Free SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) Template To Support Your Business
Blog: Monday Project Management Blog
A document outlining your company’s standard operating procedures helps ensure that all employees carry out routine tasks consistently. Adhering to an SOP can improve efficiency and produce high-quality results for your team. An SOP document provides clear guidance and acts as a reference point for your staff.
In this article, you’ll learn how an SOP document can benefit your team and improve efficiency. We’ll also share monday.com’s free, fully customizable SOP Template (Standard Operating Procedure). This template provides a starting point for you to outline routine procedures in your workplace.
What is an SOP template?
A standard operating procedure (SOP) document outlines “how-to” processes and provides directions on the best or expected way to complete a task. An SOP template helps you organize these guidelines in a way that’s easy to understand and helps employees stay on track. The three common formats for SOP templates are step-by-step guides, hierarchical steps, and flowcharts. Each of these formats has unique advantages — step-by-step guides and hierarchical steps offer more detail, while flowcharts visually lay out the steps in an operating procedure.
monday.com’s SOP Template (Standard Operating Procedure) provides your employees with a clear guideline for company best practices, reducing the risk of human error.
Why use an SOP template?
Implementing standard operating procedure templates in your workplace has countless benefits. An SOP template:
- Provides a guideline for achieving consistency
- Improves quality assurance
- Supports company safety standards
- Saves you time and money by preventing errors
- Simplifies company audits
- Reduces employee training times
- Helps you adhere to legal requirements
- Transfers work seamlessly between team members
You can increase the advantages of an SOP template (standard operating procedure) by customizing it to meet your specific needs. The monday.com SOP Template lets you change your SOP document and create an intuitive layout for your team.
What are some types of SOP templates?
Several types of SOP templates can be useful for outlining standard operating procedures for your employees. The best format for your company and project depends on the nature of the work, the operating procedure you are outlining, and how much time employees have to review the material.
Flowchart
A flowchart is useful for an SOP template when the standard operating procedure can produce multiple possible outcomes. When a task’s result isn’t predictable, it’s a good idea to use a flowchart to map out the various ways to proceed. Each step in the flowchart provides a directive for what to do next depending on the results.
Hierarchical steps
The hierarchical steps format of an SOP template is ideal for outlining a procedure where order is important. For example, you might lay out this format as steps 1 a), 1 b), and 1 c) or 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3. In this SOP template format, the order of completion for the steps is critical to the outcome.
Checklist
An SOP template in checklist format is simple to create, and you can use it for a variety of applications, from individual preparation for a task to project completion and preparing deliverables. Most people are familiar with the checklist format, which provides a list of tasks or factors to refer to. Individual items help you determine if you’re on track for completing a project or prepared for an event. You can use checklists for everything from technical work (such as a checklist for powering up a device or logging into a software program) to managerial tasks (such as a checklist outlining points to cover in a meeting). SOP templates that take on this format are highly customizable and flexible.
monday.com’s SOP Template is extremely intuitive for reducing the time spent training employees and provides reassurance that your employees can complete tasks with the necessary accuracy when they follow your best practices.
Outline best practices with monday.com’s SOP Template
With monday.com’s powerful Work OS, team members from around the globe can work together in a digital space without ever setting foot in the same office. monday.com’s Work OS is simple and intuitive, empowering teams to run project workflows with confidence.
The operating system adapts to your team’s evolving needs and lets you connect with colleagues and employees to promote transparency and efficiency. monday.com’s Work OS eliminates the need for repetitive manual tasks by letting you automate your workflows when using the SOP template and other related templates.
Related templates to SOP templates
A well-laid-out SOP template helps minimize employee training times and ensures team members understand what steps to take to adhere to company policies. In addition to using SOP templates to achieve these outcomes, you can use other templates to increase efficiency and support employee development.
Customizable Workflow Template
monday.com’s Customizable Workflow Template provides a central tool for visualizing and coordinating various project aspects and ensuring everyone on the team has access to changes in real-time. Our Workflow Template is highly customizable, so you can adapt it to your business and match the workflow features to your team’s needs.
A reliable workflow template helps prevent bottlenecks, facilitates planning, and creates transparency among team members. The template lets you assign as many owners as you need for your project, ensuring each team member knows which tasks they’re responsible for completing.
Employee Training Plan Template
monday.com’s Employee Training Plan Template helps you manage the process of training new hires. Our free template speeds up the onboarding process and your training plan development. In addition to onboarding and outlining company policies, this Employee Training Plan Template covers topics such as safety protocols, executive training, and diversity training. There’s some overlap between employee training plans and SOPs, so combining these templates can effectively manage new hires.
These additional templates help you develop a stronger SOP document for your company. When considering the most important components to include in an SOP template, check out the answers to some frequently asked questions regarding standard operating procedures and related templates.
FAQs about SOP templates
What five elements should you include in standard operating procedure documents?
You should include five critical elements in any standard operating procedure for clarity. A good template for developing SOPs will have a title page, table of contents, purpose, procedures, and quality control measures.
Why is it critical to follow SOPs?
Following standard operating procedures is critical for ensuring teams complete tasks and larger-scale projects on schedule. If you adhere to a template for formatting your SOPs, you can save time and money while ultimately boosting your team’s productivity.
Who is responsible for writing the SOPs?
The person writing your standard operating procedure should have experience with creating workflows and procedures at a high level. Other team members can review the completed document or offer contributions to the SOP, but you should only let someone with direct experience executing the procedure outline it within the template.
The post Free SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) Template To Support Your Business appeared first on monday.com Blog.
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