Obviously, we’re not out of the woods yet, economy-wise. Sure, the National Bureau of Economic Research says we are officially no longer in a recession, but most businesses are finding that hard to swallow. The money supply is still pretty tight, investors are still pretty anxious, and we have yet to see meaningful job growth.

However far away an actual recovery may be, businesses of all sizes and types are well advised to be ready to move when the time comes. Sooner or later, the business cycle will come around to expansion and companies like yours will begin hiring once again.

And when you do, will your new hires know what to do? Do you have clear, accurate, and up-to-date policies and procedures that will make their entry (or reentry) easier? If you have an effective quality management system in place and you’re continually improving it, little by little, regardless of the circumstances around you, you’re able to accept and embrace change.

All kinds of training solutions are available to get your employees “up to speed” in their jobs. The most effective solutions are those that mix a number of tools and techniques. They use a “holistic approach”, balancing various learning techniques to arrive at the best possible outcome — performance excellence, the right product at the right time in the right place, and customers who are more than satisfied.

That starts with knowing what to do and how to do it. Your policies and procedures are an integral part of the learning experience. They’re key to achieving consistently high performance and results!

We’re all looking forward to expansion but you — more than most — will be prepared for it.

* * * * * * *

Time for you to “sound off”. Tell us what you think.

“Can I buy just the one procedure I need right now?”

We’ve been hearing this question quite often and our standard response has been that we don’t sell procedures separately. It seemed to make sense that companies should have a range of policies and procedures on hand. After all, everyone thinks in terms of systems of interconnected policies and procedures, don’t they?

Then we thought, “Why not give our customers what they want!” After all, all our policy and procedure manuals have a collection of Microsoft Word files — procedures, policies, and support documents (forms, checklists, etc.). If our customers want to buy the documents individually, why not make it possible?

That’s how www.policiesprocedures.com was born. We essentially took procedure files from seven of our policies and procedures manuals and made them available for sale individually, so now you can buy and download one or more of these 200+ policy and procedure templates from the new website.

If customers could buy individual procedures à la carte, one obvious follow-up question was, “Why would anybody need to buy an entire manual?” Simple — because they get more. Not only more procedures, but supporting content — in short, a system of policies and procedures. In the “real world”, policies and procedures don’t exist in isolation. They interact, as the ISO 9001 points out, simply but eloquently.

Each of our policy and procedure manuals has a section on Manual Preparation, as well as a sample Manager’s Manual (and often a detailed guide or handbook). If you purchase the HR Procedures Manual, for instance, you get 35 HR procedures, a free Employee Handbook, a sample HR Manager’s Manual, links to dozens of Federal HR posters, and more than 50 sample job descriptions!

From a cost-to-value standpoint, once you exceed a handful of procedures (10 or more), it makes sense to purchase the entire manual. However, if you just need a few procedures to fill out your quality system, your accounting system, or any system you have in mind, the new policy and procedure download site may be exactly what you need.

So, visit our new site. Scroll or browse around and buy what you need. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know — we’re more than happy to help!

Today, even the smallest companies are quickly becoming very complicated workplaces.  As a business leader, you must cope with rising taxes, increasing regulations, growing competition, a struggling economy, increasing technological complexity, and even the mounting threat of violence and fraud in your workplace.  The consequences?  The old rules of growing a business aren’t effective and the new rules are more complex than ever.

Let’s look at the facts:

• Regulations affecting small businesses are up 36% over the past five years alone. Business owners must contend with an alphabet soup of regulations: OSHA, FMLA, FLSA, HIPAA, FCRA, ADA, ERISA, ECOA, FDCP, FCBA, IRCA, TILA, EPPA, ADEA, and so on.
• Competition is intensifying at an accelerating pace. By century’s end, America’s share of world gross domestic product declined to roughly 20% from a high of 40% at the end of World War II. Customers now demand ever-improving quality (ISO 9001), innovation, pricing, and just-in-time delivery — demands that stress smaller businesses that are already running flat out.
• As recent as ten years ago, few small businesses used accounting software or had a local area network and most certainly did not have email or a website. Today, this is common. But now, so are issues of acceptable Internet use, information security, training, or software piracy.
• One in twenty workers are physically assaulted, one in six workers are sexually harassed, and one in three workers are verbally abused in the work force, each year. Now add the events of 9/11 and there is a heightened sense of fear in business today. But, OSHA requires that all businesses with employees, large and small, provide a safe and healthy workplace.

