and what has changed.

[00:03:27] The first thing we have in every single SOP is this table right here. So if something goes not as planned in this process and potentially something got posted on social media that wasn’t supposed to get posted, who do I reach out to, to get this fixed? Also, who is the expert? The expert is the one that has been running this process and in my case, because I’ve been running this process, it is me. We then also link our tools. What are the tools that are being used in this process that is explained in this SOP? Makes it easy to log in and know right away, which tools I’m going to be needing to be able to get this job done. And then, when is the last revision?

[00:04:15] This is the overview of everything on the fly. You need to know about this process right here in your SOP. Now, we then give the big picture overview of why are we setting this up? What is the goal? Give your team a reason why they want to pay attention to this. Where are the assets? Then we are diving into the automations that are connected to this because if somebody changes the process, they need to know the automations connected to this first so that they don’t screw up any automations by changing the process.

[00:04:55] And now we are coming to the heart of this Standard Operating Procedures. Right here, nice and neatly, using some ClickUp features to make this SOP work for your existing team, just as well as for your newbies. If your existing team comes in right here. Cool. Okay. We are doing a repurposing blog post. Awesome. If the video is not yet transcribed, do that in Descript.

[00:05:21] Cool. I know exactly how to do that. Then we optimize the transcript for the blog post. We then draft it in WordPress. We then make sure that the settings in Elementor are right. We also make sure that the WordPress settings are right and we send it off to Yvi for proof. Simple, easy, to the point with a couple of, hey, pay attention to this when you are going through this process, because there are some things that might cause a hiccup in this SOP.

[00:05:50] Cool. Now a new member is coming in that is just learning the process. See how simple it is to now know the exact steps that need to happen for this specific step in the SOP. Same thing with optimizing the transcript, write down here what needs to get done to really transcribe it. What needs to get done to draft this blog post in WordPress, add Loom videos that walks them through the specifics.

[00:06:21] This makes your SOP really, really easy to be usable for your existing team, as well as for your new team, and on the point of micromanaging, and we do not want to micromanage in your SOP, link your tool, wikis right on top of the tool. Wiki is the how-to specifically set your things up in your tool and what, and how to log in and all the technical side behind the actual workflow. And last but not least, give your team members a way to quality control their work. How do they know that the transcription part is done, right? And how do they know the blog post is right? Give them quality points at the end where they can make sure they’ve done a good job before sending it off to proof for you. And before I give you the deets on how to download this SOP template and import it straight up into your ClickUp, I want to address one big issue that always comes up when team members start writing SOPs. There’s so much to do. There’s so much to write. First off, we got the first problem solved. You already got the framework.

[00:07:34] You just need to fill in your information. Secondly, you don’t have to write them to begin with. If you are the one running the processes, initially, run them once or twice, record a Loom video and hand them off. Or, use voice recording. You don’t even have to type them. If you really want to deep dive into writing SOPs, really quick and easy, I have an additional video for you right here that talks about exactly the three tricks that we use to write SOPs really quickly. You can find the template, download link right in the description and are you subscribed yet? Because you really want to stay up to date with all of the efficiency tips that I will be bringing up for you here in the next weeks.

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