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One of TAQAT major functionalities is its ability to create a collaborative environment for company’s staff to analyze their roles, document them and enhance them till they become SOPs (Standard Operational Procedures).  Roles in TAQAT mean –in a simplified way- any job duty or responsibility that could be documented then transformed to a SOP.

This concept: “Roles Documentation” is traditional; you will find it in most management books and models. The fact is that it is rarely implemented! Busy companies can’t free their resources for documentation work; employees tend always to keep “their knowledge in their heads”.  We lack -especially in our culture - the concept of “sharing knowledge”.

Let us step back a little and assume that “Roles documentation” is a strategic project that the company will invest in (time and resources), let us assume that a medium sized company has like 100 initial roles to start with, each role will be documented in 1 hour, and enhanced in 4 hours. So we are speaking about 500 working hours as investment. .. If the company has 25 employees and is targeting to finish this documentation process within 3 months, this means approximately 6.5 hours invested by each employee within the month (Only)

The question is “What is the return of this 500 hours investment, Is it really worth it?”

I will leave the answer to you, let me just discuss with you some benefits (For employees, managers and for the entire company)

For Employees:       

• It allows employees to escape from their jobs trap, which is basically doing same things all the time. An employee, who managed to successfully document his roles, can be easily promoted leaving others to implement what he documented.
• It enhances the technical writing skills and the ability to express working steps in a clear documented way.  This is a very important skill these days for everyone (especially junior staff).

 
For Managers:

• Have you ask yourself before why you have to repeat your instructions, many times, to same people, because they are not implementing them correctly? Documenting roles solves this dilemma by providing common references so that all your department employees are “on the same wavelength”
• Documenting roles allows you to focus more on the future and on strategic decisions. You can rely on the roles documents for most of your daily department’s operations.
• It allows you to identify loyal and collaborative employees and promote them; your reference will be their willingness to contribute in this documentation process and building a knowledge sharing culture thus creating a valuable asset for the company.
• It allows you to transform Roles steps to checklists that could be used for monthly or quarterly staff assessments.

For the entire company:

• It minimizes trainings required for new staff, which means more flexibility and ease of growth.
• It creates a positive culture in the company: Sharing knowledge and effective collaboration.
• It allows middle managers to focus more on building and training Human resources.
• It minimizes the dependency of the company on Key employees, so they don’t become a source of power affecting higher management decisions!
• Finally, it opens the door to investors to buy shares in the company. Investors usually consider the company knowledgebase and documented roles as a very valuable “asset”, during assessment.

And more!!!!

So, is it worth the investment? I leave that to you!