Last Updated on September 21, 2024 by Owen McGab Enaohwo
Imagine this scenario:
You’ve created hundreds of procedures that employees can use at your company.
But what happens when a drastic change occurs, like a software upgrade, and your employees still follow the old procedures?
This is where the problem arises.
Customers keep complaining about the quality of service they get from your company. Employees struggle to get anything done, as they can’t keep up with the updated procedures.
For you, as the manager or founder, you’re in a fix.
You spent more than three hours creating each procedure. How long will it take to edit each one manually?
If you’ve ever created procedures for your company, you’ll most likely struggle to keep them up to date.
This is because it’s challenging to go into each procedure to make drastic changes.
Not only that, there are chances that you’ll make mistakes while doing so.
This is where AI (artificial intelligence) comes in.
With AI, editing your procedures will no longer be a chore you avoid as a manager or founder.
AI not only makes the process efficient but also saves you a significant amount of time and effort. Instead of spending hours manually editing each procedure, AI can do it for you in minutes.
AI also ensures a minimal margin of error, giving you confidence that your procedures are accurate and up to date.
In this post, we’ll walk you through how to edit company procedures using AI. You’ll also learn how to use SweetProcess to make this process faster and more efficient.
SweetProcess is our tool, and we built it to help you create and manage your company’s procedures seamlessly. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see it in action.
Here Is What You’ll Learn in This Guide:
What Does a Procedure Really Mean?
Benefits of Creating Procedures in an Organization
How to Edit a Procedure Using AI: A Step-by-Step Guide
Editing a Procedure With AI: How to Do It Quickly and Easily Using SweetProcess
Create, Edit, and Manage Procedures in One Place Using SweetProcess
What Does a Procedure Really Mean?
Procedures are the backbone of any organization. They are the steps that guide us toward achieving specific goals or outcomes. In most companies, these procedures are known as work instructions or standard operating procedures (SOPs).
Let’s say you are the head of the inventory management department in a pharmacy. If an employee asks what the procedure for stock management is, it means the steps required to successfully manage the stocks in your pharmacy so you can serve your customers promptly and efficiently.
Procedures differ from one company to another.
Depending on the type of organization, you might need complex procedures, and in some cases, a simple procedure is all you need to get things done.
Below are some examples to help you further understand how procedures can change in different organizations:
| Industry | Procedure | Meaning |
| Banking | Opening a bank account | The steps required to open a bank account for a customer |
| Government | Registering a business (company) | The steps needed to register a company in a city, state, or country |
| Marketing | Setting up an email newsletter | The steps required to set up an email newsletter for a client |
| Aviation | Boarding an international flight | The steps needed to go through an airport before boarding your flight |
| Hospital | Wound dressing | The steps required to dress the wound of an injured person in the hospital |
As you can see, a procedure isn’t limited to a particular organization or industry. It can be used across the board to ensure that employees are productive and get more done.
Benefits of Creating Procedures in an Organization
Below are some things you stand to gain by having well-documented procedures in your organization.
1) Makes onboarding new employees easy
To create a well-functioning organization, you must nail employee onboarding. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to keep new employees engaged, and they’ll most likely become a burden for your company sooner rather than later.
While most companies struggle with onboarding new employees, you can have a seamless onboarding process with well-documented procedures in your organization.
This shows them exactly what they need to do to get the job done and how they can make it happen quickly and easily. This can be likened to giving employees a cheat code for working in your organization.
2) Helps team members to be on the same page
One of the biggest challenges you can face as a company is a need for more synergy.
Suppose employees A and B work on the same team that wants to achieve Z. Yet, employee A does X, while employee B does Y. In the long run, they’ll struggle to achieve Z.
You need well-documented procedures to avoid this lack of employee synergy in your company.
That way, all employees on the same team can be on the same page. And they’ll follow the same procedures to drive the best results for your organization.
3) Improves your team’s operations
To take your team’s operations to the next level, you must have well-documented procedures in your company.
The truth is, if you don’t document your procedures, your team will work poorly, and your operations will be scattered here and there. Hence, there will be a lack of productivity in the workplace, and the zeal to put in the work will be at its lowest ebb.
4) Prevents team members from asking the question: “What next?”
If you’ve recently onboarded new employees, getting used to how your company works will take time. In most cases, they’ll ask the founder or manager what’s next whenever they’re stuck.
This usually happens because they don’t know what to do next. With a well-documented procedure in your company, you’ll eliminate or reduce this question drastically.
