An operations manual is like an online encyclopedia familiarizing employees about your company and guiding them on how to do their jobs well. It teaches employees how to carry out tasks, act in emergencies, and contribute meaningfully towards the company’s success. With step-by-step instructions explained using images and videos, an operations manual helps employees give their best shot at work.
You can’t handhold your employees every time they are confused with a work process or want more clarity around their roles. An operations manual does that for you. Here are the top benefits you can reap by creating an operations manual:
With an operations manual always available to assist employees, the chances of making errors at work are little to zero. With fewer mistakes happening, employees turn into better performers, and the quality of work improves significantly.
An operations manual makes employees more accountable for their actions. If any mistakes happen, despite having access to the manual, employees have no choice but to take responsibility for everything they do. They no longer have the leverage to say - “We didn’t know how to do this or that.”
Employees tend to assume things when there is no written proof of how a task or process is supposed to be performed. With an operations manual, employees have access to standardized work processes that helps them work with full clarity and zero confusion.
When new people join your company, they need consistent support to perform well in their new roles and get up to speed quickly. While you cannot train each employee individually, the operations manual can. It guides them at every step on how to complete tasks and carry out processes with minimum errors and maximum efficiency.
If you want employees to read your operations manual and give it the attention it deserves, try adding just what’s necessary and exclude everything that makes the manual bloated with too much information.
Here’s what you should definitely include in the manual:
Designed by experts, our operations manual template is completely customizable, easy to use, and works beautifully across devices. It comes with a ready-made structure consisting of a table of contents and content categories, so you can give full attention to the writing and editing work. Putting together an operations manual is a breeze with this free operations manual template.
What do you want to achieve with an operations manual? This is the first question you must ask yourself before kick-starting the process of creating an operations manual. A clear goal from the beginning gives your team a path to walk on and a direction to channelize their efforts.
Modern operation manual tools provide ready-to-use templates that give you the right starting point for building the online manual. Once you have a template, start writing content. You can either use our online editor or import existing files directly to the manual.
A single person working in silos cannot match the synergy of multiple employees working together. Allow your team to work in collaboration and bring forth their unique knowledge and skills. This will not only make the content creation process more efficient but increase the speed of work too.
As articles are written, assign them to editors and subject matter experts for review. Put workflow status for each article and keep everyone in the team informed of which articles are ready for review. Vetting the articles as soon as they are written brings errors to the surface, giving your team enough time to fix them.
After all your content is reviewed, you can confidently publish it on the web and mobile. Once published, it should be available for download as a PDF or ebook. Readers should also be able to print the manual if required.
This operations manual template acts as a roadmap that your team can easily follow to get the operations manual ready in minutes. Decide the content to be included and fill it in the template, along with images and videos. The structure is already set, so you don’t have to worry about that. Just add the content and customize the template with fonts, colors, and themes that align with your company’s branding.
An operations manual can turn into a mess if the information is not organized and presented well. It’s always better to create a structure first and then fill in relevant content in each section. Start by adding a home page at the beginning, decide the topics and create broad sections and subsections for the same. Write short paragraphs, add bullet points, and give your manual a prim and proper look.
As your company scales, work processes will undergo various changes. If your business operations manual doesn’t reflect these changes, it will soon turn irrelevant for employees. Keep a constant eye on which articles need to be updated, deleted, and revamped, and give your employees access to the latest information.
Build an operations manual that works as smoothly on mobile phones as it does on desktops. It should adjust to different screen sizes and help employees learn on the go at their convenience. This is a great way to promote a culture of 24x7 self-learning.
If an online operations manual can’t return the right results, it’s of hardly any use. To give employees quick access to the information they need, ensure that your manual has a prominent search bar that shows relevant page and article suggestions right when employees start typing a keyword or question.
If an online operations manual can’t return the right results, it’s of hardly any use. To give employees quick access to the information they need, ensure that your manual has a prominent search bar that shows relevant page and article suggestions right when employees start typing a keyword or question.