Many agree that the business world has undergone a clear and definite paradigm shift. Now, with the wealth of opportunities that accompany a globalizing economy, there arises not only an accompanying proliferation of hazards but also an expanding universe of compliance and detail. The longer a small business lives, the greater the complexity.

And this phenomenon taxes small businesses, which are typically resource constrained, more than large ones.  In sum, for small businesses today there is much more to gain, much more to keep track of and comply with, and much more to lose, than ever before.

So, how is a business owner to keep up with all the details? Bizmanualz® Policies & Procedures provides business leaders with example procedure templates that help you:

• Comply with government regulations;
• Certify your quality to ISO 9001;
• Reduce or eliminate uncollectible receivables;
• Prevent theft or embezzlement;
• Optimize inventory;
• Reduce employee liability; and
• Prepare your business for a disaster.

Utilizing just one single concept from Bizmanualz can reduce waste, fraud, and abuse and add real money to your business’s bottom line.

Every month, business leaders share their stories with us about satisfying their auditors with new controls, of increased earnings found in their business, and how much time they saved using Bizmanualz® Policies, Procedures & Forms Manuals, all without stressing over how to write clear policies or procedures, staying late at the office to research best practices, or wondering what format to use.

There are millions of small businesses all over the world that are struggling with these issues.  If you lack the operational knowledge or are too pressed for time to focus on producing your own internal controls, you need the kind of help that Bizmanualz provides.

Bizmanualz provides the subject matter expertise gathered from a variety of sources, including books, seminars, magazine articles, and real world experience, allowing you to find a fast, easy way to reduce the complexity of running your business.  Virtually every department or topic is covered.

Bizmanualz has encapsulated the most critical and vital information into an easy-to-use set of policy and procedure templates.  Everything you need to manage your business is ready for instant download.  No other organization has the breadth and depth of content to help you quickly and easily develop a system of effective internal controls like Bizmanualz.  Download a free sample policy and procedure example to see for yourself how helpful Bizmanualz® policies, procedures, and forms can be for your business.

As an accomplished business leader, you’ll want to take advantage of this outstanding business opportunity. You’ll find a small investment in Bizmanualz® Policies & Procedures can pay tremendous dividends.

[CJA1]reports Wayne Crews, author of “10,000 Commandments: A Policymaker’s Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State” and CATO Institute scholar

Rumors are flying around the Internet that British Petroleum is considering removing Tony Hayward from the company’s top post. Apparently investors like the idea, as BP’s stock price has steadily risen since the rumors began.

People may feel like it’s a good start, as Hayward seems to have become a greater liability than an asset to the oil giant. However, one grand, symbolic gesture — one more sacrificial lamb — doesn’t get to the root of the problem. We have much further to go. Hayward is at the top of the company but the failures that led to the oil catastrophe have not nearly been all his or his company’s doing.

BP’s failure was part of a systemic failure: there is plenty of blame to go around. Rather than blame everybody (which helps no one), we have to correct the system in which this fiasco occurred or devise a new system.

Where to start?  We might take care of the problem this way:

• Compile lessons learned and share them with the industry.
• Rewrite industry (and other) standards to put a greater emphasis on safety.
• Enforce existing regulations before writing new ones.
• When writing a new bill (and this goes to any bill, not just those dealing with oil and gas), the legislature cannot be allowed to hide laws by combining them, related or not. One bill for one issue.
• Spend money on enforcement (i.e., hire qualified people, train them well, and pay them what they’re worth).
• Break up the MMS and organizations like it. The Materials Management Service has been responsible for gathering rights fees, etc., and they’ve been responsible for enforcing oil-and-gas-related statutes and requirements. Often, these two work at cross-purposes: as we saw, the MMS didn’t want to enforce laws that might put the brakes on revenue. Those functions have to be kept separate so there’s no confusion about what’s important.
• Restore “reinvestment in the company” as a business tenet. Paying out profits to shareholders and executives while infrastructure and technology lag isn’t sustainable.
• Fine anyone or any organization that misled anybody at any point (misinformation, late or no information, deflecting blame, covering up problems, etc.). This alone could raise enough money to put the issue behind us.
• Get the world on the same standards. It’s too easy for a company to say, “We don’t like the tax laws here, so we’re moving offshore” or “It’s cheaper to operate “over there”, so we’re going over there.” Artificially low wages and taxes, as well as lax standards and enforcement, relocates the problems and potentially intensifies them. Relocating a problem doesn’t solve it and it can create more.
• Accept responsibility. Management can certainly do its share but so can the rest of us. We need to find our collective moral compass and use it all the time.

