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Human Performance Management Best Practice 9 – Procedure Use and Adherence
Using procedures drives consistency, reducing risk and increasing quality. Whether an activity is performed by different individuals or multiple times by the same person, proper procedure use and adherence ensures the prescribed activities are performed in the same manner, in the same order, and from the same starting conditions every time thereby yielding the same expected result. Furthermore, past operating experience can be incorporated into procedures so that lessons learned information is passed from user to user helping ensure mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future. All that said, procedures only drive this type of desired performance if used and adhered to correctly.
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About the Author
Nathan Ives is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.
Use of procedures and work instructions helps increase performance consistency between individuals conducting these documented activities and between repetitive performances by one person. Such consistency promotes the error-free performance necessary for high-risk and high-quality operations. However, the use of procedures slows progress and limits productivity. Since not all activities demand a high degree of consistency, a graded approach to the application of a procedure use standard is warranted.
Individuals within organizations of all types frequently perform repetitive tasks demanding high levels of consistency and/or quality. In these circumstances, logically sequenced lists of activities serve to drive the desired consistency and quality without themselves being overly burdensome or time consuming.
Distractions abound in every environment. Whether they are audible or visual, these disruptors detract from the communication between individuals. Such communication barriers may lead to the misunderstanding of directions provided by one person to another resulting in errant execution of a desired process.
Workplace distractions are everywhere; telephones ring, page announcements sound, computer popups appear, co-workers interrupt. Each of these and countless other diversions interrupt the natural progression of work achievement and divert employees’ attention away from the task at hand. Such distractions can cause an employee to lose his or her place when performing critical procedures.
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