Like it or not, no one can deny the benefits of proper documentation in areas of employee responsibilities, human resources issues, customer support, and E&O. This document by Grace Bauer should help you explain the importance of paperwork to everyone in your office.
It’s the same in any agency I work with. The employees always feel overwhelmed when they hear that they’ll have to start writing out procedures in the office.
The facilitator feels challenged, especially during the first weeks of implementing the changes. New employees might not be totally familiar with office procedures. Long-term employees feel they already know what they’re supposed to do. Although accounting employees are very thorough, they sometimes feel threatened when asked to write down their job responsibilities. Finally, 'problem' employees might have serious problems with just working together.
Agency managers can overcome these challenges by showing patience, understanding, and expertise.
New Employees
Even though some agencies hesitate to include new employees in the procedural process, there’s no better way to facilitate their training. Reviewing all office procedures with more experienced employees on a week-to-week basis offers a great opportunity to learn their jobs. Make new employees an integral part of the process — even give them unfamiliar assignments — and they’ll end up training themselves.
Long-Term Employees
Your long-term employees might well ask, 'Why in the world do we even have to document procedures? After all, we surely know how to do our own jobs!' That’s the very reason why experienced employees — probably more than anyone in the office — need to participate in the procedural process. Over the years, employees tend to start to do things their own way, especially since the agency might not have reviewed procedures for some time. Let your experienced employees understand that failure to standardize procedures could leave you wide open for a nasty errors and omissions claim.
Accounting Employees
Because the accounting staff are the most detailed and precise employees around, their job descriptions are usually detailed and accurate. However, more often than not, they’re afraid that documenting procedures will threaten their job security by showing others how to do their specialized work. To overcome such resistance, stress the fact that their tasks are so important that they need documentation and employee backup.
'Problem’ Employees
Some employees just might not want to participate in the procedural process and will give you a hard time during every procedural review meeting. Beware of these people, and check their work! In some cases, they might not know their jobs as well as you think! In others, they just might not be team players. Either way, it’s best to uncover these potential bad apples before they create serious problems.
Conclusion
Realize that implementing change won’t be easy. When employees start documenting procedures, don’t expect them to be too happy at first. Once into the third or fourth week, they’ll come to understand that the documentation process will benefit them by:
- Allowing new employees to come up to speed more quickly
- Reviewing job responsibilities of individual long-term employee to standardize procedures
- Providing backup for the key activities of accounting employees
- Spotlighting potential 'problem’ employees
Be sure to explain these benefits — and the process should go smoothly.