Many years ago, I went camping with my family, and I recall seeing the camp rules posted up on a wooden board as we drove into the camp. They went something like this:
1. No swimming in the lake after dark
2. Clean up your garbage before you leave the
camp
3. Be courteous to your neighbours
4. Don’t make us make another rule
Really, I might have mis-remembered the first three rules,
but that last one has stuck in my head – so many companies have pages and pages
of documents. I suppose sometimes it’s necessary –
when I helped a company I worked for register under ISO 27001 we had to
document every single process. But
looking back, I bet I could have cut our 15 lb. policy binder down by at least
5 lbs. by creating the rule “Don’t make us make another rule”.
When we started our company at Kingston Data and Credit, I
thought long and hard about what had worked and what hadn’t at previous
companies I had worked with, or I had observed from working with colleagues. And really, there are lots of ways to avoid
making endless policies.
Trust Everyone and
Think The Best of Them
If your company has a policy for how to store food in the
corporate fridge, odds are you don’t trust folks to act like responsible adults
– its likely someone proved to you in the past that they couldn’t handle the
responsibility of taking food home at the end of the day or work week, and the
Avacado and Ham Sandwich Incident of 2005 still haunts your halls and is a
hushed story of legend. But really, do
you need to kill half a tree in documenting a policy?
Don’t Expect Your
Manuals To Manage People
So let’s say you have someone who isn’t dressing
professionally, or offhandedly says inappropriate comments – do you hide in
your office and create a set of rules, hoping it will fix the problem? Or do you talk to your co-workers and ask
them to fix problems or understand expectations? Even better, do you build a company culture
that allows your team members to sort things out on their own and solve
problems without the intrusive hand of ‘management’?
Honestly, if you have 197 good employees and 3
less-than-good employees, you can try to correct the behaviours of the minority
by creating stifling rules, and harming the majority of the people who work
with you that could thrive in a more open, accepting environment, or you can
deal directly with the issues at hand?
Ultimately, if a small handful of people are being disruptive to your
company’s workflow, they need to clearly understand what’s reasonable, or
understand that they can’t stay in the company.
That doesn’t mean being cruel, it does mean having honest conversations.
What Do You Really Need
To Document
So, if your person responsible for daily reconciliations gets
hit by a bus – does someone know how to step into their role and do their job
while they recover in the hospital?
Better yet, do you have a step-by-step instruction manual written out to
walk someone only moderately familiar with the task through the process? That’s more important than an abstract HR
policy that might not be followed.
If you find a rule that isn’t being followed, or isn’t
understood by the majority of your co-workers, or is at odds with how you want
to operate, it might be time to consider the fourth rule, and remove it, if you
can.
Nothing Is Set In
Stone
The other thing to keep in mind is that your rules, set down
years ago, might be out of date – they might be irrelevant. They might even be outright wrong. Whatever rules and policies you do have
should be reviewed, and someone should be the caretaker of the ‘company bible’. That means keeping the rules up to date, and
in line with HR laws in your province or state, but it also means curating the
tone and reflecting the culture that you want to promote and maintain.
Conclusion
The reason I’m writing this is that we have a new staff
member starting next week, and as I read through our employee manual, I see
things out of date, things that we believe in that aren’t written down, and
some blatant examples of corporate passive-language mumbo-jumbo that desperately
need rewriting into plain English.
It’s important to
constantly evaluate the rules you do need, and make sure they are a living
document that is updated as your company grows and evolves – but try to keep
the page count to a minimum.
Here are some of my favourite employee manuals … you will
notice there isn’t a fridge policy to be found here:
If anyone has questions about company policies and
procedures, and how it affects your company’s culture, I’m very interested to
talk if you would like – feel free to drop me an email or call.
Thanks kindly,
Blair DeMarco-Wettlaufer
KINGSTON Data and Credit
Cambridge, Ontario
226-946-1730
No comments:
Post a Comment