Defining the Process – Types of Documents

This post is a part of a series to help you define processes in your business

In our process documentation, we have the following types of docs:

1. Team member details. We do have an office, but half our team is remote. This directory puts a name to a face and provides employee details to the team.
2. Company mission, vision, values. Right on our landing page for Notion, we list our company mission, vision, values. These provide an important context for them and they will continue to see these to be reminded of our overall focus.
3. Job descriptions. We do use these in the hiring process but refer back to them. It is so important that your team knows what is expected of them.
4. Status of goals and milestones. We have a single objective each year and key results under each one. While we do our project management in Asana, this page gives the team a quick high-level view of where we stand.
5. Employee onboarding. When we hire a new employee, we have over a dozen accounts to get set up for them to be able to do their job. There are documents that help them understand a bit of the why behind what we are asking them to do.
6. Employee training. We have detailed training docs to help our employees learn their jobs faster and to ensure quality in making sure they know how to perform tasks correctly.
7. Knowledge base articles. We use a ton of different pieces of software both internally and for our clients. Each of these has documentation in our knowledge about how to use them, implement them and troubleshoot issues.
8. Standard operating procedures (SOP). Within our knowledge base, we also document processes in the form of SOPs. These articles are more detailed in steps it takes to accomplish a task. For instance, we have a long SOP article about how to launch a website. There are a bunch of details, that we go through when we make a project live and this list keeps growing and getting refined as we learn how to do things better.
9. Client documentation. We support over a hundred clients. Each of them has a page in this database with a full history of our work with them and any major details we need to remember to be able to support them.

All these docs are in Notion. As I mentioned previously, don’t get overwhelmed with documentation. Just start today. Just start creating one document to help your team with the most stressful process right now. Tomorrow you can do the next one. Before you know it, you will have a whole library of process documentation that will allow your business to run itself.