Writing procedures

Ross Woods Rev. Feb 10

Procedures are mainly sets of steps on how to do something. They can be quite simple, such as a staff meeting topic that is reviewed regularly, instructions for a particular task (e.g. how to use a machine), or instructions written at the top of a form to be filled in. In other cases, they can be quite somplex, such as the use of difficult-to-use, dangerous machinery, or tasks that are high risk.

Procedures are a little different from policies, which tend to be general principles to guide decisions. Do procedures need to be separate from policies? It depends ...

• In a very small organization, policies are often very procedural and implementational. Consequently, procedures and policies don’t need to be separate.
• In a larger organization, the board or senior executives must approve policies, while procedures need to be easy to change. Consequently, they need to be separate.

Do procedures need to be written down? It depends ...

• They need to be written down if they are subject to audit, or there are legal risks relating to non-compliance. They also need to be written down if tasks are too complex to trust to memory, or your organization is large or multi-site and you need to use them consistently (e.g. for quality assurance).
• Otherwise, they may be only in oral form.

Whether or not they are written down, they need to be part of your general work culture and kept up to date. Having a procedure written down is not much good legally if it is not consistently applied, updated, and taught to new employees. Similarly, an oral procedure that is consistently used, updated, and communicated to staff has a good chance of standing up in court.

What to do

1. Check through existing procedures. Are they used? If so, who uses them and for what purpose?
2. Find out the form they need to take, e.g. a staff handbook, instructions on a set of forms, an induction handbook, a WHS guide, a website, a software design.
3. Go through staff meeting minutes and make a list of decisions on procedures. (Look also for assumed procedures.) You will probably find that decisions were made in different ways from time to time, and might be quite inconsistent.
4. Ask people how the do routine tasks. Keep notes and compare what different people say.
5. Write the draft procedures, using simple, user-friendly language so that your procedures are suitable for helping new staff learn a job. Diagrams can be be better than words at explaining very simply.
6. Get the decision-maker (e.g. supervisor) to approve the procedure.
7. See how they go in practice and improve them where necessary.

Example

Here's a simple example of a procedure for filling in a form: 1. Read form. 2. Fill in form 3. Check form 4. Hand form in.

Sometimes the procedure asks you for a decision so you can follow a particular set of steps:

1. Read form
2. Fill in form
3. Do I need to include any other papers?
• No, I don't need to include any other papers
• Yes, I do need to include other papers
• Find out exactly what they want
• Get other papers and include them
4. Check form (and other papers if needed)
5. Hand in form (with other papers if needed)

Of course, your procedures will be a little more complicated than this. When you have lots of questions for people to choose between different paths of action, it's called a flow chart.