Introduction
While clear work instructions improve task quality and team productivity, writing them from scratch is challenging. Professionals may lack the time and energy to focus on essential details like clean formatting, logical structures and precise descriptions.
Our work instructions templates offer an excellent base for your company guides. Get started today to expand your knowledge base and enhance performance and consistency.
What Are Work Instructions?
Work instructions are step-by-step guides that describe company processes. They help people follow specific, standardized methods, reducing errors and maintaining quality standards. The term covers internal employee documents like training guides and external customer documents, such as instruction manuals.
These documents are similar to standard operating procedures (SOPs) — they explain a task from start to finish — but work instructions provide more information per step. This makes them an excellent choice for sensitive or complex processes that require significant care.
Work instruction templates provide a base structure for creating these documents. They improve consistency between guides and make it easier to write steps for every crucial task.
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Why Are Work Instructions Important?
Work instructions are an essential tool for your employees and customers — they provide clarity, mitigate risks and encourage task consistency. And using templates makes the creation process less daunting so you can reap these valuable benefits sooner.
Minimize Risks
Work instructions help your team navigate complex, sensitive situations, mitigating risks and increasing compliance. For example, an IT support agent may need to handle a customer’s login information to help resolve their issue. Step-by-step guides tell them how to safely handle this data.
Reduce Errors
Many employees, especially new hires, can skip minor steps accidentally — but even small errors may cause adverse outcomes. Although mistakes are inevitable, work instructions can greatly increase task accuracy. These documents clearly outline every detail and encourage employees to execute tasks similarly.
Ease New Employee Transitions
Moving into a new position can be intimidating, and workers may struggle without the right support, but work instructions provide this guidance. Ask your best employees to write these guides to pass learned techniques on, retaining their knowledge and helping new hires acclimate faster.
Boost Productivity
Skipping steps or performing actions out of order can slow down processes. With step-by-step guides, people move seamlessly between tasks, improving operational efficiency.
This productivity also supports quality standards and brand image. For instance, a customer service associate can provide smooth assistance with minimal hold times when they have extensive work instructions.
What Makes Great Work Instructions?
The best guides are clear, consistent and understandable. When writing instructions, templates help you achieve these goals and produce high-quality documentation every time.
Be Clear and Concise
Write work instructions using straightforward language. Describe actions in-depth while keeping sentences short and avoiding technical jargon. The goal is to provide valuable information without overwhelming or confusing the reader.
Templates offer a pre-made structure, which helps you stick with the outline and resist the urge to add unnecessary sections.
Maintain Consistency
Consistent instructions offer better guidance and reduce confusion. For example, using the term “customer” throughout a guide, instead of occasionally using “client,” ensures employees know exactly who the documentation is referencing.
It’s also essential to maintain consistent formatting between instructions. Using templates makes this simple, logically setting up your guides so people always know where to find links, references and the revision log. This uniformity also helps clean up your knowledge base and makes it look more professional.
Use Visual Aids
Add visual elements throughout your guides, including screenshots, videos and graphs. Work instructions are complex and can cover delicate topics, so it’s critical to boost understanding whenever possible.
To further simplify this step, Scribe automatically adds visual aids to your guides. Just turn on our browser extension or desktop app and perform your task as usual — our AI tool takes annotated screenshots for each step.
Involve Your Team
Ask high performers to build instructions using Scribe so you capture every crucial detail from your best people. All they need to do is turn on our software and execute the process — Scribe will handle the rest, generating an accurate guide without requiring extensive work from your employees.
We also recommend collecting feedback from your team to increase your document’s accuracy and value. Simply share your Scribe via a link, and teammates can jump in and add a reaction, from a quick emoji to an insightful comment.
8 Great Work Instruction Templates
Examples of work instructions help you skip the hard work so you can build a practical knowledge base in half the time. Explore these eight templates and craft high-quality job aids for your team.
1. Standard Work Instructions Template
Scribe’s standard work instructions template has a flexible, customizable structure that suits a wide range of needs. It outlines a task’s purpose, scope, responsibilities and required equipment, then dives into a detailed step-by-step process. The template includes sections for references, a revision history and approval sign-offs.
This free work instruction template is useful for any industry or department because it’s highly customizable, offering ample flexibility for writing guides on niche subjects.
