What Is a Policies and Procedures Manual?

Your policies and procedures manual houses your company best practices, core business process descriptions, and methods and standards for how work is performed. Creating your manual allows you to focus your company for growth, simplifies training, and eases your ability to scale.

What Is a Policies and Procedures Manual?

Your procedures manual can be a three ring binder, a folder on a network share drive, or automated and published online using procedures management software like Onpolicy. What’s important is that everyone understands what constitutes your policy and procedure manual and where a policy or procedure can be found when someone needs it.

Communicating Standard Operating Procedures

Procedures are really about communication. Imagine that you are franchising your business. If you want every franchisee to operate the same so that every customer for your brand has the same experience, then your policies and procedures manual is the most critical document that you will produce. Your manual communicates your standards. An online manual communicates and manages your procedures automatically.

Your employees need to understand what is expected of them. Your employees need a procedures manual to reference for training. Your supervisors need a policy manual to reference for managing business processes. By documenting your standards, you are communicating what is important for growth, quality, and customer satisfaction.

Policies and Procedures Template

As your company grows, new procedures will be needed. Your policies and procedures manual can also be considered a procedure template library. Your manual houses example procedure templates that can be used as a model for new standard operating procedures.

So What Is a Policies and Procedures Manual?

Your policies and procedures manual is your company best practices, process descriptions, and standards for how work is expected to be performed. The importance of policies and procedures cannot be underestimated for focusing your company, simplifying training, and easing your ability to scale. Need more examples? Download free policies and procedures in easy to edit Microsoft Word templates to create your own policy and procedure manual.

Who Uses It?

Front line workers gain empowerment to make effective, time-saving decisions through policies and procedures that affect their functional area. An effective policies and procedures manual provides appropriate methods for interdepartmental communication, to allow staff to work together to resolve day-to-day business problems without requiring unnecessary supervisory involvement.

The goal of your policy and procedure manual should be to organize the contents to reflect your company’s ways and means of communicating, getting the service performed, or the product manufactured at the lowest cost in the least amount of time, with the added benefit of maintaining job satisfaction and high employee morale.

Therefore, all employees in your organization should be educated in Company policies and procedures and always have ready access to a policy and procedure manual. Due to the cost of producing and maintaining a policy manual, it is not necessary to issue an individual printed manual to every employee — however, a manual should be readily available either in a designated area in each functional location or online using a policies and procedures management system.