Do you have any suggestions or ideas for preventing a recurrence of this unfortunate situation? What would your corrective or preventive actions be? Should compliance with ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 be required of all oil and gas companies (and their subcontractors)? Should policies and procedures be transparent?

Thanks for your time.

I wonder how many of our clients, on receiving our policy-and-procedure manuals, have asked themselves what in heck they got themselves into. (“There’s a lot of stuff here…where do I begin?”) Well, like a lot of things, it’s probably not as difficult as it looks initially. First, you took a step in the right direction by using our templates to develop your company policies and procedures. It’s always easier to start with some of the work already done for you, rather than you having to start from scratch.

Now, how do you proceed?

Understand Why You Need Policies and Procedures

You don’t need policies and procedures merely to comply with regulations or industry standards (like ISO 9001). Sure, there’s nothing quite like the threat of fines, legal action, and the scorn of the business community to motivate you, but that’s far from the best reason. Much better reasons for developing policies and procedures include:

• Communicating your business goals and priorities;
• Standardizing processes, behavior, and results;
• Training your employees consistently; and
• Identifying acceptable and unacceptable behaviors (and encouraging or discouraging them).

Prioritize Your Needs and Set Goals and Timelines

Now that you understand “why”, you need to decide “what”.  Of the policies and procedures you could work on, you have to determine which one(s) are going to provide:

• The biggest bang for the buck;
• A quick return on your investment; and/or
• The greatest good for the greatest number.

Only you know what you need.  I can offer you suggestions (like “start with a fairly simple process”) but only you have the intimate, day-to-day knowledge of your organization. It’s your company: you decide.

So, decide which process you’re going to document first.  If you have absolutely no idea (you have no metrics and no historical basis for evaluation), try any Bizmanualz policy or procedure.  Document your initial design and development process and use it as a baseline for further development.

Give the first procedure a fair evaluation.  Don’t look at your first policy-and-procedure development, point out all the flaws you can find, declare the project an abject failure, and pull the plug.

Introduce discipline into the development process by setting clear and meaningful (aka, “SMART“) goals and timelines.

Analyze Your Existing Procedure

If you already have a de facto¹ procedure in place, don’t throw it out in favor of so-called best practices that may or may not work for your firm.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” (Anon.)

Now is as good a time as any to document your process.  Diagram it quickly in any manner and medium with which you’re comfortable. Simple is best (“Don’t make a big production out of it!”, Mom used to say).  Next…

Compare Your Process with Bizmanualz Best Practices

Bizmanualz has already looked at many companies’ procedures, blended them together to describe “best practices”, and reasonably modeled these procedures on the Deming, or “Plan-Do-Check-Act”, cycle. You may find that your procedure already looks very much like the PDCA model:

• You develop a set of objectives and a plan (process) for realizing those objectives;
• You implement the plan and immediately start collecting process data (in-process, end-of-process, etc.);
• You routinely analyze the data, to see if the process is performing in line with expectations; and
• You make changes to the process (procedure) in order to improve it and improve your results.

If that’s the case, you don’t have far to go at all. Next…

Make Our Procedure Your Procedure

Make the obvious and necessary changes to the Bizmanualz policy and/or procedure.  We wrote them generally, like ISO standards, so they’d have the widest possible application.  Any resemblance between our procedure and your process is coincidental; that is, you’ll have to customize our procedures – make them your procedures.  For example:

• Change every instance of “Bizmanualz” or “the company” to your company;
• Where you have an existing form (e.g., purchase order, customer order, invoice), use it – and make sure field names, etc., on the form and in the procedure agree;
• Change job titles in the “Responsibilities” section and in the procedure itself to reflect your circumstances;
• Change diagrams² as needed;
• Add visual aids – they add impact and meaning and they complement verbal descriptions very well (especially when they come from your office, your shop floor, your staff, etc.); and
• Leave out what you don’t need.  An entire procedure or just part of one — if it doesn’t apply to your situation, delete it.  Make your policies and procedures simple and direct.