2. Instruction Manual Template
Instruction manuals, also called user manuals or user guides, help customers understand your products and services. This instruction manual template outlines your product’s purpose and how to perform common tasks with it.
Rather than writing out these specific tasks and processes, create a Scribe for each one to reduce your time and effort and elevate your audience’s understanding.
3. Safety Work Instructions Template
A thorough template for work instructions doesn’t just save time, but it also reduces risk and helps avoid significant errors in the workplace. Our safety work instructions template helps you comply with health and safety regulations for a safer environment. It includes sections on potential hazards, how to prevent crises and emergency response procedures.
4. Project Work Instructions Template
Our project work instruction template outlines project details, like primary objectives and relevant teams, and then describes how to perform specific actions and tasks. It’s useful for managing stakeholder needs, meeting milestones and handling complex projects that involve many moving parts.
This template also helps you onboard employees who recently joined a project, quickly getting them up to speed.
5. Assembly Work Instructions
The assembly work instructions template provides step-by-step guidance for employees throughout the assembly process, promoting consistent, high-quality products. It includes sections for instructions, required equipment and relevant people like team leads.
6. Visual Work Instructions Template
Our visual work instructions template encourages you to add extra visual aids to your guide, further elevating reader comprehension. For example, it prompts you to include images or videos of the expected results so employees can compare their work to your highest standards.
This template also suggests that you link to other related resources, giving people an idea of the larger process and building a practical, interconnected guide.
7. Manufacturing Work Instructions Template
The manufacturing work instructions template helps you align work with industry standards and handle complex processes. It includes sections for logging inventory, managing schedules and tracking production costs.
You can also use this template to document and monitor shifting standards so your processes always comply with regulations.
8. Construction Site Work Instruction Template
Our construction site work instruction template helps you offer solid support to your people while serving as an excellent record of events. It contains headers for instructions, outsourcing information and a projected completion date. You can also track the necessary raw materials and parts with the in-depth bill of materials.
If you’re ready to get started, check out our work instructions examples for inspiration on how to fill out these templates.
The Difference Between Work Instructions and Standard Operating Procedures
While these terms seem similar and some businesses use them interchangeably, understanding the differences helps you build better guides that provide greater value to your people. Here’s a quick definition of each term:
- Standard operating procedures: SOPs explain how to complete tasks from beginning to end. They assume a certain level of comprehension and summarize a process concisely.
- Work instructions: These guides describe steps in highly specific detail. Where SOPs assume minor steps, work instructions explain every little bit of information.
For an extensive definition of these and other related terms, read our article on rules versus guidelines.
How To Write Work Instructions: 7 Steps
Even when you start with a high-quality template, it’s vital to follow these practical steps when writing work instructions:
- Choose a clear title: Write a title that accurately describes the task. Keep it concise, but include enough unique information to avoid confusion with other similar processes.
- Write a detailed description: Include a task summary that explains when to use the guide and lists relevant team members.
- Explain the purpose: Discuss what the task accomplishes and the intended results. Include images to help people understand common issues and company expectations.
- Describe each step in detail: Now dive into your guide, providing as much information and detail as possible. Try not to exclude anything when writing work instructions. Involve subject matter experts and relevant workers so you don’t miss a thing.
- Gather feedback: Distribute your instructions to relevant team members and ask for their feedback. Based on their opinions, make edits to ensure your guides are accurate and helpful.
- Distribute to your team: Share your instructions and keep them available via a centralized knowledge base. Make sure every teammate knows about them and has easy access.
- Monitor and review: Create a maintenance schedule and review your instructions regularly. Standards change, and it’s essential to edit guides often so they remain accurate and helpful.
These tips also apply to external guides, like user manuals.
Create Work Instructions in Minutes With Scribe
Scribe helps you craft high-quality work instructions and fill your knowledge base in days, not weeks. Our process generator will capture your screen and keystrokes, turning them into a highly detailed, step-by-step guide.
Generate multiple guides with Scribe, then combine them using one of our 100+ templates to create effortlessly cohesive, multi-part manuals. Scribe’s user-friendliness makes it easy to involve other employees as you build your instructions, ensuring you capture your top performers’ best techniques.
Sign up for Scribe for free and craft company guides without the hassle.
