To lead your company, ensure performance standards, and comply with regulatory mandates you need policies and procedures that work—not a mountain of complicated minutia or technical overkill that challenges new hires and seasoned employees alike !
After all, you want employees working, not wasting time struggling to comprehend what's expected of them—or wasting everyone's time because they didn't bother reading essential information. Well-written, readily understood Policy and Procedures documents that sufficiently and adeptly explain your company's policies and procedures are critical management tools, especially in today's overregulated and overlitigated culture (e.g., HIPAA compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley (Sarbox)).
The professional policy and procedures writers at Probizwriters develop (and rewrite) policies and procedures that serve financial, organizational, and managerial objects. Properly drawn, these finely-tuned policy documents are powerful tools that enable employees, management, investors, bankers, and others to readily understand your company's philosphy, protocol, procedural standards, and compliance readiness. They also reveal the reasons and objectives underlying a policy or procedure when appropriate. Explaining "why" ensures comprehension. Compliance follows.
Policy and procedures documents go by different names and serve different functions. Examples include:
- Organizational Policy Manual.
- Operating Policy and Procedures Manual.
- Employee Manual (Handbook).
- Employment Manual.
- Standard Operating Procedures (SOP).
- Human Resources Policy Manual.
- Sales Manual.
- Purchasing Policy Manual.
- Safety Manual.
- Training Manual.
- Field Guides.
If you want your employees to use your policy manuals, if following procedures properly saves you time, money, and reduces exposure to liability, if you want your P&P documents to be applied in practice, then they must be user friendly, both through streamlined, efficient writing, and through an easy-to-navigate user interface.
Some Questions to Ponder:
Are your policy and procedures documents readily understood?
Do they clearly identify issues and objectives?
Are rights or responsibilities vague or subject to differing interpretations?
Are they all written with "one voice?" As part of a whole? With consistency?
Or are they fractured, hobbled or pieced together randomly without central focus?
Are your policy and procedure documents regularly updated?
Do they reflect current technical reality? Or are they five years old?
Do your policies foster an organizational culture? Do you want them to? Are they doing the job?
Professional policy and procedures writers produce user-friendly, efficient policies and procedures that improve performance and outcomes.
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The documents as a group must be clear, concise and well organized. If reader's fumble and don't "get it," or struggle to make use of the documents, they won't be used. This overwhelms employees, and costs your enterprise in lost efficiency, and noncompliance.
P&P documents should make your employees' jobs easier, give them confidence and a certain comfort level, and enable them to readily understand the how and why and mechanics of their operating steps—they have to be a tool employees can rely on and want turn to for guidance. These documents must invite employees to be part of a secure, predictable, and reasonable working environments—not turn them off.
Think of it this way—a principal benefit of top-notch, functional policies and procedures is happy, productive employees!
Clarity leads to better employee performance, increased employee satisfaction, accountability, and less confusion about responsibilities. When employees can trust and rely on policy documents they use them. Competent policies and procedures also lower the prospect of employee claims or other forms of corporate conflict. When you must determine cause for holding employees accountable, unambiguous easy-to-understand procedures, policies, and rules are essential tools.
If this page has you thinking or nodding your head, it's probably time to implement or upgrade your P & P documents. So, let's Get it Done Today !
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