When organising an employee handbook, policy manual, procedures manual or all three combined, structure is important. It helps organise and contextualise information making it easier to locate.
Build a simple or complex solution
One handbook with many sections
Many handbooks with few sections
There are many ways to structure any kind of handbook, from a monolithic single document, to a collection of interrelated documents, to collections of handbooks within one large manual. Sometimes in specific industries, the structure will be pre-determined by standards, de facto or otherwise.
Our solution doesn’t impose any restrictions or design philosophy upon you we fully support custom handbook structures, you are free to create sections, and within those sections place other sections, or documents. A section can be called anything you like ‘HR Manual’ for example or ‘IT Policies Manual’ or ‘Part 145 Maintenance Organisation Exposition’, what it’s called will vary based on your need and industry.
Within those sections you can have further sections ‘Family Friendly Policies’ or ‘Communication Policies’, ‘Line Maintenance Procedures’ and so on.
This allows you to build up a structure that fits your exact needs, it can be sorted and organised how you like, to match your requirements.
Each section allows you to specify defined behaviours, which can be overridden on a per document basis.
You can, for example, make all documentation in a given section of your handbook subject to periodic review, or have documentation expire after a set period of time, or ensure that any changes within that section are notified by read and sign. What’s appropriate for a section that manages compliance related procedures, isn’t necessarily appropriate for a section that manages brand guidelines, so how a document is treated within the manual can vary based on what it is and also where it is in the structure, we fully support this.
As any manual or handbook increases in size, it can contain many sections. Organised in a hierarchical manner, this allows users to drill down to specific areas of interest, and of course as well as all documentation being searchable in system, all structure is searchable.
An example of this could be the following structure.
This allows someone who knows exactly what they want to quickly locate the document, and also someone who knows there should be something in the HR area about starters and leavers to be a little less specific.
Of course all documentation can be searched at any time with search, but structure certainly helps looser searching when a user knows they need something but isn’t sure exactly which document they need.
The handbook structure can of course be organised in any way that suits your requirements, changed, moved and re-ordered as needed, and is just another feature we offer to improve ease of use of an online manual of any kind.