The Care and Feeding of Standardized Policies and Procedures

#Standardized #policies and #procedures are an #organization's way of formalizing how an organization conducts its business and ensures that it's #work is carried out in a consistent manner. #Documenting these policies and procedures is usually done based on staff knowledge, organizational lessons learned, and in some situations by external #experts with #specialized #knowledge.

Standards a high value-add to an organization in that employees and staff can be trained to the same set of policies and procedures and provide a consistent level of #service w/out having to get into all the wherefores and howcomes behind each policy.

However, standardization can be a problem if they are blindly followed even when a standard either no longer applies or has been superceded by changes over time. For example, the standard that prescriptions have to be transmitted via fax is outdated because the technology is effectively obsolete compared to other options. Another outdated standard I've seen is when an organization specifies a dollar limit for certain kinds of expenses. Limits that might've been resonable when they were set could become completely unworkable a few years later. In these kind of circumstances organizations tend to ignore the standard in order to get their work done, and at some point may even forget that the standard exists.

Such being the case, standard policies and procedures need to be periodically #reviewed and #updated to ensure they still reflect the organization's current circumstances on the ground and giving the organization the best bang for the buck.

---

If your organization has a policies and procedures issue like this that needs attention, my DMs are open for an initial no-obligation consultation.