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This checklist includes all the tips we shared during our “How to Ensure Your Team Uses the Business’s Operations Manual” webinar.

We encourage you to share the recording and the link to this checklist with your management team, getting them aligned on these practices will make adoption much smoother across the board.

If you implement every step in this checklist consistently, we’re confident your team will use your Operations Manual (OM) as the standard way of working.

How do we know? Because we’ve seen it work repeatedly — across numerous clients and within our own operations!

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Daily Habits to Drive OM Adoption

• [ ] Make sure to model OM usage yourself, by referring to the OM constantly. A good habit to build is to avoid answering questions directly — pause and ask "Did you check our OM?" first.
• [ ] When answering, pull up the OM and click through it to show where the info lives. This builds the habit of checking the OM first and reduces dependency on you.
• [ ] If you don't have time, send them the direct link to the relevant OM page.
• [ ] If the answer isn't in your OM, share it with a team member (or your EA) and have it added to the OM.
• [ ] Appoint a team member (e.g. Operations Manager, Office Manager, Executive Assistant) to be responsible for keeping the OM up-to-date and complete.
• [ ] Managers must model OM use daily — during meetings, they should say things like "Let's check what our OM says"
• [ ] In your 1:1 check-ins with managers, ask how they're using the OM and who on their team is using it
• [ ] Use phrases: "Update our OM, then I'll review" and "Better to follow our checklist, not our memory.".
• [ ] Use your OM as the single source of truth in meetings, check-ins, and project kickoffs

Tie OM Use to Promotion and Growth

• [ ] Tell the team: “Mastering our OM is step one to getting promoted”.
• [ ] Explain that using the OM means less supervision → bigger responsibilities → career advancement.
• [ ] Reframe where applicable: Employees who document their role can be replaced in that role and move up.

Training & Onboarding

• [ ] Record every training — adopt the mindset of "give it once, use it multiple times!".
  • [ ] Verbal/in-person training → record, transcribe, turn into an SOP. Or, send to us (Operations Mavenue team) to turn into SOP and add to your OM!
  • [ ] Virtual training (Zoom, Google Meet) → record it, embed in your OM
  • [ ] Loom recording → Use Loom’s built-in “Generate SOP” feature
• [ ] For field teams: have new hires watch recorded training before on-site shadowing (acts as repetition).
• [ ] New hires for existing roles: show them the OM on Day 1, tell them everything they need to do their job well is there. This sets the standard from the start.
• [ ] Encourage new hires to give feedback on SOPs, ask what's unclear or missing.