Hence, it helps you create a team of employees who can do things independently.
With SweetProcess, you can document your company’s procedures in one place. Sign up for a free trial of our platform to see how it works for creating and managing procedures in your organization.
How to Edit a Procedure Using AI: A Step-by-Step Guide
Editing a company’s procedures is good practice so employees don’t make costly mistakes.
Let’s say you’ve created a procedure for your organization on “Setting up an email newsletter.” If something drastic changes in the company, you can use an AI tool like ChatGPT to edit it.
Below are some edits you can make to your company’s procedures using ChatGPT.
1) Modify the headings and subheadings of your procedures
With ChatGPT, you can change the headings and subheadings of your company’s procedures.
This will come in handy if you want your employees to better grasp directly from the headings and subheadings.
Let’s say you’ve used AI to create a procedure for “Setting up an email newsletter,” as shown below.
To change the heading and subheading(s) of these procedures, you can use this prompt below:
You’re the founder of an email marketing agency specializing in helping B2B SaaS startups set up email newsletters from scratch until they hit 10,000+ subscribers. You have 7+ years of experience designing email newsletters for B2B SaaS companies like HubSpot, Beehiiv, Convertkit, Ahrefs, Shopify, etc. With the knowledge and experience you’ve gained so far, I want you to modify the heading and subheadings of the procedure above for “Setting up an email newsletter.” This modification aims to make each heading and subheading easier for new employees to understand and comprehend. Please note that the specific modification is for the main heading and the subheadings tagged Step 1 to Step 7.
Here is a snippet of what the modification looks like:
As you can see, the main heading changed from “Procedure for Setting Up an Email Newsletter for B2B SaaS Startups” to “How to Set Up an Email Newsletter for B2B SaaS Startups”.
Similarly, Step 1 in the procedure changed from “Understand the Client’s Business and Goals” to “Learn About the Client and Their Goals.”
While these changes might seem small, they could help a new employee quickly understand each procedure’s purpose.
2) Expand on the steps of a procedure
The goal of a procedure is to make the steps easy to follow and understand. That way, any new employee joining the company can know exactly what each step means and will not have any challenges implementing it.
With ChatGPT, you can expand on the steps of a procedure.
Using the example above, one of the steps in the “Setting up an email newsletter” procedure is about content types.
While Step 5.2 looks straightforward, a new employee will need help implementing it. This is because they might not know how each content type differs or what the relevant example is for each one.
Using the prompt below, we can expand on this specific step in the procedure and make it clearer for the team members.
Step 5.2 in the procedure above is about “Decide on Content Types.”
Educational: Share tips, how-tos, and industry insights.
Promotional: Include product updates, offers, and discounts.
Curated: Provide links to relevant articles and resources.
Kindly expand on the educational content type, plus relevant examples of tips, how-tos, and industry insights to make it understandable and clear for a new employee.
Below is what the expanded step looks like:
As you can see, the expanded step explains what each educational content entails and provides relevant examples to reinforce the points.
That way, a new employee knows the exact type of content they need to create in this case.
3) Simplify and explain the steps of a procedure
As the founder or manager of a company, it’s easy to understand the technical jargon in your industry, especially if you’ve been operating for years.
This isn’t the case for a new employee, so it’s essential to simplify and, in some cases, explain the steps of your company’s procedure.
This is another area in which you can use ChatGPT when editing your procedure.
Still, in the example above, one of the key steps is to review performance.
For someone who doesn’t have years of experience in email marketing, terminologies like open rates, CTR, and conversions might be strange to them.
With the prompt below, you can simplify and explain the steps so they can know precisely what to do with it.
“Kindly simplify these metrics (open rates, CTR, and conversions) related to reviewing performance when setting up a newsletter. Please explain these metrics using relevant examples and scenarios so that someone new to email marketing will clearly understand them and know how to use each one.”
Here is what the simplified version looks like:
This explanation makes it easy for a new employee with little to zero experience in email marketing to understand what these metrics mean and how they impact their work.
4) Correct grammatical errors
When writing your company’s procedure, you might not pay close attention to its grammar.
Due to this, it might be difficult for the new employee to follow through with it, and in some cases, they might misunderstand some sections because they are not grammatically correct.
With ChatGPT, you can identify and correct grammatical errors in an existing procedure.
For example, you can use this prompt below to ask ChatGPT to make grammatical corrections to a procedure.
