Every retirement plan provider will tell you they have procedures.
They have checklists. They have workflows. They have manuals. Some have hundreds of pages of procedures explaining how everything is supposed to get done.
That is wonderful, except when nobody other than the person who wrote the procedures understands them.
A procedures manual should not be somebody’s personal notebook. It should allow another trained employee to step in and understand what needs to be done, when it needs to be done, and why it needs to be done.
I have seen too many businesses where one employee knows everything. That employee knows the strange client issues, the exceptions, the history, and the reason certain things are done differently. Then that employee leaves and suddenly everyone realizes that the firm’s procedures were really stored inside one person’s head.
That is a dangerous way to run a retirement plan business.
Procedures need to survive employee turnover. They also need to survive vacations, illnesses, promotions, and people simply changing responsibilities.
The best way to determine whether your procedures actually work is simple: give them to somebody who didn’t write them.
If that employee constantly has to ask what the instructions mean, your procedures need work.
A good procedure should identify who is responsible, what needs to be completed, the deadline, what needs to be reviewed, and when something needs to be escalated. If there is an unusual step, explain why it exists.
Retirement plan administration has too many opportunities for mistakes to rely on institutional knowledge that exists only in somebody’s memory.
Your procedures manual is supposed to protect your organization.
If it only works when the person who wrote it is sitting ten feet away, it isn’t much of a procedures manual.