Getting People to Actually Use Your SOPs

Last week I wrote about building SOPs. The foundations: keep your structure simple, capture them as text, start somewhere, build them with your team. If you missed it, that's the prerequisite for this one. 

With AI, you can draft an SOP in minutes. I've watched owners get excited, crank out fifteen of them in a weekend, dump them in a folder, and wonder six weeks later why nothing changed. The bottleneck was never writing them. It's that your team has a limited capacity to absorb and adopt new procedures, and that capacity is a lot smaller than your capacity to produce them with AI. 

So the cadence you build them at is not the cadence you roll them out at. You can write five in an afternoon. Your team might be able to absorb one a week. Be intentional about when and how each one goes out. 

Here's how I do it. 

First, build it with the people who do the work. Before anything goes out to the whole team, I ask the people involved in that process to check it and give feedback. They catch the step I got wrong and they're far more likely to follow something they helped shape. This starts before rollout, not after. 

Second, match the rollout to the complexity. Most SOPs go out through a Teams message the team can read and acknowledge. The more complex ones get a quick meeting where I walk through it live. Don't treat them all the same. 

Third, make time to spot check. This is the step everyone skips. Once it's out, I go back and check whether people are actually following it. You'll also find that a procedure that looked clean on paper needs small tweaks once it meets real practice. That's normal, and it's another reason to pace your rollout. Push out too many at once and you have no room to adjust any of them as you learn what works. 

Then there's keeping them current, which is where accountability lives. When someone has a question about a process, send them to the SOP. The goal is that people check the chatbot or read the procedure before they come to you. If someone wants to change a process, they check with management first. Nobody just starts doing it their own way. If management decides as a group that the process should change, we document it in the SOP and roll the update out to the team. The SOP is the single source of truth, and changes flow through it, not around it. 

That's how you hold people to a process and get everyone running the same one. It's the difference between SOPs people actually follow and a pile of documents nobody opens. 

This is a never-ending process, and you'll learn along the way how to make it recurring and how to get everyone involved in reviewing, creating, and updating. It's a team effort, never one person's job, and never a one-time thing.