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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Writing procedures is an exercise in controlling the cost of compliance.  You’re trying to comply with customer expectations, management objectives, government regulations, and/or industry standards, making compliance expensive.  Regardless of the reason for compliance, wouldn’t you want to write as few procedures as possible if you could still conform to the compliance mandate and keep your compliance costs to a minimum?

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You’ve written a new procedure.  Your procedure review identified completeness, correctness, and subject matter applicability.  You feel you’ve caught your procedure writing errors and the procedure’s ready to go…but go where?  How do you determine if your new procedure is working?

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Our general topic this month is how to get procedures used. Most organizations put at least some effort into creating procedures. Shouldn’t they have a functional role in the organization? Isn’t it a wasted effort if they are just going to collect dust stuck in a binder sitting on a shelf, or if they languish in a file drawer and never see the light of day?

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Question of the month: How does work environment contribute to effective learning/training?

In July, the focus of our articles was on learning and how it benefits the organization. Learning is often perceived as expensive, time consuming, and even disruptive. While this perception may be fairly accurate for the immediate short term, the long term benefits of learning is well established and cannot be ignored.

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Question of the month: Under what situations can training be financially justified?

The email articles in August talked about workplace training programs. Highly trained and competent employees are great assets to any company. These employees grow and change as

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