How to Create Your Business's Policy and Procedures Manual

Keep your business's basic procedures and policies well documented. Whenever a policy or procedure question comes up, your business's employees can check this manual. Here are some of the things you'll find in any good policies and procedures manual:

• Welcome statement by the CEO

  
  



• Equal-employment opportunity (EEO) policy statement (including sexual and other forms of harassment)

  
  



• Company history and overview

  
  



• Employment at-will (if applicable)

  
  



• Company mission statement and values

  
  



• Essential company rules, such as work hours, business ethics, smoking, dress code, sick days, and so on

  
  



• Performance appraisal procedures

  
  



• Disciplinary procedures (you must have a lawyer carefully review this section)

  
  



• Health, safety, and security rules and procedures, including fire-exit maps

  
  



• Benefit, pension, and deferred-income programs

  
  



• Parking and transportation information, including maps

  
  

Here's some advice for creating a procedures manual:

• Separate company policies from job-specific procedures. Try to make a distinction in your employee manual between policies that apply to everyone in the company (general hours, payroll, vacation, and so on) and procedures that relate specifically to how people do their individual jobs.

  
  



• Keep it simple. Employee manuals don’t need to be literary works, but they do need to be clear and concise.

  
  



• Pay attention to legalities. Anything that you put in writing about your company’s policies or procedures automatically becomes a legal document, and someone may use it against you in a wrongful dismissal suit. Make sure that an expert in employment law reviews the manual before you publish it.

  
  



• Control the distribution. Every employee who receives a manual should sign a document that acknowledges his or her receipt and understanding of the manual. You don’t want the manual to circulate outside the company — and the manual needs to contain a clear statement to this effect.

  
  



• Make the layout reader-friendly. The layout should enhance rather than interfere with the reader’s ability to grasp the manual's contents. Be consistent; use bullets, not paragraphs; avoid small type; and use graphics to add interest.

  
  

Whatever else your employee manual does, make sure that it doesn’t do any of the following:

• Make promises you can’t keep.

  
  



• Publish procedures you don’t follow or can’t enforce.

  
  



• Say anything that someone may construe as discriminatory.

  
  



• Use the phrase “termination for just cause” without specifying what you mean.

  
  

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