We have documentation, but nobody reads it
When documentation is ignored, the cause is rarely the people. It is usually the documentation: it describes the standard case while people need the exception, it is out of date, or it cannot be found at the moment of work. People ask a colleague because a colleague gives a current, specific answer in seconds. Documentation gets used when it offers the same.
Do you recognise these signs?
- people ask a colleague rather than look something up;
- procedures are updated in the weeks before an audit, and otherwise not;
- nobody is sure which version is current;
- documents describe steps that no longer match the systems;
- new colleagues are told to forget the manual.
Why does it happen?
Most documentation is written once, for an audit or a project, and then left alone while the work keeps changing — see why documented processes drift from reality. It also tends to hold the procedure without the judgement around it, which is exactly what people need when something unusual happens.
And it usually lives far from the work: in a folder nobody opens during a busy afternoon, without an owner who would notice that it no longer helps.
What does it cost?
The effort is paid twice: once to write documentation nobody uses, and again every day in questions to the few people who know. Those people are interrupted constantly.
When someone does follow an outdated version, mistakes follow — and in an audit, documents that do not match the work are harder to defend than no documents at all.
The first step, this month
Ask three colleagues what they last looked up or asked someone about, and whether your documentation would have answered it. Write down each question and the answer they got.
The gap between their questions and your documents tells you exactly what to capture next — and it is usually smaller and more concrete than a complete rewrite.
How MentX helps
MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.
We capture from real cases and from the people who know, so the knowledge includes the exceptions and the reasons, and every answer shows its source and date. With operational excellence, it becomes short task cards linked from where the work happens.
A question we often hear
Should we rewrite all our documentation?
No. Most of it can stay as it is. Start with the questions people actually ask, capture the answers with their exceptions and sources, and give each piece an owner. The documents that keep being bypassed are the ones to replace first — the rest can wait until someone needs them.
