Work standard is the behavior guide and assessment basis of employees, which has the following characteristics:
1. The standard represents the best, easiest and safest working method. It is the crystallization of the wisdom and skills of employees for many years. It is the most efficient, safe and cost-effective working method.
2. Standards provide the best way to preserve skills and expertise. If an employee knows the best way to work, but does not share his knowledge, his knowledge will be lost. Only by standardizing and institutionalizing, can the knowledge be retained in the company, and there is no need to care about the turnover rate of employees.
3. Standards provide a way to measure performance. The job description explains what the employee should do, and the work standard indicates to what extent the employee is qualified or excellent. If you sweep the floor every day, you sweep it, you sweep it clean, and you empty the trash can, it's totally different. With the established standards, managers can evaluate the performance of their work.
There are two different forms of standards.
The first is management standard, which is necessary for the administrative work of management staff, including management rules, personnel rules and policies, job description, expense reimbursement provisions, etc.
The second is the operation standard, which is the work style and operation rules that should be implemented in the work of employees. Management standard is related to the management of internal staff, while operation standard is related to achieving QCD (quality, cost, delivery date) to meet the external needs of customers.
The specific forms of the standard include: organization chart and plant layout, operation safety rules (also tell what consequences will happen if the rules are not complied with), work order table, operation standard book (SOP), definition of unqualified service, Kanban use rules, etc.
Without work standards, it is difficult for enterprises to maintain a high level of management. The lack of work standards often leads to the inconsistency between the direction of employees' efforts
and the overall development direction of the company, resulting in a lot of waste of human and material resources. Due to the lack of reference, employees are easy to form complacency after
a long time, leading to slack work.
The following problems should be paid attention to when formulating work standards:
1. Try to be digital, connect with assessment and pay attention to operability. The responsibility of
managers is to establish standards and then introduce discipline to maintain them.
2. Standards are not immutable. Managers must examine the current standards and strive to improve them.
3. Standards, especially operation standards, should be observed and written at the work site.
<1> When any standard is put into use, if we do not invest energy in interpretation, training and supervision, the implementation of the standard may change, or even be quite different from the original intention.
There are several reasons:
One is that people's understanding of the text may be inconsistent. For the same paragraph of text, different people may have great deviation in understanding according to their education level and working background. The standard of general enterprises can not be as rigorous as the legal provisions, leading to ambiguity, information may be misread.
Second, if the manager just sends a document notice to the standard, which shows that he doesn't attach importance to it, we won't care too much. Moreover, to follow the work standards, we must improve our work behavior, but no one is willing to change their familiar work habits, so there must be resistance psychology.
<2> The operation standard should not only regulate how to do the work well, but also stipulate the abnormal conditions and the correct elimination procedures, and the handling steps that should be followed in case of abnormal conditions.
<3> When determining the standard working time, such as how much time it takes for a commodity to pick up and how much time it takes to review a 100 line order, we should operate as many times as possible and take the shortest one.
Then, find out why others spend more time, and finally, let everyone do the best work in the shortest time. In particular, when timing, employees may deliberately lengthen the time by some actions. For example, when counting the standard time of packing, employees will look for boxes everywhere.
