Merits and Demerits of an office manual

Office manuals are highly useful for both the employees and the management. The merits of an office manual are presented below.

Advantages or Merits of Office Manuals

1. An office manager can easily supervise the work of his sub-ordinates and exercise control on them.

2. The need of giving explanation and instructions to existing and new employees is reduced since the manuals are prepared to impart ready information.

3. An office manual is an aid in the training of new employees

since the manuals contain a well established systems, routines and procedures.

4. Doubts of employees can be cleared very easily.

5. Office manuals help in fixing responsibility of employees for non performance of work.

6. Office manual brings uniformity in the performance of work both in the head office and branches.

7. Changes can be very easily incorporated as and when required.

8. Office manual reduces the chances of errors and frauds.

9. The preparation of office manual brings useless work to light so that useless activities are isolated or giving less importance to them.

10. Each employee can understand the extent of authority delegated to him with assignment of job.

11. Office manuals help in detecting overlapping functions and needless duplication of work. In this way, it ensures free flow of work for effective performance.

12. Executives can take quality and timely decisions by referring the instructions and policies of an organization.

13. Greater cooperation among the employees is very easily obtained within a concerned department as well as between departments.

14. Transfer of an employee from one section to another section does not pose any problem to the concerned employee. He can easily pick up his duties in the new location through office manual.

15. Good office manuals lead to reduction of office expenses.

16. It helps in simplifying communication procedure i.e. management Information system

Disadvantages or Demerits of Office Manuals

The demerits of office manuals are briefly explained below

1. Preparation and frequent revision of office manuals involves high cost in terms of time, labour and money.

2. It is very difficult to prepare and keep a manual up to date.

3. Office manual leaves little scope for personal initiative and talents on the part of the executives.

4. Office manuals bring a number of bottlenecks in the effective performance of work instead of bringing free flow of work.

5. Systems, routines or procedures are likely to be misinterpreted if an ambiguous language is used in the preparation of manual.

6. If the manuals are not used by the employees properly in time, human resources and expenses spent on the preparation of manuals will be wasted.

7. It may discourage team spirit among the employees at times.

8. If the manuals are not revised at frequent intervals or periodically, they became outdated.

9. Sometimes inadequate or incomplete or vague information may be given in the manuals.