Kindly identify and correct the grammatical errors in this procedure on “Setting up email newsletters.”
It can also tell you the specific corrections it made so you can note them for next time.
Here is an example:
As you can see, some of the grammatical corrections it made focused on:
- Clarity and conciseness
- Simplicity
- Structure
- Incorrect capitalization
- And many more
Other use cases of ChatGPT for editing a procedure using AI include:
Review the procedure for clarity: With ChatGPT, you can review an existing procedure for clarity. This will help you show sections in your procedure that might be unclear and recommend things you can fix to clean it up.
Maintain consistency with your brand and tone of voice: Another advantage of using ChatGPT to edit a procedure is that it can help ensure consistency with your existing brand tone and voice. All you need to do is upload the brand tone and voice and prompt it to maintain consistency.
As you can see, ChatGPT allows you to edit your existing procedures and make it easy for new employees to follow through with them.
Now, the big question is, after editing your procedures, what next?
This is where ChatGPT and other AI tools fall short.
Truth is…
Editing a procedure isn’t the ultimate goal.
Once that is done, you must inform employees of the changes, why they are being made, and who signed off on the update.
Otherwise, you’ll end up with a bunch of up-to-date procedures that no one knows exist.
This is exactly what we built SweetProcess for. It helps you create, update, and manage changes in your procedures all in one place. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to see it in action. No credit card is required.
Editing a Procedure With AI: How to Do It Quickly and Easily Using SweetProcess
While ChatGPT can take you far with editing your company’s procedures, it has many limitations.
One of the biggest limitations of ChatGPT is that you have to be very good at prompting.
And even at that, some of its results might be hit or miss. So, you must scroll through the previous responses to see if they align precisely with what you’re looking for.
In addition, you must manually copy and paste the edited changes to the procedure, which could lead to human errors.
With SweetAI, you can do this and much more. We specifically built our tool for founders and managers who want to document their company’s procedures and processes.
Here’s how to use our tool to edit an existing procedure in your company.
First, if you haven’t done so, you can create a procedure for your company from scratch. Here is a step-by-step guide that shares the exact process and how it works in our tool.
Depending on your industry, our AI tool can suggest some procedures to create for specific tasks.
Below are some procedure suggestions from our tool for a company focused on podcast editing.
Let’s say you want to write a procedure for “Podcast Publication Steps.” To do so, select that option, choose a team, and click “Write with SweetAI.”
Once done, our tool automatically creates the steps for that specific procedure in less than 60 seconds.
Below are some recommended steps for the “Podcast Publication Steps” procedure.
- Planning your podcast
- Recording the podcast
- Editing the podcast
- Transcribing the podcast
- Publishing the podcast
Now that you’ve created the procedure steps, you can also edit them directly in our tool.
Let’s say you want to edit the steps in the procedure for “Transcribing the Podcast.” All you need to do is click on “Edit this step with SweetAI.”
Once you do this, a little chat box will open where you can enter specific instructions depending on the edit you want.
Let’s say you want to clarify the steps for transcribing the podcast. You can instruct SweetAI to rewrite it.
For the example above, here’s the output after instructing our AI tool to clarify the procedure step.
Another advantage of using SweetAI to edit your procedures is that it can highlight the specific changes made in each step.
With this, you don’t need to scroll through previously generated AI answers to know precisely what has changed.
You can also use SweetAI to format the steps into easy-to-understand bullet points.
You can also expand the steps in a procedure using SweetAI. Below is a snippet of the expanded version of the procedure above.
You can also instruct SweetAI to make the steps in the procedure concise. This is handy if you want to summarize longer versions of procedures without losing their original meaning.
Another upside of using SweetProcess to edit procedures is that you can apply the changes immediately and push them to your team members in less than 60 seconds.
Let’s say you want to implement the concise version of the procedure and share it with your team members. To do so, click “Apply Changes,” and the changes will be made immediately to your procedure steps.
For the example above, here’s the final version of the procedure steps.
As you can see, it has changed significantly from the original text and is now more precise and concise for the reader.
That is the power of using SweetAI to edit your procedures.
Unlike other AI tools like ChatGPT, SweetProcess doesn’t just help you edit the procedures automatically. It has different use cases you can leverage to take your procedure creation and management to the next level.
Notify Your Team Members About the Procedure Change
The purpose of editing procedures is to adjust how you complete specific steps to achieve specific goals in your company. With SweetProcess, you can notify employees about the changes in your procedure as soon as they go live.
