You have permission to publish this article free of charge, as long as
resource box is included with article. If you do run my article, a courtesy reply to sean@bizmanualz.com would be greatly appreciated. This article is 801 words long including resource box. Thanks for your interest.How many times have you asked someone to do something like “draw up a plan for such and such project”? Your employee completes plan, but then you say, “That is not what I wanted” or “That is not how you do it”. And so employee thinks: you didn’t tell me exactly how you wanted it done.
If you find yourself having back and forth misunderstandings with your employees, then you might have a communication problem. And this could be creating bad feelings, low morale and inefficiencies. To remedy this, perhaps it’s time you thought about creating a Policies and Procedures Manual.
Let’s look at 7 methods to strengthen communication and performance.
1. Implement Effective Policies and Procedures
A Policies and Procedures Manual is a communication tool designed to empower employers, managers and employees with a consistent approach to accomplishing their daily tasks. It provides a set of policies, plans, reports, forms, and work routines that convey pulse of organization.
A properly developed manual focuses your everyday business communications between employees and management on what is really important to get job done. This focus is first step in empowering your employees. Empowerment requires a shared vision, communication of necessary information and adequate training.
2. Convey Management Policy and Vision
A manual should be used to communicate both corporate policies and appropriate procedures for implementation of policy in a combined style format. If employees know vision, then they feel confident to make decisions. Keep in mind, though, policies should not be confused with procedures.
Policy - A definite course or method of action to guide and determine present and future decisions. A policy is a guide to decision-making under a given set of circumstances within framework of corporate objectives, goals and management philosophies.
Procedure - A particular way of accomplishing something, or an established way of doing things. A procedure is a series of steps followed in a definite regular order that ensure consistent and repetitive approach to actions.
3. Improve Communications and Efficiently Run Operations
A manual serves to translate company's business philosophies and desires into action. A well-designed manual is an invaluable communication tool for efficiently running operations within departments and bridging gap between interrelated departments. If a department has specific information that it requires to process a task, then this information is easily captured in a form that accompanies task. In business forms are commonplace, acting as a guide for such things as purchase orders, employment applications or asset requisitions.