Verify and Validate the Procedure

The people responsible for implementing the procedure have to put it to the test.  Oh, you could write a procedure and thrust it on an unsuspecting workforce but until it’s subjected to “real world” conditions, the results you see may not be the ones you want or expect.

And there’s more to it than procedure verification and validation. Some people call it “getting buy-in”. Whatever you call it, recognize that your employees are stakeholders in the company. They have a vested interest in the company, too – if it does well, they do well. So, keep them in the loop on matters that directly affect them, to ensure their understanding and cooperation.

Even if they’re not directly impacted by the procedure in question, keep all employees informed of this — and most — company matters.

Implement the Procedure

Now, publish the tested-and-verified procedure.  Distribute the procedure to those responsible for executing it, analyzing it, and training employees.  NOTE: A document management system, or DMS, will help you address publication and distribution, as well as improve document control.

Hold a training session on the procedure – make sure trainees are not only capable of doing the work, but that they understand the process and the objectives, as well.  Finally, execute the process.  Collect the data from measuring devices and routinely analyze it.  Look for anomalies and trends in the data, evaluate the process, and aim for continual improvement.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it’s just that simple! Any questions?

NOTES

¹Just because you haven’t documented it doesn’t mean you don’t have an effective process in place.  Example: my wife and I came to a quick understanding some time ago that I would clean tubs, showers, and toilets and balance the checkbook. It’s very effective, plus there’s no point in documenting such processes because (a) they’re easy and (b) she won’t ever do them.

²We’ve been using Microsoft Visio to build diagrams. Unfortunately, Visio is not automatically included with any version of MS-Office, so far as we know. There are many alternatives to Visio, though – any search engine will help you find them – so your organization need not be constrained by a lack of Visio³.

³No, that’s not a typo.

We are currently testing our new policies and procedures document compliance software, and plan to release it for customer testing in the near future. Potential testers have been asking a number of questions. Here are questions, and the answers:

Is your policy management software accessed as a service over the Internet (Software as a Service – SaaS) or must your policy solution be installed on your computers?

Bizmanualz policy management software is in fact a ‘software-as-a-Service’ available as a subscription over the Internet. The first time a user accesses the service, a small amount of code loads on the client machine in about 30 seconds, similar to when using GoToMeeting or any number of on-line services. The user never is required to install, launch or maintain any software.

Can we upload our existing documents into the system?

You can upload all your existing documents into the system, and open them, so long as your local machine has the software that was used to create the document. For example, MS WORD documents are can be uploaded. In fact, Bizmanualz publishes the world’s most complete set of pre-written policies and procedures, all in MS WORD format. Any policies and procedures template that you buy from us comes pre-loaded in the software. We keep the templates up to date; but we don’t change any documents that you save, upload or change, even if the document started as a Bizmanualz template.

Are documents easy to update?

Documents are edited in their native software on your local machine; they are saved to our server. Our system tracks and controls all document revisions so everyone accesses the latest version. It’s easy to roll back to a previous version if necessary.

Are employees or other users notified when a policy changes or is updated?

Notifications of policy changes are sent by e-mail to policy document authors and ‘followers.’  Administrators and document authors can assign ‘follower’ rights to any user for any document. Users can independently follow any document to which they have permission. Followers receive e-mail notifications of all policy changes. There are also announcement and action item screens within the policy management software that can be used to communicate information about documents.

Can multiple users access policies and procedures at the same time?

Yes, any number of users can access your policy and procedure documents. If two people work on the same document at the same time, their work will be saved (but not released) as two separate drafts. Built-in compliance workflow assures that only one draft can be released, so there are never multiple releases of the same policies and procedures document floating around.

How do you price your policy management software? Do you charge by the seat, or do you sell one license for the whole organization?