If your company has several departments, you can specify which should be aware of the changes and which shouldn’t.
For example, we’ve chosen the “Content Marketing” team in this procedure. This means that as soon as the manager approves the procedure, everyone in the content marketing team will be notified about the change.
Supports the Version History of Procedures
With ChatGPT and other AI tools, you can only edit procedures. That said, you can’t track the history of the versions before the edited one.
This is not the case with SweetProcess. Our tool supports procedure version history, so you can track changes made in real-time and revert to an older version if necessary.
Eric Burnside, vice president and director of business development of Independent Retirement, a third-party administration firm, emphasized that versioning was one of the things they considered before choosing SweetProcess as a process documentation system.
Adi Klevit, the business process consultant for the company, explains how this feature works:
“You know what changes were made, so it makes it very easy to see the changes and the edits from one time to another. You can see the difference. You don’t have to read the entire procedure—you can see what was edited or added.”
For the example above, here’s what the version history looks like.
As you can see, four versions of this procedure are in the draft. To see what a specific version looks like, click on the time it was created, and it’ll show you exactly everything you need to know.
Monitor the Procedure Activity
Stanley Kolosovskiy, the technology process coordinator at Atlantic Sapphire, a salmon farming company, mentioned that some of the features that got him hooked on SweetProcess were the ability to track employee activities on the platform and assign tests to them.
According to Stanley, “I like to be able to check who has checked something. I’d say I really like how thorough it is in recording data. If I want to see what somebody has done or if they even visited the page or have they ever opened it before? That’s huge for me and being able to assign tests as well.”
This is another standout feature of SweetProcess that you won’t find in most procedure creation and management tools.
This helps you see how your employees react to the procedures and how the managers and team leads collaborate on specific procedures.
Here is what the procedure activity looks like on our platform.
At a glance, you can see who:
- Created the procedure
- Edited the procedure
- Visited the procedure
That way, you can monitor the activities in your procedure seamlessly and efficiently.
Set up Automatic Periodic Review of Procedures
It’s easy to create or edit procedures and then forget about it.
With SweetProcess, you can automatically set up a periodic review of your procedures.
This is important if your team is growing and the steps required to achieve a specific client goal constantly change.
Once done, you’ll be notified that you need to review your procedures, and you can decide whether to do so or not, depending on the circumstances at that time.
Here is an example of what this feature looks like in our platform:
As you can see, you can choose:
- The reviewer
- Date for next review
- Review interval in months
With this arrangement, you’ll never miss out on any review of your procedures.
Assign an Updated Procedure as a Task
Once you’ve updated a procedure, you can assign it as a task to a new or current team member.
This helps ensure team members can seamlessly get things done when the procedures are ready.
Jonathan Harvey, the chief operating officer at Neon Buddha, a female clothing brand, mentioned that being able to put all their SOPs in one place and manage recurring tasks is one of the key reasons they switched to SweetProcess to document their procedures after using Excel sheets and Word documents for several years.
In his words, “I love that you can schedule recurring tasks from SweetProcess itself. You don’t have to use other software. You can actually link tasks based on your SOPs. This is amazing. Every day, I’m getting notifications that this is done, this is not done.”
Looking for an intuitive process documentation platform? Sign up for a 14-day free trial of SweetProcess to create, edit, and manage your procedures in one place seamlessly.
Create, Edit, and Manage Procedures in One Place Using SweetProcess
Now, you have the requisite knowledge to edit your company’s procedures automatically using AI.
This way, you’ll no longer struggle to manually edit your company’s procedures.
Not only that, you won’t spend hours, days, and even weeks figuring out what’s missing before implementing a comprehensive update to your company’s procedures.
Also, you’re equipped with the power of our tool to make this process even more efficient and faster.
With SweetProcess, you have an all-in-one platform for creating, editing, and managing your company’s procedures, processes, and policies in one place.
Not only that, it can also help you to:
- Combine multiple procedures into an effective workflow
- Turn your procedures into actionable tasks
- Effortlessly manage user identities and access
- Look back at the history of any task or procedure
- Record workflows as you perform them and transform them into a streamlined procedure
- Turn existing procedures into a beautiful knowledge base
- Collaborate with team members in real-time
If you’d like to take advantage of these features and many more, sign up for a 14-day free trial of our software to see exactly how our software works—no credit card required.
