Standards and Processes Are Like Personal Hygiene

Standards and processes are like personal hygiene for an organisation.

Do not try to circumvent them. Even if we do not follow them ourselves at a given moment, we can still ask others to follow — and we can start again at any time. They are going to make life better, not worse.

The Parenting Analogy

If you have the habit of chewing your nails or picking your nose, would you encourage your children to do the same? If you smoke, would you encourage your kids to smoke? The answer is almost certainly no — even if you have not managed to break the habit yourself. When a child grows into an adult they make their own choices. But in the meantime, you know the right thing to encourage.

The same analogy applies directly to standards, policies, and procedures in an organisation. Just because a legacy organisation has never followed them properly does not mean you should encourage a new organisation to circumvent them — simply for the sake of achieving a short-term goal.

A new organisation that follows well-defined standards will grow into a mature one — with organised, efficient workflows and the foundation to make conscious, deliberate decisions about when to deviate. That is very different from an organisation that simply never built the habit in the first place.

Q: "Policies and procedures introduce too much bureaucracy and hamper productivity"

This is a real concern — but it arises specifically when standards and procedures have been put in place for the sake of standardisation alone, rather than for the purpose of streamlining and improving the flow of work.

That kind of process is the equivalent of washing your hands with antibacterial soap while wearing rubber gloves, in a room already disinfected by UV rays. It is process for the appearance of process.

Standards and procedures defined with the genuine purpose of improving workflow are always simple and easy to follow. If they are not, the problem is in how they were designed — not in the concept of having standards at all.

Q: "Does it mean once we define a process we should never violate it?"

No — and that kind of rigidity would be its own problem. Processes are followed by human beings, and human beings operate in a changing world. There will be improvements to introduce, technology shifts to accommodate, and occasionally significant goals to achieve that warrant a conscious deviation.

But such violations should be consciously approved, documented, and reviewed — so that they do not become normalised, repeated, and eventually just another bad habit embedded in the culture.

An Example

After trekking 20 miles in hot sun, with the destination just one mile ahead, you might ask your children to walk through a dirty ravine rather than take the clean path around — just to reach rest sooner. That is a reasonable, conscious exception made under genuine pressure.

You would not ask your children to walk through that same ravine on an ordinary day in your own neighbourhood. The exception does not become the rule.

The Point

Violating standards or processes should be reserved for situations where many people's lives or outcomes are genuinely at stake — not for the sake of hitting a 5pm deadline on a Friday.