Every small company has someone who just knows how things work. Where the file is, which customer needs a call first, what to do when the printer jams on invoice day. Then that person books two weeks in Mexico, and for two weeks everyone finds out how much was kept in one head.
You do not need a manual
The word "documentation" makes people picture a binder that nobody reads. That is not the goal. The goal is a short page for each job that would otherwise stop when one person is away. If a stranger with ordinary common sense could get through the job using that page, it is good enough.
Start with the person you would least like to lose for a week, and begin with the jobs that would hurt first.
Finding the jobs
Ask your best person to list what they did last week, without leaving out the small things. Then ask a second question: which of these would be a problem if nobody did it for five working days? The second list is your priority. It usually holds things like:
- Weekly or monthly tasks tied to a date, such as payroll, invoicing and remittances.
- Anything that involves a login nobody else has.
Pick the three that hurt most. Do those first.
What goes on each page
Keep the format the same every time so people learn where to look.
- When it happens. Daily, weekly, the 15th, whenever an order comes in.
- What triggers it and what finishes it. How you know it needs doing, and how you know it is done.
- The steps. In order, in plain words, with screenshots where a screen is involved.
- Where things are. Which folder, which system, which supplier contact.
- What goes wrong. The two or three usual snags and how you get past them.
- When to stop and call someone. Who, and what counts as serious.
Write the page for the person covering, not for yourself.
The parts people forget
The steps are the easy part. What really saves a cover person is the judgment that the expert applies without noticing. When do we give a refund and when do we say no? Which customer gets a callback the same day? How late is too late for a delivery? Ask your best person to say these rules out loud. They are often a sentence or two, and nobody has ever written them down.
Passwords are a separate matter. Do not put them in a document. Use a password manager with shared access for the logins the business depends on, so a person can be locked out of nothing while their colleague is away.
Make it painless to produce
Nobody enjoys sitting down to write procedures. A far easier method is to record yourself, or have someone record you, doing the job once while you talk through it. Twenty minutes of speaking becomes a rough first draft. Today's tools are good at turning a recording into a tidy written page, which you then read and correct. The correction is the important part. The expert knows what is missing, and a tool does not.
Test it before you need it
A written page is only a guess until somebody else has tried it. Give it to a colleague and let them do the job while the expert watches and says nothing. Wherever the colleague hesitates, the page has a gap. Fix it and let them try again.
It is a good idea to run the whole thing once as a rehearsal. Let your best person take a day off on purpose, with a phone off, and see what breaks. Better to learn it on a quiet Tuesday than during the holiday.
Keep it in one place
A shared folder with one page per job and a clear name is enough. Put someone in charge of it. Set a reminder every six months to read the pages again, because procedures go stale the way price lists do. A guide that is wrong is worse than no guide, since people trust it.
Where to start
- Ask your best person what would stop if they vanished for a week.
- Choose the three jobs on that list that would hurt soonest.
- Record each one being done, talking aloud, then turn the recording into a page.
- Add the rules of thumb: refunds, priorities, cut-off times.
- Have a colleague follow the page once, and fix wherever they got stuck.
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