Business and Company Operating Manual

A business or company operating manual contains all the policies, procedures and work instructions that make up the way a business carries out all the functions in the business. Ideally an operating manual will contain all the information required for new and existing employees to access for training, reviewing and up-skilling.

Creating a manual requires a dedicated effort from the senior management and ownership of the business right through to all the employees of the business. The manual itself will ultimately contain all the intellectual knowledge of all the people in the business.

To successfully complete the manual requires firstly decisions to be made about structure of the end product before a method of creation is chosen. The users of the manual in the end are present and future employees of the business. If the manual is created in such a way that the users are unable to find information or the structure is confusing then the intention of the manual may be lost.

Alternatively a business may look to hire a business analyst or technical writer to assist with creating their manual.

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