It is currently being cleaned in drawers, cupboards, stalls, attics and garages. Extra time in the home often makes us more aware of clutter and disorder. Combined with the fact that we have to stay more at home it is a great opportunity to get sorted, cleared and removed things. No doubt it does good, even if it’s not so nice when you are in the middle of it.
The time we’re in can be a good opportunity to get the organization’s systems cleaned up as well. Not all tasks are as straightforward to get done from a home office, but going through digital systems and tools is at least a useful task that needs to be done anyway. Cleaning and auditing are in many ways two sides of the same issue.
Correct and relevant
By cleaning a management system, I mean ensuring that the information and data are both correct and relevant. This can be divided into several activities:
- Review the requirements the business is facing. Ensure that you have an up-to-date overview of the requirements of the authorities, customers, owners and other stakeholders.
- Redo procedures and instructions so that the content comply with current practices and If there are discrepancies between procedures and practices, either the procedure must be revised, or the practice changed.
- Ensure that your documents are easily accessible to relevant readers; that is, to check that employees have the right roles with access to their documents
- Ensure that employees are registered with the right data and that former employees are archived and no longer have access to the system
Simple content in a double sense
When revising documents, it is at the same time a good opportunity to simplify and improve the content. You should ensure that the content is relevant and easy to understand for the reader. Not too detailed and not too general. For insentience’s, foreign words and generally a lot of text, it makes the content harder to understand.
Content must be easily designed:
- Standardized layout, use fixed templates
- Write short sentences and be straight to the point
- Symbols, images, and flow models describe much more than text
- Short videos are great at telling how something should be done, think about YouTube
Some cleanup time in the management system should also include a session to ensure that tasks and activities are described at location and not several times in multiple documents. This will quickly achieve more adverse effects through
- increased likelihood of something being described incorrectly and the employee makes mistakes
- increased likelihood of the employee becoming confused and making mistakes
- more administration, everything should be revised and followed up
Describing the same thing in several places is often something that occurs over time. It can be a measure after a deviation that is resolved by writing new procedure instead of revising an old one. Or it may be new employees who do not have the full overview and create new content. It’s a bit like weeds in the garden, the system grows over time.
The advice is therefore to clean out similar content. With a good search tool in the software, you will find similar content and can remove redundant documents and text.
Removing excess procedures or content in the system feels just as well as removing old clutter from the garage!
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