2.) Policies
In the military, if you aren’t sure how to do a task or what to do in a daily situation, you can look it up! All these countless policies, regulations, technical orders, memorandums, etc. may get frustrating because of the constant reading required to keep up and stay in compliance. But at least they typically eliminate any vagueness or ambiguity (I said “typically,” not always!).
Policies, in the end, can make issues much easier to handle because you can simply reference the text and say, “Look, there’s your answer, that’s what we’re going to do.” It doesn’t have to become a debate, there’s no need for a meeting. The directives are there in black and white.
With civilian business entities, such blatant guidance may not always exist. The branches of the military have been around for decades and employ hundreds of thousands of people. In order to be standardized, policies needed to exist from the beginning, and are always being fine-tuned. But most companies only have general policies which may not be specific or updated, or might even conflict.
How to cope: If you’ve looked and can’t find anything in writing to outline how to handle a certain situation, ask Human Resources or whichever department might cover it. If there’s a Policies and Procedures section, or a Records Manager, shoot them an email and try to track it down. Often, policies do exist but aren’t as readily available as they were in the military, because there’s just not the same attention-to-detail or desire to enforce strict adherence to the rules.
If you still can not find something, pose the question to your supervisor in email and ask for a clear response in writing. Then you have a record of it.
