Launching project to write/refresh policies & procedures.

There is a great corporate handbook here: https://www.proformative.com/og/resource/general-content/company-handbook. There are also a number of other handy docs in the Resource library. There are a ton of policies contributed by Lawroom in the Resource area which are well researched and current. If you need more, please name specifics in this thread and the community can chime in.

I would encourage you to visit the following two websites that offer very inexpensive policies & procedures templates that can be easily "cut & pasted" to create a customized manual for your company: www.bizmanualz.com and www.copedia.biz. Starting with one of these as your foundation, you can then spend your value added time on documenting the most critical/unique policies/procedures, e.g., revenue recognition, trade secrets on pricing/markups, etc.

There is great book on building procedures for a company across all functions - e.g. purchasing, manufacturing, sales etc. "Improving Performance - How to manage the white space on the organization chart" by Rummler & Brache.

Keep in mind that the 22-25 procedures that comprise the whole possible set of operations procedures should be customized to reflect your own company's policies. Having too many procedures risks losing the users, and complicates training.

I had written the ops manual with policies and procedures for a publicly traded, engineering company some time ago and and found that the true battle was in trying to keep it simple, using visual aids like flowcharts and and problem-solving time-outs. Did a fair amount of benchmarking as well.

Hope this helps.

Did this 15 years ago for a Fortune 100 company. Off the shelf material was a starting point, but it was never accepted "as is".

We ended up creating a simple format with key and consistent headers, written in "non-accounting speak" with lots of white space and short paragraphs. Not all our team was native English speakers.It also helped other employees use and understand the book.

We would write a section, then issue it for comment ~60 days - then finalize. It took two years - it is still in use today as we made it easy to update.

We did two books, one on Financial and the second was Corporate. Had a lot of fun arguing where the Travel Policy should fall, and Revenue was in both - but had a somewhat different angle. There was a Tax and Financial compliance section in the Finance book.

I have done policy manuals for several companies.

One thing to keep in mind is making it easy to keep updated. I did one manual using a three ring binder with each policy having its own section. Within each policy, there were subsections for the individal procedures, control points, flowchart, and related links to other policies. Keeping each of these on seperate pages made it easy to update one area as needed. It is important to review all policies on a regular basis (usually annually) and update as necessary.

Starting with a template or pre-written policies is good. However, as has been noted above, you will be customizing to fit your company. I encourage you to include as much detail as needed to make the policy and proceedures clear, so a new employee can use them successfully.

I also encourage you to include a list of control points. This shows what internal controls are incorporated into the procedures. This is more important then ever in our new SOX world.

Thank you all for your thoughts and input. I have seen bizmanuals and copedia wanted my cell phone so did not pursue but will try them again. I will review all your comments and come back if I have any questions. As Mike says, it is LONG TERM project, just feels so onerous!!