How to Start Writing Policies and Procedures
| by Bizmanualz Editor |
Any old policy and procedure format saves time by not having to start from scratch, right? Well, not necessarily.
Using a weak starting point can hurt employee usability, introduce confusion and user-error, and may not assist in your compliance and control objectives. The result could set your procedures project back further and cost you even more time to fix it later. But it doesn’t have to.
Drive Performance Improvement
If your policies and procedures are incomplete, outdated or inconsistent, then you are probably not driving the performance improvement you intended. And by improving your business, you can save money and help increase customer satisfaction.
Improve Your Results
To be confident you’re buying a procedure template that gets the job done quickly and correctly, it’s important to examine its basic elements. Take a moment to view the following features that you should be using, and also learn how to benefit with such crucial time-saving features as:
- An ISO 9001 compliant layout for easier readability
- A clear and concise header block to ensure a procedure communicates the purpose and scope
- Clear department responsibilities that identify who does what
- Key term definitions to reduce confusion
- Measures of effectiveness to quantify outcomes
- References to related documents to improve usability
- Listing of applicable laws or regulations to communicate compliance
- Detailed list of revisions to track edit history
- Forms to ensure proper control and record keeping
Writing Policies and Procedures
Procedures should be action oriented, grammatically correct, and written in a consistent style and format to encourage maximum usability. This will result in an increase in both effectiveness and efficiency.
Improve Performance in All Departments
You can improve your procedures for many departments, improving performance and results:
- Accounting
- Finance
- Information Technology
- Sales & Marketing
- Engineering, Manufacturing & Production
- Human Resources
- Security & Disaster Recovery
- Sales and Marketing
Best Practices Saves Time
With more effective and efficient features, you can finish your policies and procedures project sooner. A core set of “best practices” policies, procedures and forms will begin to save you time right away.
Categories:
Procedures & Process Training • Writing Policies and Procedures
Tags:
Human Resources • Information Technology • ISO 9001 • Policies and Procedures • Procedure templates • procedures project • Sales and Marketing • Writing Policies and Procedures
Related Articles:
- Writing Policies and Procedures for your Organization
- Sales & Marketing Policies and Procedures Manual Addresses Strategic Sales and Marketing Issues Through a Process Approach
- Who Are You Writing Procedures For?
- Policies and Procedures Used as Management Key
- Seven Cs to Avoid Procedure Writing Errors
Originally published in 2004 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title How to Start Writing Policies and Procedures. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com
June 21st, 2010 at 4:28 pm
We need to write a large amount of policies and procedures. Nothing is written at the moment and none of your standard pre-written polcicies even come close to addressing the area we will be working on (no one would have poicies and procedures written in the areas we are addressing).
What product do you have that could act as a Framework giving us structure and format without content.
June 22nd, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Any Bizmanualz policy-and-procedure product can be used as a guide to writing your own policies and procedures. It’s possible — make that virtually certain — that no one has the perfect pre-written policy or procedure for your organization. Only you know your unique circumstances and needs and can put them into a useful document. You can certainly get a great head start on your policies and procedures by using our templates.
Organizations have as much as 80% in common with every other organization: everyone has an HR department, an Accounting department, a Sales department, and so forth. In small business, you often have people working in multiple areas — wearing many hats. All the more reason to have documented policies and procedures: ensure that your employees know what to do and ensure that they do it with consistency.
Try our MS-Word-based content, based on best practices — get started writing and deploying your own policies!