~by Haley Lynn Gray~
Every company has its own culture and its own set of processes. Not all of those processes are any good — and a process nobody follows is worse than no process at all, because everyone assumes it’s happening.
The test of a good one is simple: is it easier to follow than to ignore?
1. Make it easy to remember
Cheat sheets, one-page summaries, cards people can keep at their desk. Whatever turns a document nobody reads into something people actually use in the moment.
If following your process requires remembering seven steps from a manual read once during onboarding, it will not be followed.
2. Make it hard to skip
This is the real craft. Build it so the wrong path is more effort than the right one.
A form that won’t submit without the required field. A booking that can’t be made without the deposit. A checklist the work physically passes through.
Relying on diligence means relying on everyone being at their best on their worst day. Design removes the choice instead.
3. Keep it short
Every additional step is another place to stop. If a process has fourteen steps, ask which three actually prevent the problem, and whether the rest exist because someone once made a mistake in 2019.
Processes accumulate. Prune them deliberately, or they grow until people route around them entirely.
4. Say why
People follow rules they understand and quietly abandon rules that seem arbitrary.
“Photograph the meter before you leave, because we’ve been billed twice for readings we couldn’t dispute” gets followed. “Always photograph the meter” gets forgotten by Thursday.
5. Let the people doing it design it
The person doing the work knows where it actually breaks. Processes designed entirely from above tend to solve the problem as imagined rather than the problem as experienced.
Ask them to walk you through it. You’ll usually find two steps nobody needs and one crucial thing that isn’t written down anywhere.
6. Review it when it fails
When something goes wrong, ask whether the process was wrong or simply wasn’t followed — and if it wasn’t followed, ask why not.
“They were careless” is almost never the whole answer. Usually the process was slower than the workaround, and people did the sensible thing under pressure.
Why this matters for an owner
Because process is what lets a business run without you in it. Every decision that only you can make is a constraint on how large the business can get and on whether you can ever take a holiday.
Good process isn’t bureaucracy. It’s the difference between a business and a job you own.
