You wrote great SOPs your team doesn't use. Here's a simple fix.

Picture this: your new admin assistant is sitting in front of the accounting software, trying to invoice a client. She vaguely remembers there's an SOP for this somewhere on Google Drive. To find it, she'd have to leave the software, open your company drive, dig through folders, find the right document, read it, and come back.

Or — she can turn around and ask you.

Guess which one she picks.

I know, I know — you've spent real time writing those SOPs. They're thorough. They're accurate. And they're sitting in a folder on Google Drive, completely ignored. If that's your situation, this post is for you.

I also recorded a full walkthrough video with three concrete examples — including a live demo of how I set this up in ClickUp for my own video production workflow. But the core idea is here if you'd rather read first.

The issue isn't the SOPs themselves, it's where they are

Here's something worth saying directly: the reason your SOPs aren't being used has nothing to do with how well they're written. The problem is structural.

Think about what you're actually asking your assistant to do. She's mid-task. She'd have to stop what she's doing, switch contexts, open another app, navigate a folder structure, find the right file, read it, retain it, and come back. That whole chain of steps takes longer than the task itself.

Meanwhile, turning around and asking you takes one quick second.

She's not being lazy. She's being rational.

There's a principle from the book Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein that applies here perfectly. The authors found that when companies switched retirement savings from opt-in to automatic enrolment, participation jumped immediately — not because people suddenly realised retirement savings were a good idea, but because the friction disappeared. The default changed.

The same logic applies to your SOPs. If following the process requires effort and not following it requires none, most people will take the path of least resistance. Every time.

Writing better SOPs won't help. You gotta make following them the default.

Embed the instruction in the work itself

Tangibly: stop storing SOPs separately from the work. Bring the instructions to wherever the work actually happens.

I'm going to walk you through three examples — physical, low-tech, and digital — because this principle works regardless of how your team operates.

Example 1: The hotel housekeeper (physical workplace)

How does hotel management ensure every room gets cleaned consistently, across dozens of staff, every single day? Not by expecting housekeepers to look up a protocol in the back office before each room. There's a checklist attached to the trolley. It travels with the work.

Towels replaced? Check. Minibar restocked? Check. The instruction is right there, at the moment it's needed.

This is the most obvious application of the principle. The SOP lives in the same physical space as the task. But what about work that happens on a screen?

Example 2: The spreadsheet template (low-tech office)

Years ago I led a team that ran reporting for a large agency. We depended on dozens of people across different countries to send us data in the right format. Mistakes were constant. We tried the usual things — long emails, training decks, repeated onboarding calls. None of it stuck.

What actually worked was almost embarrassingly simple.

We built a reporting template with the instructions baked directly into the file. Every field had a comment explaining what it needed and the exact format required. The first tab had a checklist that pointed to further guidance inside the file itself. No hunting through emails. No separate documentation. Everything a contributor needed was right there when they opened the spreadsheet.

Before submitting, they ran through the checklist. If anything came back unchecked, we sent it straight back.

But here's the part that made this even more useful: if a step couldn't be completed, contributors were told not to skip it. Leave it unchecked and write a one-line note explaining why. Suddenly the checklist wasn't just a quality control tool — it was a feedback loop. If the same step kept getting flagged, we knew the process itself needed updating.

That's the low-tech version. If you have a work management tool, you can take this further.

Example 3: Task templates in ClickUp (digital workflow)

This is how I run my own video production process.

Video creation is a recurring task for me. Every time I start a new video, I apply a task template in ClickUp — and all the instructions are already inside the task. Each step in the process is a sub-task. I use the checklists inside each sub-task to communicate my expectations to my video editor and lay out every step he needs to take.

My editor uses Descript, a video editing software he wasn't already familiar with. So I've added help links directly inside the relevant sub-task, plus the SOP for exactly how I want certain edits done. As he checks off each step, he can refer to my specifications in the same place. He doesn't need to navigate elsewhere. I don't need to grant him access to yet another tool.

I demo the full template structure in the video above — it's much easier to see how it's set up than to describe it in text.

One thing worth noting: I didn't write an SOP for how to use Descript itself. I just pointed him to where he can get help (by linking to Vanessa Lau's video on How to Use Descript, as well as a note about the AI bot in the interface called Underlord). Not everything needs its own documentation — but that's a topic for a separate post.

If you're working with a lot of templates, you can even set up automations to apply them. I have one that triggers whenever I create a task containing the word "video." The template applies automatically, and the instructions are already there before I've done anything.

And because the sub-tasks and checklists are also where my editor and I communicate, any feedback goes directly into the task. If something needs adjusting, I update the template on the spot.

Putting it together

Whether your work happens with your hands, in a spreadsheet, or in a project management tool — the underlying move is the same. Let the instruction travel with the work.

If you've already got a library of SOP documents, none of that effort has gone to waste. You just need to convert them into the right format for where the work happens: a checklist, a task description, a comment inside a template, or even a printed sheet posted where the task gets done.

Excerpt: Your SOPs aren't being ignored because they're badly written — they're being ignored because looking them up takes longer than just asking you, and the fix has nothing to do with rewriting a single document.