A standard operations manual is essential to streamlining your business. It defines the roles of employees, what they are responsible for, how to carry out a process, what to do in case of an emergency and so on.
In simplest of terms, an operations manual is a document that explains how a company does things or get things done. It can come in the form of a printed small booklet or an online resource like a company wiki.
Operations Manual Guide
The document lists down step-by-step instructions detailing how to carry out particular tasks or handle certain situations at the workplace. As such, it offers complete guidelines on the day-to-day activities necessary to operate your business. Documenting standard operating procedures eliminates inconsistencies and ambiguities while enhancing efficiency.
In most cases, the project manager, communication manager, or operations manager is the individual assigned to create an operations manual. But with the correct information and key attention to detail, you can also craft a decent operations manual.
As mentioned, an operations manual guides employees on how to perform their functions efficiently. However, it goes further and breaks down the steps, plus the resources that employees need to complete specific business processes.
An operations manual provides your business with several benefits. For starters, it lays down consistent work standards, standardizes operations, and streamlines systems. However, businesses that lack a form of operations manual suffer inefficiencies, higher business costs, and lowered productivity.
For instance, skipping a step in an intricate product development process could lead to a defective product, while not following sales guidelines could cause potential customers to move to your competition.
A well-written operations manual is a source of company information. It also serves as a more comprehensive employee handbook that shows your employees how to carry out their job well while providing them with all the resources they need.
By provisioning answers to frequently asked questions, an operations manual allows established employees to continue with their work uninterrupted. This enhances training efficiency and promotes overall productivity.
A good example of how an operations manual can help a business secure and retain years of employee know-how and experience is this manufacturing company. According to their consulting firm Radcom, the company was losing valuable workforce to shutdowns and retirement. But more than that was the combined loss of knowledge and years of experience from these workers.
The thing is, an operations manual makes it easier to implement and replicate the same procedures on a larger scale. You could even set up new business locations. In other words, documenting your operational procedures makes your business scalable. New business sites can use the manual for reference, thus maintaining the same level of standards in your initial business.
Also, if a disaster such as an earthquake or theft strikes your business, you need to have a recovery plan documenting how to restore normal operations. Having an operations manual plan will help you resume operations much faster and prevent a significant loss of revenue. It also shows your customers your dedication to delivering uninterrupted service.
Before writing your operations manual, you first need to plan how the layout will look like. Note that the design will depend chiefly on the platform you choose to create it on. That said, you need to ensure that it stays consistent throughout the document. This includes aspects such as how to separate sections, the fonts to use, whether to use page numbers, screenshots, or images.
One efficient way to organize your operations manual is to create folders that coincide with the departments in your firm. Next, organize your workflows and processes into subfolders. Adding a table of contents containing a list of the subsections will make it easier for users to find the precise information they might be seeking.
The critical thing here is to ensure that your operations manual contains all the important sections discussed earlier. Go through the list and carefully document each item, such as the processes, business policies (such as not accepting cash payments), hierarchy, job descriptions, and emergency procedures.
An operations manual is a company-wide document. What this means is that it requires input from all departments. Therefore, involve your team members in the process as this will help get procedures down correctly and create a sense of ownership.
Once you have a draft of your operations manual, get your legal adviser to review it and suggest improvements where necessary. Getting a legal eye to look through your document is critical because they can advise in case your policies have legal implications. They can also
At this point, you can seek the necessary approvals for the document. Depending on the company, permission might be granted by a review committee or the board of directors. Whichever the case, get the stamp of approval before distributing the operations manual.
Remember, keeping your systems and processes in a central location will allow you or anybody else access at any time and anywhere they are working from. You can also keep a physical copy of the operations manual in your office library.
Assign a team to help with revisions and updates. Once you have a team in place, allow employees to give feedback on using the operations manual and share suggestions on how to improve it. Listen to the suggestions offered and always ensure to act on them. You can also make the process easier by including survey and feedback forms in the manual.
If employees keep a file copy of the manual, they can print the revised pages for inclusion in their file. However, ensure to include the changes in the official printed version of the operations manual.
SweetProcess can make creating your operations manual quick and straightforward. Have a look at the following real-life case studies to see how you can transform your business by streamlining your policies and procedures.
Stone & Wood is a local brewing and bottling company in Byron Bay, Australia. The company lacked a system effective enough for Thomas Parker, the quality assurance coordinator, to maintain consistent quality assurance and smooth operations. In any case, the company relied on binders and MS Word documents.
At The Dentist Off Main dental clinic, the head dentist Dr. Olesya and office manager Alex had a deep desire to deliver superb dental services to their patients. While they understood the need to streamline their operations, they were struggling to complete this task. This was mainly because they were using Word documents to document their business processes.
The truth is, the only way to prevent such errors 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.
Typically the manual is either a book or folder of printed documents containing all of your standard operating procedures (SOPs), your hierarchy, contact details, and emergency procedures. Whenever an employee needs to know how to do something, they can look it up in the manual.
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 of having them are massive.
Admittedly, this will depend on the format of your manual. A physical file (a book or folder) will need to have items reprinted with corrections or potentially even a complete re-issue to avoid lengthy and confusing appendixes. Digital operations manuals do not suffer the same problem, giving them an advantage over physical copies.
Much like with an employee handbook, the challenge here is to include enough detail in your operations manual to serve as a comprehensive knowledge base for your team, but not so much as to bore them into complacency.
You could combine this part of the operations manual with the job description section if you want to have a more compact document, but having a separate list of contacts can make it easier to skim through and immediately get the correct information.
Having to print out an entirely new manual (or at least a chapter of it) every time you update it is just as bad. Unless you only print one copy at a time it will be difficult to recall every existing copy and replace them, leaving plenty of room for human error to sneak back in with an outdated manual.
So, rather than invite a Third World War, make your operations manual detailed enough to be useful, but simple enough to follow without sending the reader to sleep. Your company (and the general population) will thank you for it.
Great article, and just what I need at the moment. Haven experienced costly errors and confusion among staff in my cassava processing business, coupled with the struggle to maintain standards and quality, I knew a need to have a document that will guide our operations. I have attempted to put one together but I was overwhelmed and discouraged because I have neither done or seen anything that looks like one. But reading this article brought so much enlightenment and relief on this project, and it is more of like an answered prayer for direction. Thanks for putting up such great an article up.
Thanks for this article. I have seen first hand how operations can be adversely impacted due to a lack of documentation. I work in IT and I see it again and again where software applications are designed and implemented however, you have a lack of continuity amongst users, or you have what I refer to as Super users that know the application inside and out but they are also potential single points of failure to the operation as a whole.
I am curious, over the last few years I have worked several different IT consulting contracts and the majority of organizations seem to be moving away from the structured training unit, has anyone seen any organizations that specialize in user guide or process flow creation? 2ff7e9595c
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