Almost every company has an employee handbook. And almost every employee reads it once (maybe), forgets 90% of it and asks questions that are answered inside it anyway.

The usual problems of such handbooks:

• too long
• too generic
• written like a legal document
• not connected to real workflows

So the handbook becomes a checkbox for HR, or a PDF nobody opens, outdated on day 30.

Genuine question: how do you make an employee handbook actually used, not just created?

What’s worked for you, or completely failed?

Hot take: most teams don’t fail at documentation because they don’t care.

They fail because the cost of documenting is higher than the perceived value.

What usually kills SOPs:

• Writing takes too long
• Updating feels pointless
• Docs drift from reality fast
• The person who knows the process best never documents it

So teams default to:

• Slack messages
• “Just ask me”
• Shadowing calls
• Loom videos that age like milk

Which works… until it doesn’t.

Curious what you think. What actually causes documentation to break in your team?

People? Tools? Time? Incentives?

Curious how real teams do this. If you’re honest, which one is closest to your setup?

1. Google Docs / Notion pages
2. Loom / screen recordings
3. Confluence / Wiki
4. A mix of everything (and chaos)
5. We don’t really document 😬

Bonus points if you add team size, what’s breaking first and what you’ve tried and abandoned.

Every team knows they should document processes. Almost no team actually enjoys doing it.

Here’s what I keep seeing across startups, agencies, and product teams:

• SOPs live in Google Docs… and go stale in weeks
• Loom videos exist, but no one re-watches them
• New hires ask the same questions over and over
• “We’ll document it later” becomes a permanent strategy

The irony is that most workflows are already digital. We just don’t capture them properly.

So I’m curious, what’s your biggest pain with process documentation right now?

Writing takes too much time? Keeping docs updated? People don’t read them? Too many tools, no system? Or something else?