Processes.
Your business processes are considered the primary determining factor in retaining the quality of your products even after changing employees.
They are hard to nail down in a creative environment (think of art).
In most cases, products follow a complex workflow designed to replicate the original design as close and as best as possible.
Think about expensive products like cars. How do you mass-produce a vehicle in the long run if your factories employ thousands of people? Statistically speaking, people are leaving every single day.
Design specifications, complex processes, audits, and other measures are introduced to the production process, ensuring that quality stays intact.
Sure, a 5-person shop cannot employ the same standards. The burden of the paperwork overhead is not sustainable.
But this is an iterative process.
The following are some of the steps you can take to ensure that you will be able to keep your product quality even after losing your employees:
- Start with the “bigger picture”.
- Define the required steps to get the job done.
- Describe the expected output.
- List all cases you consider to be “trickier” (require attention to detail or other skills developed with time).
- Attach product photos (or screenshots for digital).
- Search for existing processes and best practices you can use as a foundational framework.
Note the steps may differ depending on the size of the company. The list though shows the basics that you must follow.
It is crucial that you have business process management systems in place so your company is not entirely people-dependent, but rather, process-dependent as well.
Even the most robust processes aren’t ideal and may fail. But reducing the error ratio is what it takes to build a scalable business, allowing you to employ additional measures once the budget is in place and the roles and responsibilities are properly defined.