Can I upload the whole handbook and rely on the match threshold to keep the private parts out?

No. The threshold decides whether the assistant answers at all, not which parts of an indexed document are eligible to be retrieved. Anything in the material can be matched and quoted with a citation, and the private paragraphs are often the most specific ones, which makes them strong matches rather than weak ones.

The handbook is the only place our real procedure is written. Do we have to write it twice?

Once more, and then that version is the one that gets maintained for customers. It is usually a short document, because the questions customers ask about procedure are a small slice of what a handbook covers, and it is the slice that would otherwise generate a phone call every time.

What about the induction pack and the training slides?

Same category and the same treatment, with one addition: training material is written to be spoken over, so its lines are fragments and its examples are invented. A fragment retrieved as an answer reads as a claim, and an invented example reads as a fact about your business.

Source material

The handbook knows the answer and tells it to the wrong reader

For most businesses the handbook is the only place the actual practice is written down. Not the published policy, which says what the rule is, but the procedure, which says what somebody does when a customer stands in front of them asking for an exception to it. That makes it the most useful unpublished document you own and the most dangerous one to point an assistant at, because it is bound together with everything about your staff that must never leave the building.

Why this one is harder than it looks

It is written in the second person, to an employee. Every procedure in it is an instruction: offer a replacement before you offer a refund, take the details and pass them to a supervisor, do not agree to anything over the counter. Lift one of those into an answer and the instruction is now addressed to the customer, who is being told to offer themselves a replacement, or is reading the internal order of preference your team is supposed to work through before conceding anything.

It is where the discretion is written as a number. A handbook has to give staff a limit, so it names one: the value somebody can authorise alone, the gesture available without asking, the circumstance in which the published rule is set aside. That is simultaneously the most quotable material in the business and the material that changes a discretion into an entitlement the moment it is published, because a customer who has read the ceiling will ask for the ceiling and will be right that it exists.

The parts that must stay private are not separable by chapter. Pay bands, sickness reporting, the disciplinary and grievance procedure, keyholding, cash handling, what to do about a colleague you suspect of theft, named individuals and their responsibilities. These are interleaved with the customer-facing procedure rather than filed away from it, because a handbook is organised by the shift somebody is working rather than by who is allowed to read what. A document becomes passages as a whole, and there is no way to mark a paragraph inside one as ineligible.

It goes stale silently, in a way public documents do not. Nobody outside an induction reads a handbook end to end, and staff learn the real practice from the person standing next to them. So the written procedure drifts behind the practised one for years without a single complaint, because the only people who could notice are the people who stopped consulting it.

What it has to contain

Structure rather than wording. A passage pulled out of this document has to stand on its own, because that is the only form in which it will ever be read.

Structural requirements
A new document written for customers, not a handbook with parts removed	The extract is its own file, composed from the handbook rather than derived by deletion. Deletion leaves you holding a document you have to trust yourself to have cleaned, and one missed paragraph is one paragraph that will be quoted with a citation on it.
Every procedure restated in the third person	What the business does, not what the reader should do. An instruction beginning with the word you is an instruction to whoever receives the passage, and the passage is going to be received by a customer.
Discretion described as existing, with no figure attached	That some cases are looked at individually, who looks at them, and how to reach that person. Never the threshold, the authorisation limit, or the conditions under which staff are told to concede.
One subject per extracted page, none of them named after a chapter	Handbook chapter titles are shift-shaped: front of house, opening, cash. A customer-facing extract needs pages named for the situation a customer is in, each carrying its own subject in its first line.

The rewrite, in order

Start from the questions, not from the contents page

Write down the handful of questions your team gets that only the handbook answers. What happens if somebody arrives without their receipt. Whether an item can be held. What the process is when a delivery is damaged. Who decides. Those questions are the specification for the extract, and working forward from them is what keeps the private material out, because you never open the chapters that have nothing to do with them.

Working the other way, opening the handbook and marking what looks safe, fails predictably. It puts you in the position of certifying an entire document rather than authoring a short one, and it means the shape of the extract is inherited from a book organised around your operation rather than around anybody's question.

