How We Do It: Developing SOP Manuals at Jacobsen Landscaping

Training our labor force has always been of paramount importance at Jacobsen Landscape Design and Construction. However, what worked when we were a small landscape company is insufficient now that we are a 70-employee, bilingual design/build firm.

With growth comes a new challenges. One of ours has been making sure all of our managers, supervisors and crewmen do things the same way. We needed to put systems in place and in writing so there was no room for interpretation from employees on the front lines.

This is what prompted us to undertake one of our largest internal projects since we began maintaining residential landscapes in 1978. The development of a series of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) manuals has proven to be a landmark event at our company.

Although we have been blessed with well-managed growth, at the same time this has meant that I depended more on our managers, supervisors and crew leaders to implement landscape projects and deal with customers. That made it imperative that all employees were following the same tenets of quality and service. Since we frequently have different crews do various portions of larger projects, there is a need for a written record of what was done when and how, and accountability – a paper trail – in case there are problems later in a project.

Writing one SOP manual is a daunting task, but writing four of them, and translating each into Spanish for our 60 percent Hispanic workforce was overwhelming. We were able to accomplish it over the winter of 2001-02 by having 100 percent buy-in from the management team.

The idea for customized SOP manuals came to me during an Associated Landscape Contractors of America meeting at which we were discussing the need for the development of “best practices” for the entire landscape industry. Currently lacking such a manual, our company set out to do it ourselves.

We began the process by pulling together a team from our construction unit, the largest segment of our business. Three top members of this team wrote the first draft of this construction SOP in about two months and we tested it out in the fall of 2001. Our mistakes – too lengthy, too wordy, not enough pictures or real-life examples – quickly became apparent. Our foremen and crewmen viewed the document as simply more paperwork, convincing us to make it more user-friendly.

That’s when our SOP manual project became an all-winter undertaking. Our goal was to have the first construction SOP manual completed by the end of January. A further goal was to complete another manual each month – maintenance in February and irrigation in March – so our procedures would be in place in time for the busy spring. We met each of those deadlines, as well as completing the office administrative manual by late winter.

Success would have been impossible without support from all parties involved. This was made easier by the fact that I was totally committed, but this needed to be communicated to the supervisors and foremen so it could trickle down to the men on the front line. Nothing can sabotage a project like employee indifference, and one of our primary objectives was to give everyone a vested interest by being involved from the start.

The key is to make implementation a primary component of the SOP manuals. Supervisors and crew leaders are now responsible for making sure the processes are followed and strict checks and balances are in place.

Was this worth the hundreds of hours invested by a dozen key management personnel? While there can be no clear-cut return-on-investment formula, we would not have taken on this project if we weren’t sure it would benefit us in the long run. Will we be able to say we saved X dollars on a landscape project because we followed our construction SOP? Probably not. But will our company be more quality-oriented and efficient and, as a result, more profitable? Without a doubt. – Glenn Jacobsen

The author is founder and president of Jacobsen Landscape Design & Construction, Midland Park, N.J.