We charge per seat. Released policy and procedure documents are published to a web-based reader module which can be viewed by anyone you want. Typically, that would include all your employees and your auditors if you have a formal quality system.

We have an Intranet for reading our documents on-line. How does your software work with Intranets?

If you already have an intranet or a document publishing platform (SharePoint for example) and want to keep using it, our editor module can ftp documents to your existing publishing platform so that user’s viewing habits don’t have to change. But your editors and document managers would benefit from using our editor module for policy and procedure document control, workflow, version control, notifications, etc. while your general employee population would continue to read documents as they’re doing now.

Can I assign different levels of access to users and documents?

We offer a full access control at the document, user and department level. That is, all users assigned to, for example, the accounting department can be granted permission to all accounting procedures with a global command. Additional restrictions can be placed on individuals within a department. Access privileges can also be set at the document level.

Is your policy management software compliant with my quality management or document control requirements?

Yes, the Bizmanualz policy management software is consistent with the document control requirements of all ISO quality management systems, government and industry standards and regulations.

Policies and procedures provide the framework and direction for addressing many common business problems your organization might face.  Let’s look at the top ten business problems solved by Policies and Procedures.

1. Accounts Receivable procedures to reduce accounts receivable (A/R) aging and ensure even cash flow.  Every company needs Strategies for Writing Accounts Receivable Procedures.  Your accounts receivable process is the heart of your cash cycle.  Salespeople can find plenty of customers but without cash-paying customers, you can’t pay your bills, which is part of your Strategies for Writing Accounts Payable Procedures.

2. Sales procedures to standardize sales pipeline management and ensure a consistent sales pipeline.  Sales procedures allow you to take control of the sales and marketing cycle.  Developing measurements, sales assignments, and target markets are all important elements of your sales process.

3. Disaster Recovery procedures will assist in an orderly and timely response to emergencies your company may face, as well as control the inevitable chaos that occurs.  Every company needs to effectively respond to disasters or emergencies in a timely manner; if not, they could be out of business.  In recent months, we’ve had ample opportunity to learn the lessons of the Gulf oil disaster, such as “having a disaster recovery plan before the need arises”.

4. Human Resources procedures ensure non-discriminatory practices; specifically, well-defined employee hiring and termination practices will help you avoid costly litigation.  Human resources procedures address diverse topics such as recruiting, hiring, training, retention, termination, and — most importantly –complying with local, state, Federal, and even international employment laws.

5. Quality procedures (nonconformance, corrective action, and auditing) improve product and process quality.  The ISO 9001 quality standard addresses quality control, quality assurance, and quality management practices.  Learning how to meet quality standards with ISO 9001 will help your organization reduce costly rework and overtime, thereby improving quality, satisfying customers, and contributing to your competitive advantages.

6. Customer communications procedures, like collecting data from customer feedback and complaint handling for process improvement.  ”Poor customer communication” is the root cause of much customer dissatisfaction.  If you know what your target customer wants, your business has all the information it needs to satisfy the customer. Implementing communication procedures will help you act on your customers’ wants, improving sales.

7. Shipping and receiving procedures are needed to track materials purchased and sold.  Most of shipping and receiving revolves around inventory or assets, which requires processes for handling, inventory management, asset acquisition, and asset disposition.  Specific supplier requirements — and the policies and procedures that flow from them — ensure that you receive what you want, when you want it, in the quantity you want, and with quality built in.

8. Management procedures can improve poor meetings, poor internal communications, and poor reporting.  Management is really about communication — that’s why improving internal communication benefits the whole company.  One of the best ways to improve communications is to develop, document, implement, and monitor a procedure for communications.

Also, it’s important that management shows its commitment to the highest standards, whether those standards have to do with internal processes or processes that directly involve your customers.

9. You also need compliance procedures to ensure your company conforms to the requirements of various regulations, statutes, and standards.  This is where policies and procedures can help your organization.  Compliance is one of the primary problems solved with policies and procedures.

10. Accounting procedures ensure that you fulfill your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.  Accounting is a process to track transactions of items, cash, and information.  Accounting procedures help to ensure consistency, reliability, and accuracy of those transactions, which (in turn) helps to build trust in your financial statements.  What Are the Top Ten Accounting Policies and Procedures?

