Download 15 free policy and procedure templates to establish clear standards and streamline processes. Create effective policies with our customizable templates.
Adelina Karpenkova September 2, 2024
What’s more important for process success — explaining why one should perform it or how exactly one can achieve it?
Hopefully, you say “both” — ‘cause that’s what this article’s all about.
Policies are the why behind the fundamental processes in your company. Procedures, on the other hand, are the what and how of every internal process. Policies and procedures can exist independently, but they often go hand-in-hand.
In this guide, we’ve clarified the relationship between policies and procedures and provided you with 15 free policy and procedure templates and a simple (and fast!) process to create them.
Read on to discover:
Here are 15 different types of policy and procedure templates to build your policies and procedures in no time!
Use this company policy template to create a workplace policy outlining rules and expectations for your employees.
Customize this template with your own policies and procedures like:
With this standard operating procedure template, you can build step-by-step instructions to help employees carry out routine operations consistently and ensure compliance with regulations.
Use this customizable standard operating procedure template to build procedure documents with your:
Use this change management template to build your change management policy and procedures:
Typically used in manufacturing, construction, and IT industries, a Method of Procedure template ensures that tasks are performed consistently and correctly.
Use this Method of Procedure template to outline step-by-step instructions for performing a specific task or process, objectives and expected outcomes.
Try from 100+ free process documentation templates in the Scribe template gallery.
Use these templates to:
. all for half the time in effort.
Here are a few of our popular policy and procedure templates for different industries and job functions:
This IT Standard Operating Procedure template outlines step-by-step instructions for completing specific IT-related tasks.
Use this runbook template to outline procedures, instructions and guidelines to help IT professionals manage and maintain computer systems and applications.
Use this IT procurement policy template to standardize your policy and procedures for the IT procurement lifecycle.
Customize this data protection policy template to create a data governance policy with clear procedures for handling data and data protection.
This internal onboarding process template provides both the employee and employer with a comprehensive framework for new hire onboarding.
Create an employee handbook with your workplace policy, guidelines and information about your procedures for employees.
Use this attendance policy template to define your workplace policy for work hours, punctuality and absences.
Customize this customer service standard operating procedure template with your company's processes for delivering high-quality customer service.
Use this business development standard operating procedure template to build a comprehensive framework for all phases of your business development cycle.
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Tailor this product support standard operating procedure template to create a structured approach for handling product support activities, ensuring that customer inquiries and issues are addressed promptly and professionally.
With this knowledge transfer standard operating procedure template, you can create a systematic approach to transferring knowledge or skills from one individual or team to another.
Let’s start with the basics.
A policy is a system of rules and principles determining an organization or team’s course of action.
Policies regulate certain business processes, like internal communication, change management, accounting operations, etc.
A procedure is an established method of performing a business operation. Documenting procedures is the best way to standardize repetitive actions and achieve consistent results.
Written standard operating procedures (SOPs) usually offer guidelines for accomplishing specific tasks in the form of step-by-step instructions, hierarchical processes or flowcharts.
These are just some procedure examples:
Most often, policies include procedures. On the contrary, procedures are self-sufficient without policies. So how do you draw the line between these two?
Here’s a simple breakdown of the key difference between policy and procedure.
Define the organization's culture
Define how goals are achieved
Strategic in nature
Practical in nature
Don’t change often
Require regular reviews
Every company needs established policies and procedures to function smoothly.
While policies define the rules to comply with (e.g., anti-discrimination policies describe acceptable and unacceptable behavior for employees), business procedures feature the steps to take to translate these principles into life (e.g., how to act if you spot discrimination in the workplace).
Policies and procedures have one common feature — they create standards for everyone to follow. Without those standards, you can hardly align people’s actions and achieve consistent results at work.
Now we know that a solid outline creates the ground for great policies and procedures.
These are typical components for a policy and procedure outline (yet they’re rarely all used in one file):
Writing effective policies and procedures requires careful planning and consideration. Here's a step-by-step guide to help you get started:
When documenting policies and procedures, you can’t just copy and paste the ones you’ve found on the web.
Well, you can. But that’s usually no better than having no policies and procedures at all. So once you’ve chosen your templates, make sure to make them specific and useful.
Great policies and procedures are:
Avoid long introductions and cliches.
It’s especially important to mind when you work on policies. Often, organizations develop policies only because the law requires them. They copy something from the web, customize it slightly and publish it somewhere their employees will never try to look.
That’s why it’s usually so difficult to read through an organization’s policies. That’s why employees have little to no understanding of what their company’s policies are.
Instead of publishing walls of text that nobody wants to wade through, be straightforward in your policies and procedures.
Jargon is the second biggest problem of policies and procedures.
If you expect your employees to actually use the documentation, write it in plain language. Here are some rules to keep in mind:
Regardless of the topics covered, your policies and procedures should be easily accessible and understandable.
For easy navigation, your documentation should follow an established structure. Break down your policies and procedures into sections; separate them with headings and proper formatting.
It’s good to have one layout to use across all your files. Later on, we’ll provide a specific outline you can follow in your policies and procedures.
If your documentation is too generic, people won’t use it. To check whether your policies and procedures are specific enough, make sure they answer these questions:
Once you’re able to answer the questions above, you can rest assured your documentation speaks exactly to the people it’s intended for.
Consistency is the key to properly adopting your policies and procedures.
Follow these tips to keep your documentation consistent.
Sound policies and procedures are regularly revised and updated to ensure their content is always fresh and relevant.
It particularly relates to procedures, as they’re way less static than policies. In a growing company, business operations are undergoing continuous changes, and so are procedures.
Both policies and procedures should be flexible enough so that you can adjust them and introduce new standards to your team whenever it’s needed.
Take these simple yet effective steps to not get stuck in a laborious process of writing policies and procedures.
Before you start with your workflow, define your priorities. Knowing which policies and procedures are urgent and which ones can wait will help you focus on the most important tasks first.
You may follow the layouts we’ve suggested above or create your own one — regardless of your choice, it’s important that you use a template to build your policies and procedures.
Want to write policies your team will actually read, and set up easy-to-follow procedures? What if we told you you could do it all in half the time?
Process documentation software like Scribe removes the manual effort from process documentation.
Save 20+ hours documenting and sharing your policies and procedures with Scribe’s auto-captured guides.
And if you ever need to update your policy and procedure manual (you will!), Scribes are easy to edit. Have one Scribe in several places? Not a problem. One update will fix your Scribe wherever it’s shared or embedded.
Delegate the creation of policies and procedures to your team. This way, you’ll be able to collect helpful feedback, get more collaborators on the project and get the documentation done faster.
Lastly, don’t hesitate to spend some time developing a consistent workflow, templates, and a style guide. Standardize the process of documenting policies and procedures so that all the collaborators can align their actions and follow an established format.
Writing policies and procedures can be hard, tedious… and downright boring. But it doesn’t have to be. Pick a template, get your team on board and use the right tool to automate the process. Check out Scribe, for free, today!
