User manuals are a tool to help our coworkers understand us better; a personal profile that includes probing questions about a person's communication style, direction on how they like to receive feedback, and how they approach conflict.
A few years ago I was introduced to the concept of a user manual in a team-building and reframing retreat. After that, user manuals became a critical part of our revitalized team, particularly when it came to approaching feedback, conflict resolution and working on making day-to-day operations of the team more tolerable for everyone.
This simple idea – "tell your coworkers what you need and what helps you work" – is so obvious, but most people never even think to go down this road because we don't want to be vulnerable at work. But learning to uncover a little bit of vulnerability, and share what makes us excel, really can draw a team closer together and help, dare I say it?, increase productivity!
I'm a Notion fanatic, so for me putting all of this into a Notion dashboard made the most sense. If your team wants to get started in Notion this could even be a great exercise in practicing with creating pages, working with templates, and observing how databases work. I spent a lot of time making sure to make every step of the process really clear, even for folks who aren't Notion power users yet.
Inside, you'll find a detailed prep area for the project manager that's going to introduce them to the team, including links to validators who've created their own user manuals, things to think about when starting this project, and ways to integrate user manuals into your work going forward.
Hope you enjoy the template! It's been a labor of love and lots of time and research. I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback on how I can improve it, as well.
