The Question Your Team Keeps Asking Is the SOP You Haven’t Written Yet
A 4-step fix that takes one afternoon
I once created an SOP about how to create an SOP.
A document teaching my team how to make documents.
And I knew, right in that moment, that something had gone deeply, gloriously sideways.
The reason I had to build a meta-document about documentation is that the way I had been building SOPs was completely wrong. Dense Google Docs. Bullet points that made sense to me when I wrote them at 11pm and made zero sense to anyone else the following Tuesday. Processes described in theory but never captured in practice.
Nobody was using them. And I couldn’t figure out why.
Here’s the dirty secret about SOPs.
People don’t read. They watch.
Especially people who are mid-task, on a deadline, trying to figure out how to do a thing they’ve never done before. Nobody stops to read a 12-step written process document in that moment. They Google it, or they ask you.
That’s why the same questions keep coming back to your inbox. Not because your team is forgetful. Because the answer is buried in a document that doesn’t feel human enough to actually open.
I’m going to say something that felt a little obvious in retrospect: the best SOPs are recorded, not written. Because when someone watches you actually do the thing and hears you explain why, it lands in a way that bullet points never will.
The moment I switched to Loom for every new process, my team stopped asking me the same questions. Not because they got better at remembering. Because I finally gave them something they could actually use.
And then AI made it stupid simple.
Here’s what I do now, and what I walk clients through when their team is constantly looping back to them for answers.
You record the Loom. Five minutes, maybe ten. You do the thing on screen, you narrate as you go, you explain the why behind the non-obvious steps. You hit stop.
Then you take the AI-generated transcript from Loom (or drop it into ChatGPT yourself) and you ask it to build a step-by-step written SOP. You get both: a video for people who need to watch, a document for people who need to reference.
You put both in the same place. One link. Always findable.
And then, crucially, the next time someone asks you a question that’s already in the library, you don’t answer it. You send them the link.
That’s the training moment. Not the SOP itself. The consistency of not being the answer.
