We help organizations at different levels of growth put their operating processes and rules in writing for streamlined operations and relations while in the company’s service.
This could be the complete general operating manual documenting work processes, or individual sector/unit policies for specific functions/issues such as the following:
Having an operations manual may not be glamorous, but it prevents disasters caused by human error and bad processes; this can save your business and even in extreme circumstances save lives! The truth is, the only way to prevent errors in business processes is to document workflows and processes, and the only way to make sure your employees know what they have to do, how to do it, and have the resources to do it is to create your own operations manual. Our specialist teams work with your organization to make this a reality.
What is an operations manual?
An operations manual is the backbone of your organization – the encyclopedia for your business. Your employee handbook may introduce your team to your mission, various policies (benefits, holiday leave, security, etc), and the culture, but the operations manual will show them how to do their job and give them everything they need to do it.
Typically the manual is either a book, a folder of printed documents, or an online portal/link containing all of your standard operating procedures (SOPs), your hierarchy, contact details and emergency procedures. Whenever an employee wants to know how to do something or needs to know how to contact someone, they can look it up in the manual.
Imagine a manual for a car. In it, you’ll be told what the model is, what the tire pressures need to be, and a myriad of other useful facts which are important to know, but not necessarily off by heart. An operations manual is exactly that, but for your company and/or organization. It’s a way of making sure that your team can reliably and efficiently carry out their tasks with consistent results. Human error is reduced to a minimum and everyone knows precisely what they need to do, who they might be waiting on, and who might be waiting on them to deliver results.
Why are company policies important?
One of the biggest advantages of having an operations manual is that it forces you to have fully documented processes for every task you do more than once. This might sound like a pain to set up, but the long-term benefits for having them are massive.
Aside from increasing your efficiency and highlighting problems in your current processes, the consistency your business achieves is at the core of why processes are important. By having a method which can be executed perfectly time after time, you’re standardizing your business model, making it easy to find problems and deal with them.
Without a consistent and reliable business model, it’s next to impossible to scale your business. By having an operations manual to store your SOPs and important internal data, you can easily onboard new employees and identify the factors limiting your ability to scale. Not only that, but having documented processes in the first place will mean that your operation runs with less wasted time and money, making it able to rapidly expand.
Company policies put in writing what you expect from your employees. These may be related to performance, values or behavior. Additionally, company policies can serve as pre-warnings for employees, since they outline the consequences of failing to abide by the rules. Company policies are important for a variety of other reasons, including: