It seriously disturbs me that the vast majority of businesses have almost no documented operating systems. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I lose sleep over it, and it is unlikely ever to lead to total societal collapse, it worries me in the background way that certain scratching behind a wall can be heard subconsciously in the depth of night.
The fact that many businesses would trust information that has been simply locked up in someone’s head – or, worse yet – heads, is nothing short of disastrous. A lot can happen to heads, they can get knocked around, or even, as watchers of certain medieval fantasy dramas will acknowledge, get forcibly remove and put on sticks above castle palisades (as per the Joffrey management technique).
Luckily, we have the LSS document, a simple, easy to create document that will literally save your life, or at least reduce fuss, in the dire event that one of the aforementioned heads in a business no longer makes it to work.
What Is An LSS Document?
The best way to describe an LSS Document is as a shred of an operating manual. It is essentially a set of notes in any format – Google Docs, MS Word, or even a scrap of paper – that explains everything to do with one particular process in a business. The ‘LSS’ part stands for ‘Labour Saving System’, and yes, before you ask, it is something I invented.
In our motel we have LSS Documents covering everything from performing specific tasks within complex guest registration software, to reconstructing the cot to place it in a unit. Literally every repeatable step of a business should be systematised. There should never be any confusion about what to do next in a business.
The LSS Document will contain, at a minimum, the following characteristics –
Document Title, Date Created, Created By, Who, What, Where, When, Why and How.
Each document should be around a page, or as short as possible, to quickly define and justify each important process in the business.
A simple template which you can use for your business is reproduced below.
How these elements can be taken together to form an operations manual for a business
If you buy, start or otherwise take over a business, you often don’t start with a robust operating manual in hand. One of the most valuable things you can do in terms of delegating tasks and also preparing your business for sale, is to then map out every step of it. But it often doesn’t make sense to begin with the table of contents – operating manuals don’t appear out of the blue and you need to start somewhere.
What LSS Documents enable you to do is to gradually construct your operating manual and piece it together. You can start anywhere in the business, with the important tasks that you or staff spend 80% of your time on, and then get down to the niggly little tasks that are mission-critical but that only pop up once every 12 months.
What this eventually enables you to do is to identify every single one of your business processes at all different levels of the business. If you ever reach a point where you are spending more than 5 minutes in a state of consternation wondering how to do a specific minor thing, then you need an LSS Document for it. If it’s a problem for you, it’s a problem for your staff as well.
The Micro of Getting It Done
Yes, I know that following this process to get each one of the answers on the LSS Document template mapped is not easy to fit in to a full workload. But having some sort of accessible system will save you a lot of time in the long run, as well as enabling you to delegate. It is work that will essentially need to be done at some point, and if you do it in the early stages you will receive big dividends in terms of future opportunities. I believe that the LSS Document can ultimately transform your business existence from being one stressed teddy into a care-free care bear.
Notice that the document does not just include ‘What, Where, When and How’ – it also includes ‘Why’, and importantly, ‘Who’. It is as important to explain the reasoning behind the process in the document as it is to explain the process itself. It is furthermore very useful to be able to delegate and assign each process to a specific job role. Such assignment may be the basis of a comprehensive position description that enables the company to function effectively and even avoid work disputes.
In the process of creating this document, not only do you outline the steps for an outside observer or potential buyer of the business, but you also explain the reasoning behind the management step, and assign it to a particular job role. All of which makes the procedure incredibly transparent as the business changes and develops.
We have used these documents extensively at Otaki Motel (OK – admittedly, I am the one who primarily uses them), but having easy access to having hard-to-remember tasks at our fingertips is an investment that has saved us dozens of hours of time.
LSS Documents In Action
Let’s look at example of an LSS document that I recently created, for reconstructing a cot to place it in a motel unit bedroom.
Setting Up a Cot
Created By: Richard Christie Date: 13/08/17
Who
The Manager, Supervisor, or Cleaners, as required
What
Transporting and setting up a cot in a guest unit, in order to provide sleeping facilities for a little one.
When
On the day of check-in whenever a guest has requested that a cot be included in their unit.
Where
The motel guest units (studio or family) where the guest has requested it.
Why
Setting up cots is a miserable nightmare for me. It comes up once every six weeks and is my least favourite part of the job. I suspect it is the case for others in the business as well. Nevertheless, it is an essential part of our service offering for the families we support.
Since I am not a parent, I have always had a hard time with this. And guest expectations are often that the cot will be set up by the time they arrive. Sometimes, awkwardly, in the past, I have had to rely on guests themselves to assist me with this setup, because as parents they have a more natural affinity with this sort of thing. But it is not a good look.
Sometimes cleaners or managers ‘forget’ to set up the cot and I vaguely suspect this forgetting is to do with the fact that one or two of them don’t know how to do it. And so I am writing this document.
How
Assembling the cot
– Check the registration book to identify which unit the cot needs to be in
– Choose the location of the guest unit and/or family unit where the cot needs to be set up & transport the cot to that location
– If the cot has been fully folded and disassembled, expand it so that the edges are as far apart as possible.
– Raise the centre ring as high as possible by lifting it up through the blue material.
– Lift each of the four edges of the cot and click them into place. This can be a fiddly process. Remember to keep the centre part raised as high as possible while doing this.
– Locate the cot bedding in the store room and lay out as follows: two mattresses underneath, two blankets above.
Disassembling the cot
– To disassemble the cot, first remove the bedding. Click under the middle of each of the four top edges of the cot. Hold the button down until the edge releases and can be folded. Repeat for each edge.
– Compress the cot into a bundle for storage.
It sounds amazingly simple, now that it is written in document format, but it took three full-grown adults 15 minutes apiece to figure out how to do this. And we would have repeated that charade at least once every six weeks if we hadn’t properly documented it.
So hopefully you can now see how 15 minutes’ investment in finally nailing out this process in document format, saves me a lot of time down the road.
How to Turn Your LSS Documents into an Operating Manual
The next step is incredibly simple – once you are at a stage where you are reasonably confident you have captured the majority of meaningful LSS Documents in your business, you can group together all of the LSS documents from each of the assigned job roles, put them in a single document, and create an index or table of contents – and voila, you have a complete operations manual.
You can continue to add to the operations manual as the business develops.
Anyone can create an LSS document – not just a manager. Which means the LSS is ideal for building a business operating manual from the ground up with anyone’s input. And most importantly – it costs virtually nothing, but can add a huge amount of long term value to the business, even to the point of preparing it for sale.
Basically, anyone who runs a business but who fails to utilise LSS Documents (or some equivalent format – it is not like I entirely pioneered the artform of business process documentation), is in my view a bit daft.
