The process of on-boarding an employee with Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) training is one that many regulated organizations have to do. I am even more familiar with how every organization has a method to document that the new employee “read and understood” each SOP. We want to prove to the auditors that we performed our duty of ensuring that training is a priority and it was completed on time and was effective resulting in a signature and initials on a piece of paper that’s taken as gold.
I am confident that many organizations innovated some creative ways to train their employees training and can actually prove it effective. It is known that most of what we read, especially what we take in mass amounts, is quickly forgotten. I am certain as employees go over multiple pages of information that they tend to skim the SOP instead of reading and grasping the entirety of what the SOP is meant to declare. So what is a regulated organization to do?
Methods and policies for training should focus on businesses providing time-the right time, the amount of time and enough time. An organization should provide ample time for new employees to start their first week with some of the major SOPs concerning safety, company policies, and the like. The SOP on “Writing an SOP” might be able to pushed of until say…it’s time to write an SOP?
People are more tuned to understanding procedures when actively engaged in the process. Reading and training with the SOP at hand and performing the job per the procedure while under supervision not only ensures that the employee fully understood the SOP but effectiveness can actually be evaluated. Presenting SOP on-boarding to new employees in small pieces enhances attention and helps retention of policies, procedures and work instructions. Performing Just In Time training elevates on-boarding to another level.
Workforce Advance can assess your organizations SOPs in order to isolate the high risk content for initial training and connect all other SOPs to Just in Time training based on a sophisticated training matrix that can seamlessly be implemented into your current training program.