Do your documents earn their keep?
We’ve seen many businesses littered with documents that don’t earn their keep—documents that don’t deliver any business benefits. They are rarely read, they don’t increase production or sales, raise quality, improve efficiency or enhance safety. They are freeloaders that consume resources and don’t deliver anything in return.
If you have freeloading documents, here are four ways we’ve found to turn them into valuable workers.
Make documents easy to use
Documents don’t earn their keep if they’re hard to use. Typically documents are hard to use when they’re poorly structured or laid out, wordy, cryptic, slow to get to the point or crammed with jargon and legalese.
Documents like this are a turn-off. We’ve found that people who try to use them usually give up and ask a workmate for the information they’re after. And the answer may well be unreliable or just plain wrong.
Make documents easy to use by ensuring they:
- are well laid out
- are logically structured
- use plain and direct language suited to the intended users.
You may need help from an information designer to achieve this.
Develop documents that are relevant and realistic
Documents that earn their keep must be relevant and realistic. We’ve found that documents often don’t tell people what they really need to know. Even worse is a document that gives an instruction that won’t work on the job. This breeds a culture where written guidelines and instructions are ignored because people have dismissed the documents as produced by people who are out of touch. This kind of culture was a major contributor to the Moura Mine disaster.
To produce documents with relevant content that applies in the workplace, involve people who do the tasks in the writing process. These people should:
- contribute to the content
- review and criticise drafts and
- test the documents on the job to evaluate their usefulness.
Implement documents
Documents won’t earn their keep if nobody knows about them.
Implement new or changed documents by communicating to all affected people:
- that the documents exist
- something about what’s in the documents and why they will be useful to them
- how to get access to them
You must then actively seek feedback from people, and incorporate improvements quickly.
You will need to provide detailed training for people whose work is significantly affected by new or changed documents.
Keep documents up-to-date
Documents don’t earn their keep if they’re out-of-date—they’ll be forgotten, just like the dated pair of pants in your cupboard you wouldn’t be seen dead in.
To keep documents up-to-date:
- follow a system for reviewing and revising documents so that they continue to serve the needs of the business
- review documents regularly to check that they remain easy to use, and have correct, up-to-date content relevant to people’s needs
- allocate ownership of documents and hold owners accountable for keeping their documents current.
When you find documents that are out-of-date, involve employees with subject matter expertise in revising them. And remember, if you’ve made a significant revision, implement the document again to ensure that affected people are aware of the changes.
To sum up
If you’re going to put time and resources into developing documents, make sure they deliver business benefits—that is, help people work better together. Make sure they are easy for people to use on the job, relevant to their work and provide realistic advice. And don’t forget that writing is only half the story—unless people know about documents and what they can do for them, there is no point putting finger to keyboard. You need to put just as much effort into communicating and training people in new or changed documents as you’ve put into writing them.