Open any SOP your team uses regularly. Not a policy, not a handbook - an actual procedure someone is supposed to follow tomorrow morning. Put it on the screen next to this article.
The ten flags below take about thirty seconds each to check. If you find three or more, the document is closer to wallpaper than working instruction. That is not an insult; it is where most SOPs end up without active maintenance.
1. It uses the word “simply” more than once
“Simply press the reset button.” “Simply log in.” The word does two unhelpful things. It adds no information, and it communicates “you are stupid if this is hard.” The first time it appears is a tell. The second time means whoever wrote the SOP was reaching for emphasis rather than precision. Strike it everywhere.
2. It has not been updated in 18 months or more
Eighteen months is not a hard rule but it is a useful line. Processes, tools, and teams change faster than that. An SOP without a review date or version stamp in the last year and a half should be assumed stale until proven otherwise. If the document has no dates on it at all, that is its own flag.
3. It exists only as a PDF nobody links to
A PDF in a shared drive folder is the compliance equivalent of a book on a shelf. It exists, it can be produced when asked, and it is not shaping behaviour because nobody opens it during the task. If the last time your SOP was opened was when it was uploaded, the format is the problem, not the content.
4. It refers to software or equipment you no longer use
The easiest flag to spot. Names of legacy tills, discontinued software, decommissioned machines. When the SOP confidently instructs someone to “press F8 on the old screen,” you know it has not been touched in a meaningful review. This also tells you something uncomfortable: someone has been following it anyway, translating mentally between the document and reality.
5. It contains “and/or” in the steps
“Check the valve and/or the pressure reading.” One reader will check both. One reader will check the valve. A third will check neither, figuring it is optional. “And/or” is the writer hedging a decision they should have made. Split it into two steps or pick one.
6. The legal disclaimer is longer than the actual instructions
If the footer has three paragraphs on indemnity and the body has one paragraph of steps, somebody outside the operational team has edited this document into corporate furniture. Disclaimers have their place; they belong next to the instruction, not instead of it. When disclaimer length exceeds instruction length, the document has stopped working as a procedure.
7. Steps are written in the passive voice
“The machine should be switched off at the isolator before the inspection is commenced.” Who switches it off? When exactly? Passive voice is the house style of every SOP that has been through three rounds of legal review and zero rounds of “did anyone try to follow this.” “Switch the machine off at the isolator. Then start the inspection” is half the length and twice as usable.
8. There is no way to prove it was followed
Scroll through and ask: if someone claimed they did this, how would I know? No photo requirement, no signature, no reading recorded, no timestamp. An SOP with no verification is not a procedure, it is a suggestion. Most SOPs do not need verification on every step - but steps that affect safety, compliance, or cost almost always should have something, and if none do, that is a flag.
9. It lists conditions in a paragraph instead of a decision
When the SOP hits a judgment call, watch what happens. A good SOP says: “If the reading is over 80 degrees, stop and call the supervisor. If it is under 80, continue to Step 5.” A bad SOP says, in one sentence, that the operator should consider various factors including but not limited to temperature, flow rate, and recent maintenance history when deciding how to proceed. Nobody makes a decision on the floor out of that sentence. They wing it.
10. Nobody on the team can name its owner
Ask three people on the team: “who owns this SOP?” If none of them can name a person, the document is unowned. Unowned documents do not get updated. They do not get retired when they are replaced. They drift. Every SOP should have a named owner visible on the document itself, along with the review cadence.
Score your results
Count how many flags you hit. Then read the honest appraisal below.
0-1 flags. This SOP is in unusually good shape. Check the review date is current, confirm the owner is still the right person, and move on. These SOPs are rare enough that they are worth studying - what made this one survive?
2-3 flags. The SOP is working but has real weaknesses. Most likely the owner is too busy to do the maintenance. A focused forty-five minute rewrite fixes the common issues: tighten the steps, remove the stale tool names, add a verification mechanism to the two or three most important steps, stamp it with a date.
4-6 flags. The SOP is closer to wallpaper than working instruction. There is a real chance that what your team actually does differs from what is written. Before rewriting, observe the task being done - you will often find the live practice has evolved and the SOP has not. Then write against reality, not against the old document.
7+ flags. Honestly, start over. Retire this document, do not try to patch it. Write a new SOP with a named audience, a testable structure, and a named owner. It is faster than fixing ten unrelated problems.
What to do next
The point of an audit like this is not to grade SOPs for sport. It is to find the two or three that are actively misleading the team and address those first. Pick the most dangerous failure first: the SOP covering a task where mistakes have consequences. Rewrite that one. Run the audit on two more. Repeat monthly.
A well-designed SOP library grows by attrition: bad ones get retired, not preserved out of sentiment. If that feels harsh, remember that every stale SOP is silently training your team to distrust the documentation as a whole. One confident, accurate SOP is worth ten hedged, outdated ones.
If the rewrite feels like more than you want to take on from a blank page, the template library has 60+ starting points organised by industry. Clone the closest match and adapt from there rather than starting from scratch.