Establishing and enforcing proper policies, procedures in your shop

For most, the COVID-19 pandemic has completely disrupted our lives. Stay-at-home orders, lockdown restrictions and economic panic have upended our communities, shut down businesses, and forced many of us to make difficult choices about how to keep our shops operating. 

As I write this, America appears to be on the path back to normalcy and local governments are considering when to reopen and get back to work. Yet, it’s clear that everything has changed. 

One thing that has been made abundantly clear as a result of this crisis is the importance of establishing and enforcing proper policies and procedures. Having every employee follow proper procedures -- every time, with every vehicle -- takes on a new level of criticality when, for example, that procedure involves sanitizing a vehicle to keep your employees and your customers safe. 

But the truth is, that level of criticality has always been there. The threat of pandemic magnifies the risk, of course, but when government restrictions loosen and the risk of COVID-19 fades, the importance of doing a thorough inspection every time will remain, and will be just as necessary for keeping your customers safe and your shop protected. 

So how can shop owners establish and enforce proper policies and procedures without the ever-present threat of a virus or even without you having to micromanage? 

Introduce and Enforce 

Step one when introducing any policy or procedure is to make sure your entire team knows and understands what is being asked of them. By pulling the entire team together and training them at the same time, you’ll accomplish two things:  

First, you’ll ensure there are no excuses from the team about not knowing what has been asked of them. Having to train individual employees when they’re in violation of a policy that they didn’t know about is a surefire way to leave you frustrated and feeling like the shop is in chaos. 

But just as importantly, it creates accountability for the team. This is a critical part of building a strong culture in your shop because here’s the truth: smart policies and procedures, enacted and enforced fairly, aren’t for your worst employees…they’re for your best employees. They let your hardest working employees know that you care about your shop and seeing it succeed, and that you’re not going to tolerate poor quality. 

Which is a good segue to the second critical point: you must enforce the policies and procedures you set. More accurately, not enforcing those policies is how you lose good employees. Great employees want you to succeed and can see when you’re being held hostage by others. Refusing to hold their coworkers accountable is a clear indication they need to find the culture they crave somewhere else. 

Be Consistent 

Even if you’re not a disciplinarian, holding your team accountable for violating policy doesn’t have to be a terrible experience. In fact, it’s the same procedure for helping your team reach their benchmarks consistently – something we call the Auto Profit Masters (APM) Accountability Cycle™. 

First, they need to know what policy they violated, or where they’re missing their targets. Documenting this is key for understanding a pattern and being able to see improvements. 

Next, the key is to identify specific solutions. In some cases, this will be educational. If your employee doesn’t know the resources at their disposal, this is a good opportunity to show them how to access training classes, online articles, or documented procedures. But in some cases, this is a chance for your employee to document what they already know. If they know what they should do, but forgot to follow those steps, have them document that procedure so that it can be better trained into the entire team. 

That’s important, because the following step is to get their buy-in. If they’re the ones writing the procedure, they’re far more likely to buy into following it every time, and to see others follow it as well. They can even help you train that procedure to the rest of the team. 

Measurement and documentation are critical at this point. If you don’t know if they’re improving, how will you know if your policy works, or if the procedure is working for the entire team? 

Now, if you’re a single location owner who spends a majority of the time on-site, everything we’ve talked about probably seems doable. But what if you don’t want to be on-site? What if you are trying to manage multiple locations? 

The final step in the APM Accountability Cycle is to implement Return and Report, which makes your team accountable for reporting their progress toward their goals to you, rather than trying to extract that information from them each day. By putting them in charge of reporting, you no longer have to chase down people, procedures, and performance numbers to know how your shop is performing. 

But even that is difficult as you add locations and employees, which is where shop management systems can play a critical role. 

Traditional shop management systems allow owners to manage customers, tickets and employees retroactively. But newer, cutting edge management systems can actually enforce policy for you, so that following proper procedures is a built-in part of using the program. In the management system we use in our shop, there’s even Artificial intelligence incorporated to help the shop reach key performance indicators. 

Prepare for Long-Term Success 

Whether you plan to implement policy and procedure on your own, or (like us) with the help of a management system like Shop4D®, the important thing to remember is that properly enforced policies and procedures are the key to much of your business. They are how you maximize your return from your marketing budget, how you increase production and how you reduce chaos. 

As COVID-19 runs its course and shops start to return to normal, your shop can be in a great position to have firmly established policies and procedures that ensure your long-term success. In fact, your team is already in the right mindset for understanding the criticality of proper procedures. By establishing the APM Accountability Cycle (and by using tools that help you enforce policies and procedures at every step of the repair), you can emerge from this crisis stronger than ever, and prepared to grow in the year to come!