Why You Need to Document Your Processes and Procedures (and How to Do It)

When working for a co-operative, member-owned institution that handles financial data daily, your processes are more than just necessary – they're critical.

This means you should be documenting all your processes.

If you aren't, then you could be failing your credit union members. Considering there are over 100 million credit union members in the U.S., that's a large pool of people potentially being let down. Plus, not only could you be failing your members, but the organization as a whole.

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Without proper process documentation, you won't know whether current processes contain flaws, are costly, use up too many resources, or are simply outdated, inefficient ways of working. Research has proven that organizations lose 20% to 30% of revenue every single year due to inefficiencies.

With process documentation, however, your processes don't have to remain inefficient.

How Documenting Your Processes and Procedures Can Improve Your Credit Union

Effective. Practical. Valuable. These are words you want to be associated with your processes. And by documenting your processes, they can be.

Process documentation helps to:

Create consistency and reduce ambiguity. No matter if you're a member service manager or an account manager at the credit union, you'll have tasks that need to be completed repeatedly. By documenting processes, guidelines are then created, ensuring you accomplish consistently great work.
Improve overall efficiency. With documented processes and procedures, not only will you be able to get the same positive result every time, you'll complete the processes at a faster rate, too.
Provide an opportunity for improvement. You can measure the successfulness of your processes once they've been documented. If you notice an aspect of the process that could be changed, altered or even removed entirely, you can then make amendments to better the process.
Teach new employees how to do the job well. Employees don't stay in one job role forever. And as millennials become the brunt of the workforce, that statement couldn't be truer; 28% of them have said they won't stay at their company for longer than five years. With this in mind, having documented processes means you can easily train new staff easily and quickly.
Establish accountability. For most processes, the results should be the same each time. So by standardizing processes, you're ensuring credit union staff remain focused, engaged and highly responsible for the work they do!
Foster collaboration. Credit unions are inherently democratic – that's why their members are also their owners. The internal actions of a credit union can be equally collaborative. With the transparency that a documented process offers, staff at different levels can suggest improvements that management may not have thought of.

The benefits don't end there, either.

Once processes have been clearly defined and documented, it's then possible to automate certain steps of a process, or even the process in its entirety.

From a business perspective, "automation" means using technology to set up workflows that are carried out for you in the background. So, once the automation has been built – let's say you want to automate steps of the member onboarding process – you then don't have to lift a finger. This is known as "business process automation."

As the IT education website Techopedia explained, "The BPA process is geared toward implementing software applications to automate routine business tasks through initiation, execution and completion, while achieving enterprise-wide workflow efficiency."

By automating recurring tasks, your CU's staff can not only improve efficiency, as outlined by Techopedia, but you can also labor-save, increase productivity and redirect your staff's attention to more pressing tasks. According to research by WorkMarket, 53% of employees said they saved up to two hours a day with automations. That adds up to 240 hours per year.

But before you build out automations, you need to define and document your processes and procedures thoroughly. And that's only possible with business process management (BPM).

The Best Way to Document Your Processes & Procedures

With BPM, you can model, document, measure, optimize and automate your processes for the better. It's even been unearthed that implementing BPM boosts the overall success rate of projects by 70%.

The best way to implement BPM is by utilizing business process management software. But how, specifically, does BPM software help with process documentation?

It's simple. For a process to be documented, it needs to be written down. You need to be able to physically see the steps involved. So, when you're writing down a process in BPM software, you're documenting the process by default. As Michael E. Gerber, the best-selling author and entrepreneurial thought leader, said in his book "The E-Myth Revisited": "If you don't write it down, you don't own it."

Once the process has been written and you've given definitive details on what to do and how to do it, you're presented with the following information: A process name, a start and endpoint of the process, process inputs/outputs, and specific tasks to be carried out to facilitate the overall process.

The result is a documented process.

And while creating processes in BPM software – and thereby documenting it, too – you're opening yourself up to a range of benefits you otherwise wouldn't get. Namely, the process is digitized: It hasn't been written on a piece of paper that will get shoved into a desk drawer and forgotten about. Plus, you can link business process management software with tools like Zapier to build those automations I mentioned earlier.

If there's one takeaway from this post, it's that, for the longevity of your credit union, you should be documenting your processes with BPM software.

Here's to your credit union being effective, practical and valuable.