Introduction
A playbook documents shared principles so each team member can learn how to contribute to the company's long-term vision.
To write a playbook, you’ll need to identify the type of guide your business needs. With that context in place, you can follow a straightforward process for drafting, reviewing and publishing a company playbook that aligns everyone in the organization.
This article will help you get started by outlining what a playbook is and how to create one.
What’s a Playbook?
A playbook for businesses is a central resource for describing your company’s processes, guidelines and organizational structure. The purpose of a playbook is to document regulations and best practices to ensure consistency across teams. It serves as a primary source of truth the entire organization can reference whenever they need authoritative answers about policies and procedures.
What a playbook looks like depends on how it’s published. Sometimes, writers publish a comprehensive document in a shared cloud folder. Other times, they use knowledge base software to host their playbook on an internal website. In either case, the playbook's content must be accessible to the whole organization so everyone’s on the same page.
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4 Key Components of Business Playbooks
Playbooks contain plenty of information, but the following four components are key to a successful guide.
1. Vision Statement
A vision statement clearly and concisely describes the future the business hopes to achieve. It should include “we” statements that foster collaboration and shared understanding. This vision becomes a central tenet of your company culture, so consider it carefully.
For instance, one of Scribe’s primary goals reads, “We’re on a mission to unleash and uplevel the world’s know-how.” If we opened our playbook with this phrase, it would tell employees that each task should focus on creating new ways to help the world learn.
2. Processes and Workflows
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) should make up a large portion of your playbook to establish consistent processes. These guides should cover each step of a task in detail so any team member can complete it.
SOPs are especially helpful for onboarding, as new hires will have precise directions on how to do their jobs. But experienced team members can also reference these guides to refresh their memories on existing processes or learn about new ones.
3. Operational Standards and Guidelines
Establish expectations for quality, professionalism and productivity in the workplace with clearly defined standards and best practices. You can’t assume everyone shares your idea of a strong company culture, so write guidelines that explicitly communicate your vision for the business's operations. These criteria could include KPI benchmarks, email response times and attire requirements.
4. Organizational Structure
Provide a diagram visualizing your departments and hierarchy to clarify the company’s reporting structure. Identify everyone’s roles and responsibilities, and designate subject matter experts that workers can rely on when they have relevant questions. Remember to include contact information to help employees communicate, especially across teams.
Benefits of Having a Playbook in Business
With a detailed playbook, your organization can experience the following benefits:
- Alignment: A playbook outlines SOPs, responsibilities and universal best practices to establish consistency.
- Efficiency: By placing all these answers in one playbook, new hires and veteran employees alike can spend less time searching for guidance and more time staying on task.
- Organization: A well-organized playbook clarifies the business’s structure so people can understand where they fit into the company and who they should contact when needed.
- Culture: Playbooks detail how the business works and the vision it's driving toward, directly influencing how the company culture takes shape.
- Minimizing risk: By regulating your employees' workflows and guidelines, you reduce the probability of them making costly mistakes.
Examples of Business Playbooks
From organization-wide guides to team documents, here are a few examples of playbooks businesses use.
Company Playbook
A company playbook is a large-scale document covering everything a business needs to run efficiently. As a company grows, its playbook will need to scale up accordingly, so enterprises may have playbooks that are hundreds of pages long.
To start on this project, download our company policy template to take advantage of headings for policies, procedures, guidelines and responsibilities.
Operations Playbook
An operations playbook narrows the scope somewhat to create a document that outlines a company vision and the strategies to achieve it. It should also provide additional resources for readers, such as job aids and templates.
This operational manual template includes everything you need to create an operations guide, such as a mission statement, organizational structure and standard operating procedures.
Sales Playbook
This playbook type focuses on the sales team's role within the organization. It captures guidelines and resources they’ll need to design marketing content and contact customers. For example, this account management SOP template provides a structure for documenting the procedures for maintaining client accounts. It has headings for a client onboarding process, check-in cadence and key metrics the sales team will use to measure success.
How To Create a Business Playbook in 7 Steps
Follow this seven-step process to create a playbook outlining essential business strategies, workflows and expectations.
1. Determine the Scope
Identify the scale of business needs your playbook will cover. If you need to detail policies and procedures for an entire organization, your playbook will look very different than one intended for a support or sales team. Defining a clear scope upfront helps you assess the workload and identify the right contacts for gathering the necessary information.
2. Select a Template
Find a template with the headings and formatting you need so you don't have to start from scratch. The Scribe Gallery has several options for any scope. Select an outline that suits your needs and fill it out with any content you already know, such as the purpose of the playbook and everyone involved in creating it.
3. Identify Topics
Write headings for each topic you intend to cover. The prepared headers in your template should give you a strong starting point, but you might need to add more, such as a list of roles, an organizational hierarchy or a vision statement.
4. Collect Information
Take each heading step-by-step and gather the necessary information to fill them out. Interview subject matter experts and team leaders to learn what to document about each topic, and fill in the relevant headings as you go. If they already have documentation for workflows, best practices or tools, drop these guides directly into your template.
5. Review
Circulate your draft among team leaders, and invite them to point out contradictions, unclear content or problematic policies wherever they see them. This document will serve as the primary source for all other company documents, so getting it right from the start is imperative. You should be willing to stand behind any commitments or policies it establishes.
6. Publish
Publish the document somewhere everyone can access it, like a knowledge base. Configure access controls to ensure new hires automatically gain access when they join the organization. After the document is live, ask the whole company to review it to learn about any policy updates.
7. Maintain
Now that your playbook is published, set up a system to update it as needed. Treat this as a living document that evolves as your company does. Invite readers to provide feedback, and document a procedure for turning those comments into noticeable updates. Add this procedure to the playbook, and establish a regular schedule for following it.
Best Practices When Creating a Business Playbook
Here are some best practices to consider when drafting and maintaining your company playbook:
- Outline a clear company vision: Keep your vision statement concise, inclusive and attainable so everyone can align with the business’s goals.
- Make it accessible: Write clearly to improve understanding, and use inclusive language so you don’t marginalize members of your organization.
- Update it regularly: Routinely review and update your playbook so it accurately reflects your company culture, vision and structure.
- Leverage automation: Use automation tools like Scribe to streamline the drafting process. Automatically generate text, capture screenshots or format documents with AI.
- Keep an open mind: Give everyone opportunities to influence the policies, vision and guidelines you document in the playbook. Treating it as a top-down mandate might make writing it easier, but it fails to incorporate valuable input from the people who make your company excel.
Generate Consistent, Actionable Documentation With Scribe
Company playbooks contain a wealth of information, and starting one from scratch can be intimidating. Thankfully, Scribe significantly reduces the time it takes to create new documentation or replace outdated instructions.
To draft an SOP, simply open the browser extension or desktop app and complete a task as usual. Our platform will generate step-by-step instructions and annotated screenshots describing the entire process. And if your procedures change, simply click “Edit” on your Scribe to update the necessary information.
Schedule a demo to learn how Scribe helps companies achieve their documentation goals.
