Are you responsible for writing policies at your company? Whether you’re writing them for the entire company or just your own group, are you writing effective policies?

Too often, I’ve seen business policies at are very poorly written. They aren’t comprehensible, or they say things they don’t mean. If you ever have to tell people “I know the policy says that, but it doesn’t mean that,” you have a bad policy that needs rewriting.

Rule 1: Use as few words as possible. Extra words produce confusion. Try rewetting your policy to eliminate as many words as you can without changing the meaning of the document. Enlist good writers to help you. Legislators follow a fundamental legal principle that every word in a law must be interpreted as if it’s part of the law for a reason. Your policy is a law within your company. Follow the same principle in your policies.

Rule 2: Use care when using terms. Be sure the term means what you think it means. This is especially true if you’re using a term that may have a very precise, technical meaning among members of your audience. If you misuse terms, assuming people will know what you really meant, you will write a policy that enforces rules you never wanted.

Rule 3: Be reasonable. Any military officer will tell you the truth of the old maxim, “Never give an order that you know will not be followed.” Before declaring a new policy, find out if it will be so onerous to your business that no one will follow it. There’s no point in publishing policies that will go unused from day one.

Rule 4: Watch out for unintended consequences. Check the impact of your policy with the people who will be affected. If your wordings overly broad or inappropriately narrow, you may end up restricting activities that are important to running your business smoothly. For example, you may have a legitimate need to restrict employee use of cellular phones, but a poorly worded cellphone policy could keep your information-technology employees from being able to receive and respond to urgent equipment failure pages sent to their BlackBerries.

Rule 6: Don’t assume that you’re a good writer. Very few people are good writers. Your organization undoubtedly has a few, and they probably have jobs at aren’t primarily about writing. Seek them out, befriend them, and get their help saying what you mean to say. If the policy will affect them, they’ll probably have a lot of intrinsic motivation to help you.

Poorly written policies infuriate employees and create resentment. They also make the company look bad. Neither one of these things is good for a manager.

It should go without saying that these rules are even more critical when you’re writing policies that impact customers. Employees have to deal with your poor policies, unless they are willing to quit and find employment elsewhere. Customers, however, can very easily take their business elsewhere, and they will rarely tell you that they’ve abandoned you because they found your policies asinine.

Some of the managers where I work have that unique form of functional illiteracy wherein they use words that sound like, but are not, English.  These words are supposed to be a jargon that, I suppose, they believe makes them sound very managerial, intelligent, and possessed of secret knowledge not known to the mere mortal rank-and-file.

In reality, it just makes them sound like idiots to anyone that actually understands English.

A case in point: the management-jargon word “decisioned.”

Example usage:

We haven’t yet decisioned which software package we’re going to use. The management team is still conducting the decisioning process.

People actually believe this makes them sound smart…

The proper English way to say that would be

We haven’t decided which software package we’re going to use. The management team is still deciding.

Note the use of the perfectly good English words “decided” and “deciding.” Everybody understands those common English words, whereas only managers see the point in creating new words for the same concept. I wonder what made them decide to invent “decisioning?”

To be fair, “decisioned” is a real English word. Unfortunately for the managers, it has a very specific meaning. It’s used only in relation to the sport of boxing, where it means the awarding of a fight to a boxer on the basis of points instead of a knockout.  Knowing this, management conference calls about project statuses are often unintentionally hilarious.  I never knew that management was so pugilistic!