HR Consulting Editing and Proofreading Services

A policy is written once and then applied by two hundred managers who never read it in full. It is drafted to satisfy a legal review, published on an intranet, and thereafter consulted only at the moment somebody is in trouble — which is exactly the moment its ambiguity becomes expensive. The gap between what a policy says and what managers actually do is where most employment disputes are born, and it is a writing problem long before it is a legal one.

We edit what HR consultancies and people advisers produce — employee handbooks and policy suites, disciplinary and grievance procedures, performance management frameworks and appraisal documentation, absence and flexible working policies, pay and reward frameworks and job architecture, restructure and consultation documentation, TUPE and transfer communications, engagement survey reports and action plans, competency and behaviour frameworks, equality and inclusion policies, manager toolkits and briefing packs, investigation and case-handling templates, and organisation design and workforce planning documents. Our editors work on the part of a policy that decides whether it is applied consistently.

The manager guidance attached to a policy is what determines whether the policy works, and it is routinely the weakest document in the pack. The policy itself is written for compliance and reads accordingly; the manager holding a difficult conversation needs to know what to do on Tuesday. We write these so the guidance is organised around the situations that actually arise rather than the policy's clause order — someone repeatedly late, someone whose performance dropped after a bereavement, someone alleging bullying by their own manager; so each situation gives the first step, the thing that must not be done, and the point at which HR must be involved; so wording is offered for the conversation itself, because managers who are unsure what to say either say nothing for months or say too much in one meeting; so record-keeping expectations are concrete about what is written, when and where, given that contemporaneous notes decide contested cases; and so the boundary between informal and formal is drawn in observable terms rather than left to a manager's confidence. Consistency across two hundred managers comes from this document, not from the policy.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client policies, case material and organisational information. We are editors rather than HR practitioners or employment law advisers, and we offer no view on policy content, employment obligations or any individual case. What we can do is make guidance usable by the person holding the conversation.