Documented processes and procedures are very important when it comes to maintaining stability within an organization. Although this documentation requires an initial heavy investment, it will ultimately provide long-term benefits, not only by ensuring state and federal compliance but also by improving efficiency. The power of established and comprehensive processes and guidelines becomes more evident during onboarding or training periods. Are your new hires truly set up for success?
It is never too late to re-evaluate your organization’s process and procedures. Here’s how you might be able to start…
When new employees are hired at an agency, having a set of pre-established processes and procedures will allow agencies to quickly onboard their new employees. These new employees will be able to reference the processes and procedures to orient their work and prevent any steps from being skipped in the tasks performed. It’s important to note that these pre-established processes and procedures are not only useful for new employees because they’ll ultimately reduce both time and effort of current employees as well. Having the ability to reference pre-established processes and procedures when performing tasks, allows agencies to reduce the time and effort required for compliance while also ensuring they are staying compliant with both State and Federal regulations in the tasks being performed. This will additionally save any potential time spent on ensuring non-compliant tasks are changed to be in compliance based on state or federal feedback. Finally, the efficiency at which tasks will be performed will drastically increase if a tested and updated process or procedure is in place. By using past experiences in these tasks to drive updates in the processes and procedures, the tasks will be performed much more efficiently and be established around the most current systems in place at the agency.
The first step to developing established processes and procedures is to list out by department the tasks performed most often. Next, an agency can begin interviewing staff and management in each department to see if there are any processes or procedures already being used for these tasks that may not yet be documented. When documenting these processes, an agency may choose many different forms to record these in. For instance, an agency may choose to document their processes in visual flow maps, or they may decide that a standard word document is best. In either medium, there are a few key pieces of content that must be captured: who is responsible for each step of the process, what is the order that each step must be taken, and what are the systems used in each step to assist in the task. Once it has been determined that every task that has a known process is documented, the agency can begin to check each of these processes and ensure that they are complaint at both a state and federal level.
As for the remainder of tasks that do not have any established process, there are multiple ways to go about developing these processes. The most efficient way would be to reach out to similarly sized agencies in the state and see how they perform these tasks. By reaching out to agencies of similar size and located in the same state, the agency will be able to see how other agencies are staying compliant with both state and federal regulations while performing their various tasks. However, not every agency is going to be willing to share their pre-established processes and procedures. If this is the case, then the next way is to develop these processes by scratch. The best place to start in developing these new processes and procedures is by seeing what is required at the state and federal levels. Developing processes around these requirements will ensure that your agency complies and can then be updated overtime to best fit the agencies systems and needs.
Once processes and procedures have been documented and established, the work is not over. While these solutions will be extremely useful, overtime systems and regulations will change and thus the agency’s processes and procedures will need to be updated as well. By developing and adhering to a consistent schedule for reviewing and updated established processes and procedures, agencies will be able to ensure that new systems and regulations are included, allowing for maximum compliance and efficiency.