Prewritten policies and procedures from Bizmanualz help solve many of these common business problems.  The Top Ten Core Business Policies and Procedures you will need can be found in the Bizmanualz CEO Company Policies Procedures Manuals bundle.

Top 10 Business Problems Solved by Policies and Procedures

1. Accounts Receivable procedures, to reduce A/R aging and ensure even cash flow.
2. Sales procedures, to standardize sales pipeline management to ensure consistent sales.
3. Disaster Recovery procedures, to control the response to chaos in an emergency.
4. Human Resources procedures, to ensure non-discriminatory employee hiring and termination.
5. Quality procedures, to improve quality.
6. Customer communications procedures, to collect data from feedback and complaint handling for process improvement.
7. Shipping and receiving procedures, to track materials purchased and sold.
8. Management procedures to improve poor meetings, communications, and reporting.
9. Compliance procedures to conform to regulations, standards, and laws.
10. Accounting procedures, to fulfill your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders.

What do you think? How quickly could your most urgent problems be solved by implementing effective policies and procedures?

I recently posed this question to the “Bizmanualz Policies Procedures Network“, or group, on LinkedIn:

“The same teams (Brasil, Italia, España, Deutschland, etc.) are perennially among the top contenders for the FIFA World Cup. Do you think it’s the personnel or the system that makes these teams consistently great?”

I’d like to know what you think, and why. To me, it’s sort of a “Heredity or environment?” question: it isn’t one or the other. I mean, you could have one or the other and you might do well. However, if you have both good personnel and a good system that optimizes their individual skills and experience and blends them…

Look at some of the great individual performers of all time, in team sports – Pelé, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Babe Ruth. As capable as they were, they didn’t reach the zenith of their respective sports until they were surrounded by other capable people and learned to work as a team, using a system. (I wish I could have John Facenda narrate those last two sentences.)

Strangely, we forget how much their coaches — and the systems they designed and implemented — had to do with their successes. Feola, Jackson, Sather, and Huggins — all devised systems that ensured quality and consistency. Management also scouted well and hired not just talented and hard-working player personnel, but those who understood the “team concept” and put the team ahead of individual accomplishments.

The same is true in business, of course. Some of your employees are undoubtedly star performers but until they have a system that coordinates — meshes – their actions with those of other capable people, and until everyone buys into the concept of “team first”, they’re never going to reach their potential. And as a result, neither will your company.

You have to have a management system that fosters quality, consistency, and ongoing improvement to the system and the people using it. And, you have to have the right players.

By the way, I may as well get a plug in for our LinkedIn policies and procedures group. We’re at http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=86367. If you’re not part of our group, or if you haven’t joined LinkedIn yet, consider this your invitation to join us.

I look forward to your comments — here, by email, and on LinkedIn. I’m especially excited when you challenge my “knowledge” or my way of thinking. (Or as they say in my favorite sport, ice hockey, “You wanna go?”)

Let’s get it on!

There are many reasons why procedures become too complex.  Many revolve around “too much”, “too many”, or “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”  Reducing the complexity of your procedure is simple.  Keep it simple.  Less is more.  Don’t go into long explanations, use industry- or profession-specific terminology, or try to dispense too much information. Remember — complexity is one of the enemies of consistency and quality. Keep it simple.

How do you know if your procedures are too complex? Here are the top ten signs:

1. Your procedures are too long.  This is possibly the most common kind of complexity. If your procedures are 30 pages in length, they’re too long.  It is very difficult to follow a 30-page procedure (try it).

The fewer the pages, the better. This forces you to simplify your procedures — to make them more concise. If you have a 30-page procedure, try breaking it into three 10-page procedures.  See if you can simplify each ten-page procedure — maybe eliminate or repurpose the information into work instructions, training material, or pictures.  Pictures are a great substitute for excess verbiage and should reduce your document size.

2. Your procedures have too many steps. If your procedure contains — let’s say, 27 — steps, it has too many. Follow the “rule of seven” — use no more than seven steps to describe a process.  No more than seven activities to describe a procedure.  Use no more than seven tasks to describe an activity, and no more than seven lines to a paragraph.  Break information into chunks that can be easily understood and followed.

