All businesses need to keep hold of their internal and external documents. They need to refer back to archives or decisions made in writing, on paper, and verified correctly. If a business doesn’t do this, they operate in a kind of vague soup of understanding, perhaps somehow moving forward by inertia but never quite building the firmament they need for success. Ensuring your small business knows how to document is one of the most essential systems you could set up from the start, even as a startup.
This is because you will continually need to refer to these documents from the inception of your firm. This is for legal purposes, but also to clarify your own direction, and ensure you’re not going to follow multiple directions at once. If you struggle with this, it’s important to get it down from the offset. This is where we hope to contribute our ideas:
Archives
Consider your working archives. Most of the time, they will be extremely instructive should you ever need to refer to that which you have discussed previously. Old legal documents, accounts, public letters and messages should be archived correctly, both through the use of a competent digital archivals suite, scanning your paperwork in, but also keeping paper archives where necessary, especially if these documents cannot be electronically signed for whatever reason. Ensuring your business knows how to document is an essential part of keeping a singular, cohesive vision, and ensuring that you know where the foundations of your current direction lay.
Archives can also help you in a bind. For example, keeping the disciplinary reports of an employee will be essential if you ever need to prove why their termination was acceptable and not a case of wrongful layoff. In this way, archives should be viewed as the backbone of your legal defense, as evidence should you ever need to defend your firm or litigate on its behalf.
Trophies
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom. A business can do well to remind itself of how far it’s come. This isn’t just some self-congratulatory effort without any juice behind it either. Staff motivation can skyrocket when they realise just how well they have done in the past, or the achievements of those that came before them. They often say a pride comes before a fall, but no company can function from year to year without pride as a fundamental understanding about itself.
You might decide to display trophy cabinets in the main corridor as people come in. Not only does this look impressive to your guests, but motivates staff as they walk in and remember the history of the place in which they work. Awards, photographs of past teams, and perhaps old memorabilia such as old patched logos or trophies that might have been gifted during event functions.
If you run a staff awards ceremony, you might also have a staff award copy waiting in the front hall behind beautiful lit glass displays. This can show staff without a doubt that they will be celebrated if they contribute something wonderful to your firm. If you’re hoping to build a wonderful staff atmosphere, it can’t hurt to start here.
An Indexing System
A competent indexing system is essential. Staff will often need to refer to old documents and other important policy documents to ensure their work is proceeding as required. However, if they have no way of referring to those instructional documents, their job is impeded. An excellent search tagging system is essential to ensure that these documents can be found from top to bottom, and that they always shine in their relevance. You might also construct folders to ensure that documents that have been scanned but not yet tagged in your system can be found through a general gist alone. This means having dedicated staff archiving documents to ensure that everything is labelled correctly. In smaller firms, you might manage this yourself, or train staff to do it as part of their daily responsibilities.
Transcriptions
Often, recording meetings or other important connections or speeches will be done through audio. But often, if you have a large volume of these kinds of recordings, it can be a time-consuming and often inaccurate process for just any staff member to take care of. This is where utilizing an excellent service such as those offered by Take Note can help you shine, and ensure that every word spoken is written in a thoroughly well-formatted direction.
The time, energy, effort and errors you save when using a service like this is hard to fully describe from the offset. But you will absolutely notice its positive effects over time, and thank yourself for the decision.
Permissions
Permissions are essential for your firm to share documents as is best for the safety of your business and relevance of your staff. Let’s take a simple example to illustrate this point. Google documents, sheets and slides all have sharing permissions that can be used. If you are registered as a business and are using the Google Suite, you have even more security features. Sharing permissions with particular people, sharing them with a group or division in your company, or allowing anyone to view the link is all possible, and can mean collaborative work on documents together. This functionality is free.
Paid suites will often utilize VPN connections to ensure the privacy of your document sharing and ensure they remain hidden even from the right people in your firm, if they do not go through the proper security avenues. Also, allowing timed access to certain documents can ensure that it’s only viewed for the right amount of time. Copy protection can also prevent copy-paste or the making of an additional digital set of the document on the worker’s module. This all ensures documents are well protected, on a need to know and share basis, and never interfere with the security of your firm. Ensure your permissions are set right for the best success.
With these tips, your small business is sure to document correctly.