I’ve belonged to far too many small, non-profit, high-turnover organizations to count. Over the past 5 years, I’ve experienced some (most) which are organizationally ad-hoc, some which contain legacy procedures due to long-timers, and the rare one which has a small enough mandate to not need any kind of systematization.
If there’s one crucial protip I’ve learned from these is that if you want consistency in procedures, if you want long-term memory, and if you want cohesion in your brand, you must integrate your secondary procedures into your day-to-day. Three important principles to enact this:
- Systematize public accountability.
- Avoid individual-enforced rules.
- Avoid duplication at all costs.
For instance, say your organization keeps and maintains a library of policies, which are to be reviewed tri-annually, and proactively disclosed online. The way this is poorly done is:
- Have a ruleset in a .doc on a shared drive/online.
- Have custom-edited list on a website with pdf links to each policy.
- Have a policy analyst whose job it is to enforce the ruleset, and ensure the website list is kept up-to-date.
This procedure is silly in a high turnover environment. Should a policy analyst make one mistake one year, there is no accounting for their gaff, and no accountability once they turn over. Policies will get lost in the share drive, never get posted online, due to the number of minute actions required. You’ll undoubtedly end up with every new policy analyst coming in, getting frustrated with the organization of the status quo, ignoring the hierarchy of the shared drive, and developing their own process.
The key problem here is that the policy analyst is accountable to a .doc, and responsible for being the machine that enforces the .doc. In other words, they’re accountable to themselves, because no one will invest the time to reading the .doc, and making sure the machine is well-oiled (except in the case where someone’s out to get your policy guy.)
The elegant solution is to axe the offline database, and make the online listing the only available directory of your policies, and have the system either send automated reminders about deadlines, or make it easily-discoverable that there are policies that need review. This way, should someone want access to a policy, they automatically know of the only place to get them, and the curator of the bunch becomes publicly accountable to ensuring the rules are being enforced. If they’re not, it looks bad on the organization, and suddenly, proper enforcement becomes the priority of everyone.
Everything from link sharing, tweeting, facebook posting, press releasing, media monitoring, and others can be systematized in the way above mentioned. The idea to integrate as many independent processes as possible, so the one core action automatically results in all subsequent. Your business can’t rely on an all-knowing overseer to ensure everything’s getting done–that overseer turns over every two years. Let exposure demand training, and things will work much smoother.
