If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a founder say “I can’t get staff to do what I say” or “I can’t get people to perform like me,” I’d have many more dollars. But, in their business, I will find that virtually no written policy exists.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? It sounds like something that a government departments spits out, which ties you up in useless red tape.

Well, yes, it can be that when it comes to governments and councils and other largely unproductive groups. But in any organisation, it has an essential purpose.

Policies are the rules of the game. It’s what you can do and what you cannot do. It’s how we handle things. It’s how we don’t handle things.

It includes standard processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs). It could be a list of all the successful ways you found to transact with clients or run your business over the years.

It’s what works and what doesn’t work. If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ve developed many ways to succeed. Did you document it? Did you let your team know? Or are you letting them make mistakes and find out for themselves? Or are you letting them make up their own policy? 

If your staff handle the same situation differently, you have a lack of policy. They make up for it by trying to work it out. This is a pass on initiative, but it slows down your business and makes it harder to generate profit.

Policy can also be things like your payment terms. When do you process a refund? How do you handle a client complaint? What is the time we turn up, go home? 

If your destination was to get to the top of the mountain, and there was a well-worn track which got you there, policy would be the edges of the path. 

In achieving the goals and purposes of the business (i.e., get to the top of the mountain), you need to know what are distractions, what aren’t distractions. When are we going off track? When are we on the proven path to success?

In small and medium businesses—there’s a complete lack of policy, meaning almost all of it sits in the owner’s head. What does that lead to? It means that you have to explain yourself constantly.

If you have to explain yourself more than once on the same subject, it’s a missing policy.

When you leave the office or are not available for a week and things go bad, it’s because you have a missing policy. Or it's not known.

I often hear founders complaining about how they can’t get good staff, when you look in behind the curtain, you will find a tremendous lack of policy.

How can a staff member know how you get results if you don’t tell them? 

What happens if you don’t have policy? 

The business will run on opinions, feelings, and whatever people think is a good way to do it at that time. The problem with this is that everyone’s going to have a different idea.

Then you end up with "Complaint A" getting handled five different ways depending on who picks it up. It’s going to bounce around the organisation. It will cause tremendous amounts of double work, busy work or waste.

Here’s the thing with a group. Everyone has their own personal goals and purposes. They have their own agendas and their own experiences. Their own training. Their experiences can be good or bad.

So you unite them under one purpose in your organisation, and then you need to tell them: 

• How do we play this game? 
• How do we win? 
• What is acceptable behaviour? 
• What is bad behaviour? 
• What time do we show up? How do we take time off? 
• What do we do if we’ve got a complaint or a problem? 
• How do we deal with our customers? 
• And so on.

If you don't, they'll make it up.

When playing any team sport, such as soccer, there are rules: What’s considered good and bad. What is rewarded and what is frowned upon. There’s a time you start, there’s positions on the field, there’s what you can and can’t do. There’s opponents but they also have to play by the same rules. If people don’t know the rules, it’s not much fun. It's a free-for-all and chaos. 

Can you imagine a team where the goalkeeper turned up 20 minutes late? Well, that team would fail, and it’s no different with business. You need clear policy to win.

Here are some examples of policy that every business should have and that are not that hard to produce:

1. What is the goal and purpose of the company? Why does it exist? That’s the first policy your staff should see.
2. What are your core values? What are the important values and core things you believe in?
3. What is the schedule? How do you take time off?
4. What are the roles? Who does what?

It can seem boring, like a waste of time, but get the writing done. Get it out of your head. Then get your staff to study and understand it.

Clear policy, well known, sets you up for an exit—where you can step back, or out. Now a manager can come in and manage using your policy.

You’ve learned a lot. There’s a lot of fantastic knowledge in your mind which you need to share with the rest of the team.

I urge you to work on this.

If you need help, we specialise in extracting it and documenting it quickly. It’s one of the modules of the Ideal Life Business Program.

You can book a call here to discuss if this module is a fit for you.