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Leo Hamel Fine Jewelers Policy Letter

Orders, Verbal and Email from the Wrong Source

Orders follow the chain of command, come from the top of the Organizing Chart and flow down the departments from the Executives and Supervisors in charge. As the owner and President of the company, I am the source of company policy, and company policy should be taken as a direct order from me. I don’t have time to walk around giving everyone orders. Therefore company policy is used to pass on my orders to everyone in the company, and to remind us all of the rules by which we have all agreed to abide and the way in which we have agreed to perform procedures and tasks.

Often in an attempt to be helpful, an employee will send out an e-mail to all employees or selected department members and word it as if it’s an order.

For example: an email is sent from the shipping department to all employees, “Please clearly write customers’ addresses on letters. We are getting lots of them back as the post office cannot read the address.”

In this case what the shipping employee is saying is logical and right but it is not the shipping employee’s job to send “orders” to everyone else about what to do. The mail person is the wrong source for the order. Company policy is the correct source for the order.

Compounding the error is the fact that sending an e-mail to everyone is Dev-T (wasted time to read it) for all the people who are NOT doing this thing incorrectly.

Here is what to do instead:

  1. Determine if the subject is already covered by Policy.
  2. If it is, find out exactly who did it incorrectly, write a report on them and attach the policy that they need to be re-trained on; send to the person in HR who is in charge of corrections. If it isn’t, write a suggested policy on it and send through your Supervisor to Leo. Write the report on the offender right away so they can be corrected before they do it again and they will be trained on the new policy as soon as it is issued.
  3. Occasionally there may be something that is being done and you cannot determine who is responsible; in that case an e-mail to ALL (or OLD TOWN or SALES depending on if you can narrow down the list of likely suspects) may be appropriate. In this case send the info to your Supervisor and they can decide if it should be sent to ALL or not. In most cases you should be able to find out who needs to be corrected.

This also goes for verbal “orders.” You should not be telling your co-workers, especially new employees, how to do specific and important tasks having to do with their job. Most tasks and procedures are covered by a policy. Verbal orders get passed on, changed and confused and before long the thing is not being done right. If it is important, there should be a policy on it so that we all do it the same way consistently. Find the policy and get the person corrected on it.

This does not apply to technical skills such as accounting for example; there are plenty of manuals already written on how to perform general accounting. However we have specific ways that we account for certain things at LHFJ and those unique procedures should be written in a policy.

Leo Hamel, Founder