Writing company policy is similar to writing a business procedure, but there are a few differences between a policy and a procedure.  Business policies consist of either company rules, typically about ethics or relationships, or process outcomes defining expected results, kind of like a mission statement.

Company rules are found in your Employee Handbook.  One example would be sexual harassment.  It is illegal in the United States to subject others to unwelcome sexual conduct in a work situation.  If you are going to write a company policy, you would start with the law or regulation issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).  The EEOC provides definitions and additional information that will allow us to describe a company policy.

Every company should have a sexual harassment policy in their company manual that reads something like this:

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Customers and readers alike tell us how difficult it can be to keep their policies and procedures up to date. Due to the ever-increasing rate of change, your policies and procedures can get “stale” (ineffective) very fast.

One reason for this might be that your procedures are too long. If you have 35-page-long procedures — especially if that’s all text — it’s probably not fair to expect your employees to understand, let alone use, them. At that length, there’s the very real risk that your procedures are unclear, overly complicated, and just plain boring.

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How many times has someone asked you to do something like “Draw up a plan for ‘X’” that you complete, only to have them say, “That’s not what I wanted!” or “That’s not how you do it!”  You might be thinking, “You didn’t tell me exactly how you wanted it done.”

If you find yourself saying “That’s not right” to your employees after the job is supposed to be complete, you have a communication problem — one that’s resulting in general inefficiency, as well as bad feelings and low morale.  Perhaps it’s time you thought about creating a Policies and Procedures Manual.

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Bizmanualz is one of the leaders in policies and procedures documentation. Our policy and procedure manuals are written with small to medium businesses (SMBs) in mind. Thousands of companies that have been looking for a way to develop and implement a system of effective policies and procedures quickly have relied on us.

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You’ve just been given the task of writing a new procedure that documents an existing business process.  You make sure you understand, and you close with, “I’ll get on this process right away.”

That’s when your boss says, “Process? Did I say ‘process’? I meant processezzz! Plural!”  And before you can blurt out, “What do you mean?”, the boss says you need to develop procedures for all accounting processes, not just the one.  Oh, and he wants them by the end of the month!

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Business and organizational development is about business process change: not as in “process change – the event”, but “process change – the journey“.  Your business processes change in response to market forces, competition, regulations, customer demand, the economy, culture, personal beliefs, and many other factors.  The question isn’t about what is causing the business process changes — we know your business processes are going to change — the question is…

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We always start our Well-Defined Processes Class by asking the participants “what’s wrong with your policies and procedures where you work?” and we always get the same answers.  Students come to the class from different industries, companies, and geographies and yet we still get the same answers every time.

People tell us how hard it is to keep their procedures up-to-date.  Information gets stale fast and it is difficult keeping procedures current and relevant without becoming outdated.  One reason for this is that the procedures are too long in the first place.  If you have a 35-page procedure then, yes, it is difficult to keep all 35 pages up-to-date.  Especially, if the procedure is unclear, overly complicated or just too difficult to understand in the first place.

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Last week we discussed how to ensure procedures are used. Along with communication, training and auditing, we brought up the concept of buy-in. We thought the topic of buy-in deserved further discussion. So, what is buy-in?

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We talk about policies and procedures all the time but you may be wondering what is a policy and how does it differ from a procedure?

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