Work instructions ensure that employees work independently, efficiently and in the right way. Traditional work instructions have been incorporated into PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, PDF files, and stacks of paper. In the digital age, you expect that traditional work instructions have now been replaced by digital work instructions, but nothing could be further from the truth. Learn why this is a missed opportunity for organizations.
Work instructions determine how an employee performs his/her tasks. When employees carry out tasks in the right and efficient way, the organization achieves quality and efficiency improvements. However, to achieve this, employees must understand and actually use the work instructions. It is up to organizations to get serious about work instructions, as research shows that 90% of traditional work instructions do not offer users a desired solution.
Traditional work instructions cause a lot of frustration for users, designers and the organization alike. Users are frequently confronted with outdated and incomprehensible work instructions that are not stored centrally. For designers, it is a time-consuming process to create and then maintain work instructions in Word or PowerPoint, for example. Finally, organizations have no insight into how to use the work instructions. As a result, there is insufficient insight into the execution of processes by employees.
Digital work instructions are digitally created work instructions. To benefit from this, a central management environment is desirable. In such an environment, digital work instructions can be edited and kept up to date. Using software, it is also possible to make digital work instructions available to employees anytime, anywhere, but more about that later in the article.
Digital work instructions offer numerous advantages over traditional work instructions. We list five advantages:
To really benefit from digital work instructions, there is specialized software, such as Self Guide, necessary. This is because this offers additional advantages compared to the previously mentioned advantages of digital work instructions:
It is crucial that employees understand work instructions so that they will also be used. Policing on work instructions ensures this. The basic rules for work instructions are:
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