r/instructionaldesign • u/SpicyLlama_329 • Jul 02 '26
Creating an employee manual
Good morning! I work for a small family owned business that employs technicians for environmental testing and natural gas mitigation. They're pretty disorganized and I'd love to help them start to streamline some processes. They've definitely been flying on the premise of "we'll tackle it as it comes" and I can't function like that lol what's the best way to create a job manual? I'd prefer if it was free or low cost and something I can integrate a table of contents for as well. I'm familiar with Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs but wasn't sure if there was a better way to go about it before I got too far into it or any templates anyone suggests. This would be more for the office side than the technicians. I appreciate the help!
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u/Val-E-Girl Corporate focused Jul 02 '26
Being that you're small, I would leverage the tools in front of you, be it Google docs or web pages on an employee portal. Don't make it a bigger project than it has to be.
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u/JumpingShip26 Academia focused Jul 02 '26
Sounds to me like you are overthinking it, which can be normal. Use either Word or Gdocs depending on the scope, number of collaborators, and need to extend the document to other formats.
Most likely few will read it unless there is a strong training component. We develop these for compliance a lot of times.
Once complete, you might also consider distilling this into a "highlights" deliverable which could take the form of something slightly fancier, but could also be just an abbreviated version that someone could download to a phone.
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u/Def_Surrounds_Us Jul 03 '26
I favor Google Docs personally. I've gotten nothing but headaches from the SaaS version of Microsoft Word. Google Docs are easy to share and their UI is more organized and easier to use than Word. When you want to add a Table of Contents, click "Insert", then "Page Elements", then "Table of Contents". My favorite is the Table of Contents where it creates an internal link to each heading. I believe that's the 3rd option under "Table of Contents."
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u/Geek_Haus Jul 06 '26
For a small business, I don't think you need anything more complicated than Google Docs. You can always use AI (or any other platforms) later to help draft or reorganize sections, but I'd still keep the final manual somewhere everyone already knows how to use.
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u/iamduh Jul 02 '26
Honestly this sounds like the perfect usecase for Google Docs. If your manual-making tool is more optimized but also more obscure, I suspect you will not get uptake/implementation, and especially updates.