Here’s another tip for writing policies and procedures and employee manuals that get good results.
Provide the RESULT as well as the Action in your steps.
This is an simple but powerful way to keep people from taking a wrong turn and getting confused, or worse still making a costly error! Unless you tell your readers what to look for, they will not know if the result they get is correct or not. Try to provide a verifiable outcome for each step.
Example:
If correct result of mixing 2 chemicals is that the solution turns BLUE, then be sure to tell the reader that. If the solution does not turn blue, something is WRONG.
Similarly, if after selecting ENTER in a software step, a specific screen should display, then show the correct result. If something else displays, the reader will know something is wrong.