Rewrite the second person out of every procedure

Change the subject of each sentence from the member of staff to the business. An instruction to check the item before accepting it becomes a statement that items are checked when they come back. An instruction to take the customer's details and escalate becomes a statement that these cases are passed to a named role and what happens next.

This is not cosmetic. A passage in the imperative has no subject in the text at all, which is precisely why it is so readily read as being addressed to whoever is holding it. Once the subject is the business, the sentence carries its own audience with it and cannot be turned around.

While doing this, listen for the sentences that were only ever true as staff instructions. Anything about what to say, what not to admit, or how to respond if somebody pushes back is not a procedure that has a public version. It comes out entirely rather than being softened.

Take the ceilings out and leave the route in

Every figure that describes what your own people are permitted to do has to go. The authorisation limit, the goodwill amount, the number of times something can be repeated before it is refused, the value above which a manager is involved. Delete rather than round, because a rounded ceiling is still a ceiling and the customer will treat it as a floor.

What replaces it is the route. Cases outside the published rule are considered individually, here is who considers them, here is how to reach them. That is genuinely useful to a customer, it is true, and it gives the assistant something to say other than a refusal on exactly the question people most want an exception to.

The same surgery applies to any internal reason. A handbook explains why a rule exists so that staff will apply it consistently, and that explanation frequently mentions cost, abuse, a supplier arrangement or a past incident. None of that survives contact with a customer, and all of it reads as authoritative once it is quoted.

Publish the extract and let the handbook stay a handbook

The extract is indexed and the handbook is not. That boundary is what makes this workable, and it only holds if the two documents have different owners and different lives. The handbook keeps being the internal authority, revised when your obligations change. The extract is a customer-facing document that somebody in the business owns and updates.

Decide before you publish which one wins when they disagree, and write that decision down somewhere a person will find it. Two documents describing the same procedure will diverge, and the one being quoted to customers is the one nobody has an appointment to review.

It is worth putting the extract in front of the people who actually work the counter before it goes anywhere. They are the only readers who will notice where the written procedure stopped matching the real one, and they will notice within about a minute.

What happens if you skip it

Instructions to staff, delivered to the customer

Somebody asks whether an item can be returned without its receipt. The strongest passage is the counter procedure, because it is the only text you own that talks about receipts and returns in the same breath, and it says what a member of staff should do: ask for proof of purchase, offer a credit note in the first instance, and only authorise a refund with a supervisor present. All of that comes back as an answer, cited, to a customer who has just been told the sequence your team is meant to work through before giving them what they asked for.

The expensive version names the number. A passage carrying the authorisation limit turns a discretion your staff exercise case by case into a published entitlement, and it is published with a citation attached, which is the hardest kind of statement to walk back. The next customer will ask for it by name, and every one after that, and none of them are being unreasonable.

Neither of these is a retrieval fault. Both are the consequence of indexing a document whose entire register assumes the reader works for you.

Check it against this

Before you index it

The indexed document was written from scratch, not produced by deleting chapters
No sentence in it gives an instruction to the reader
No authorisation limit, goodwill figure or concession threshold appears anywhere
No colleague is named and no internal reason for a rule is explained
Each page states the situation it covers in its own opening line
Somebody who works the counter has read it and agreed it matches practice

Questions

Can I upload the whole handbook and rely on the match threshold to keep the private parts out?: No. The threshold decides whether the assistant answers at all, not which parts of an indexed document are eligible to be retrieved. Anything in the material can be matched and quoted with a citation, and the private paragraphs are often the most specific ones, which makes them strong matches rather than weak ones.
The handbook is the only place our real procedure is written. Do we have to write it twice?: Once more, and then that version is the one that gets maintained for customers. It is usually a short document, because the questions customers ask about procedure are a small slice of what a handbook covers, and it is the slice that would otherwise generate a phone call every time.
What about the induction pack and the training slides?: Same category and the same treatment, with one addition: training material is written to be spoken over, so its lines are fragments and its examples are invented. A fragment retrieved as an answer reads as a claim, and an invented example reads as a fact about your business.

Keep reading

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