Why You Need Written Work Standards

Every building needs a strong foundation. Without one, the walls would sag, buckle, and cave in all too soon. Likewise, the people engine of your business needs a sturdy base. Without a base of established work standards, we find ourselves managing by generalizations and personality. That might seem to work for a few charismatic people (think Lee Iacocca or Jack Welch) but it's never enough. Even the most charismatic leaders would fail utterly if their subordinates had no idea how to do their jobs. 

Written work standards take away all the guesswork in deciding what it means to do a good job. It's as simple as that.

 What are Written Work Standards?

So what do I mean by  written work standards? A set of written work standards breaks downs the work of the business into separate tasks that can be trained, performed, and observed as a single unit. Here are a few examples of typical tasks in this sense:

• Use the OS system to generate an initial estimate/work order.

• Explain an repair estimate to a customer.

• Activate the building security system for off-hours operation.

 For every task, written work standards include three factors. These are: 

• Responsibility - Describes who is responsible for completing the task.

• Procedure -  Describes in detail the process or steps taken to do the task.

• Standard - Specifies the level of performance that must be achieved for the task to be considered done properly.

The task of preparing written work standards is straightforward, though it takes some planning and help from experts. You can do it yourself with some guidance or you can call in someone to do it for you. It's much like your accounting. You may use an accounting system that was set up by your accountant or you may simply have created your own using a software package. In either case, you got your system with the help of an expert. I recommend doing the same to get your work standards down on paper.

Why Bother?

Now let's look at some of the best reasons for having written work standards in place in your usiness. To make their worth very clear, I'll attach each reason to one of the essential systems in the people engine of your business.

Recruiting and Hiring If you don't know exactly what doing a good job looks like, how can you be sure that any candidate for a job opening will be capable of doing that job well? With standards, you can clearly explain each job to job applicants and allow the applicants to determine if it's the right job for them. Finally, those doing the recruiting and hiring are following set standards so they comply with the law when interviewing applicants.

New Hire Orientation Giving each new hire a set of your written work standards tells them, "We expect you to work up to our standards and will accept nothing less." It sets a tone of excellence from the very beginning. It also makes your expectations perfectly clear. Each new employee will know what he or she must do in order to succeed.

Training and Coaching Having set standards in writing provides a basis for all training to be consistent regardless of who does it. They also allow you to create performance checklists that enable managers and coaches an objective means to evaluate employees' progress in learning and performing their jobs.

Compensation and Rewards Written work standards make it possible to distinguish objectively between your best performers and the rest. They provide a basis for fair and objective performance appraisals and discussions of work performance.

Recognition Because your employees all know what it means to do a good job, when they are recognized for their excellence they will know that the recognition means something. Written standards help put more worth into your recognition programs. And employees will only work harder to be recognized if they believe the recognition means something.

Leadership Having established work standards helps create an atmosphere of fairness. When employees know they are being treated fairly, they are more willing to follow their leaders in times of crisis or challenge.

Communication One of the real challenges in the workplace is communicating with employees who are not working up to your expectations. It becomes easy to fall back on what I call managing by personality traits. For example, instead of starting a performance discussion with "Bill, I just don't think you have the right attitude for our business." wouldn't it be more productive to say something more objective? How about this instead: "Bill, you've been arriving late at least two days each week for the past month and you've been taking more than 25% longer to do tire rotations than the standard calls for. We need to talk about improving in these areas in order for you to stay employed here."

From front to back and top to bottom, having established work standards that are written down and put in the hands of your employees will give you the specifications you need to start tuning up the people engine of your business.

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