3. Your procedures reference too many other documents. If you have to keep flipping between documents, it’s difficult to follow the main procedure (and easy to derail your train of thought). If your procedures reference multiple documents, this leads to straying from the main path.

4. Your procedures contain too much terminology. Industry jargon needs to be defined in the procedure.  Does everyone really know how the “takt time” on your value stream map is used to improve your OEE? Instead of assuming they know, define your terms or use them in such a context that your readers can infer what you mean.

5. Your procedures involve too many people. If your procedure requires a lot of different individuals, you probably have too many handoffs. The more information and materials are handled, the greater the likelihood of a breakdown in the process. Therefore, you have an opportunity to simplify the process.  Break your procedure into several discrete procedures and focus the responsibility on fewer people in each procedure.

6. Your procedures involve too many reviews. Do you really need as many reviews, meetings, or inspections as your procedure calls for?  Can you combine, eliminate, or substitute a review with another element? Individuals can do self-inspections with checklists.  A lot of reviews make for a complex process.  Simplify.

7. Your procedures cover a long period of time. Delays allow for interruptions.  Eliminate them.  Reorganize the procedure into time-based elements that can be easily followed.

8. Your procedures encompass asynchronous activities. Loosely related activities that occur in their own time frame are hard to coordinate. Tie the activities together with milestones — have them share start times or end times. Synchronize them.

9. Your procedures leave out important information. This is the opposite of using jargon, or giving too much information. By leaving out bits of necessary information for the sake of saving time or space, you increase the risk of process failure. The reader does not know what they do not know. Economize and keep it simple, but don’t omit important information.

10. Your procedures use too many big words and long sentences. The average person reads at a ninth-grade level.  Using too many “big college words” and stuffing a lot of information into long sentences or paragraphs introduces unnecessary complexity. Use smaller words, shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs. Remember the Rule of Seven (above).

Your Procedures Are Too Complex If They:

1. Are too long with too many pages;
2. Have too many steps, activities, or tasks;
3. Reference too many documents, work instructions, or forms;
4. Contain too much jargon, industry terminology, or slang;
5. Involve too many people, jobs descriptions, or managers;
6. Involve too many review steps, meetings, or inspections;
7. Cover a long period of time;
8. Discuss a series of asynchronous activities;
9. Leave out important information, pictures, or explanations; or
10. Use too many big words, long sentences, and long paragraphs.

So, are some of your procedures too complex? What is the most complicated procedure you have ever had to work with?

A reader recently asked if we could talk about writing a policies and procedures “style guide”. As a matter of fact, many style guides already exist, so why bother to come up with one of your own? Your situation isn’t so unique.

Bizmanualz provides a style guide with its policy and procedure manuals. (It’s in the ”Manual Preparation” section, under “Your Manual” and “Effective Communication”.) It doesn’t break any new ground, but reinforces what you see in other style guides (Elements of Style, Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

Why does — or why should — anyone use a style guide? Well, we use them to establish and preserve a preferred style of writing and/or layout. We use style guides to ensure consistency. It’s more economical to establish a documentation style and stick with it than to use a different style for every document.

In addition, the right style can help establish and reinforce your brand, though we’re not concerned about the brand internally. The consistency we’re looking for internally is that of behavior.

Written procedures are meant to ensure that the business processes they describe are carried out the same way every time, no matter who’s carrying out the procedure, or where or when.

Will a style guide help with that? It won’t hurt, though it really only scratches the surface. You don’t give a procedure to a trainee, tell them to read the procedure (or watch the video) over the weekend, and begin the process “for real” on Monday, do you? If you do, do you think the document’s style matters all that much to the employee?

Of course not! You may have them read/view the procedure first, but you have to show them – in a real or simulated work environment — how the procedure is carried out, then have them carry out the procedure themselves, gradually ramping up their productivity with their confidence level.

Therefore, the ultimate style guide is the user. If you get consistent results from your employees once they’ve been adequately trained — and you’re key performance indicators will tell you if that’s the case — your style meets the most important requirement. You’re achieving the desired result.

That’s not to say, “Forget style guides.” By all means, use them. Just don’t get hung up on them.

Now it’s your turn. Thoughts?