Did you know?

An employee manual is almost always a rich minefield of opportunity.

• For new hires, it provides a warm welcome into a new community that will soon dominate day-to-day life.
• For old hands (er, existing workers), it forms a quick reference manual for everything from dress code to pay periods, parental leave to continuing education, workers comp to grievances…and more.
• For HR, it’s a finely tuned instrument, presenting well-honed policies with the crisp clarity that anticipates questions, sidesteps confusion, and realizes efficiency for all.
• For everyone, it’s an effortless opportunity to reinforce your employer brand—and re-inspire afresh with your mission and core values.

But if you’re like countless companies around the world, your employee manual falls short:

• Possibly, it’s become a decades-old avalanche of densely legalistic, bluntly technical, and unnecessarily repetitive text.
• Probably, it’s dense, droning, and redundant—and frankly a chore to read.
• Realistically, it might not meet any of the above objectives.
• Ironically, it might be this way due to years of astute and responsive HR policymaking. An 8-headed monster borne from your own professional acumen. Oy.

How do you dial this back? How do you uncover latent opportunity—and reap the gains into a muscular organization?

Impart joy—not stuffy legalese

There’s a better way to convert all hires into allies—and brand evangelists. At MarketSmiths, we conduct employee manual writing that imparts joy—not stuffy legalese. They don’t just tell employees what to do and how to do it. Instead, they motivate new hires by way of the crucial, humanizing why.

If we were overhauling yours, here’s how it would work. First, we’d restructure your content—sifting convoluted sections into a simple format that makes things easy to find and follow.

Next, we reinvent your HR policy persona and voice. We eliminate the schoolmarm—replacing with authenticity, honor, and respect. Where your existing manual is rife with “don’ts,” we pepper it with meaningful do’s. We say what you need to once (vs. eight times), and we say it powerfully, succinctly, and with delight.

Finally, we leave your policies and procedures firmly intact. As copywriters, we are the messengers—not the rule makers. With a former lawyer at the helm, we’ll follow the rule of your law—if not the letter.

Bureaucracy to ease

We’ve accomplished this process for a handful of household brands, whose names we can’t share. We would be delighted to do this for you as well.

Presto: your notoriously bureaucratic HR document becomes a sharply honed instrument that reinforces branding, solidifies internal strategy, invites new employees into a welcoming community, and reaffirms the choice they’ve made to work for you. Talk about leveraging your human resources.

Interested in harvesting operational efficiencies—and transforming your organization into a leaner, more employee-friendly machine? Fill out our Contact form, and we’ll be in touch!