When it comes to professionalizing what you do, job aids may be the hardest working but most overlooked tool in your kit. Checklists, work instructions, and templates are what allow you to systematically follow best practices and use repeatable solutions.
Besides helping you get your work done quickly and accurately, job aids also ensure you stay aligned with your boss, your colleagues, and even your clients in how you do your work. Perhaps best of all, job aids can help train others to support you or back up your role.
How do you build job aids? Every time you fine-tune a task or responsibility, you capture a record of your new and improved best practices. The key is to continue to maintain updated standard operating procedures and turn them job aids that can be easily used and understood.
Of course, well-developed organizations have always used standard operating procedures based on current best practices for as many tasks, responsibilities, and projects as they can. That’s the key to scalability. Just imagine running a chain of restaurants without having the same basic layout, menus, staffing, marketing, and so on. If the chain’s leaders are smart, these procedures live in the form of job aids like work instructions, checklists, templates, and scripts.
The Four Major Benefits of Job Aids
1. Job aids keep you from getting rusty
Job aids can help you get up to speed more quickly with tasks you don’t do often or haven’t done in a while. If this is a task, responsibility, or project that you do only periodically, then it’s doubly important to capture all the lessons you learn. You don’t want to have to dust off your memory the next time. You don’t want to relearn the same things you already learned in the last go-around.
Job aids such as work instructions, checklists, and comparable work products will jump-start your performance the next time you tackle the same responsibility or a comparable project.
2. Job aids keep you from going on autopilot.
At the other end of the spectrum are those tasks that you do over and over again, sometimes daily and even multiple times a day. Job aids such as step-by-step checklists will keep you from just doing those things mindlessly, by rote, or going on autopilot.
When you do anything mindlessly, that’s when mistakes happen, quality suffers, or opportunities are overlooked. You might start to think you can multitask with another task or responsibility. When that happens, it’s time to slow down, take out your instructions and checklists, follow them step by step, and check them off one by one. That’s how your job aids can keep you focused and serve as quality control. They are tools of mindfulness to get you back to dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s as effectively as possible.
Sometimes, rather than preventing autopilot from kicking in, all those checklists and other job aids can trigger autopilot, especially when you use the same tools repeatedly. After a while, they start to turn into wallpaper. Rather than using them as tools for mindfulness, you start to tune them out and ignore them.
If that happens, it’s time to change things up. A simple example is to take your checklist and rearrange it. Do things in a different order. The idea is to force yourself to stop and think.
3. Job aids help you train go-to people.
Sharing your job aids will help you increase the productive capacity of others and improve their ability to rely on you with greater confidence and work with you more effectively.
That’s how you train go-to people. When you’re overcommitted and must say no to a customer yourself, ask some of your go-to people to fill in for you. You know they’ll do a good job because they already have all your job aids and work product samples. These will get them on board, up to speed, and backing you up faster. That’s a positive you can deliver for your internal customers, even if you are overcommitted and unavailable. And it’s a positive you can deliver for backup go-to people because you are building them up and giving them an opportunity to add value and become more and more of a go-to person themselves.
4. Job aids help you educate your cross-functional collaborators.
Your instruction sheets and checklists show your collaborators how you do business, while at the same time teaching them how to do business with you.
When you are working with your internal customers in other teams, functions, or departments, they often have lots of blind spots about what you do, how you do it, and how best to work effectively with you. Sometimes they might wonder, “Why are you asking me all these questions?” And “What’s taking so long?” If they don’t fully understand what it takes for you or your team to complete a task, responsibility, or project on your end, that might breed frustration and bad feelings.