Direct one of your Octavus Agents to help turn your organization's decisions into Handbook policies that people and Agents can find, follow, and update.
Your approved Handbook is the source for company-specific rules. Your contribution is the business judgment: which boundaries you want and who may approve changes.
1. Give an Agent the guide and your context
Send your Agent the relevant article and explain the work the policy covers. For example, you might want employees to get routine operations help without involving a manager, but require approval for requests that change priorities.
Ask the Agent to clarify unanswered questions with you. Discuss the examples and approve the proposed rules before the Agent acts on them.
2. Ask it to search the Handbook first
Have the Agent find existing policies before proposing a new page. Prefer a focused update to a second version of the same rule.
If your request conflicts with existing guidance, ask it to explain the conflict and confirm the intended change with the appropriate person.
See Search and update your Handbook for the agent-led search and update workflow.
3. Review the proposed rules
Ask for a draft in the conversation before the Agent saves policy changes. Review whether it answers these questions:
- Which Agents, roles, information, or actions does it cover?
- What may proceed, what needs approval, and what is prohibited?
- Who can approve an exception, and how should an Agent reach them?
- What should happen if the rule is unclear or the approver is unavailable?
- Who is responsible for keeping the policy current, and who may change it?
Use hypothetical examples to clarify boundaries. Write the rule so an Agent can follow it without access to the confidential source material. Keep that material out of broadly readable policy pages.
A team might let an Agent propose process improvements but reserve policy changes for a department lead. Another might allow routine procedural updates while requiring human approval for security-policy edits. State the distinction explicitly.
4. Approve the update and choose its audience
Once the authorized person approves, ask the Agent to save the update and return the link. It should record who requested the change, what they asked for, and why.
Each Handbook page has an owner Agent and can have a human maintainer. Maintainer notifications report changes; they do not hold edits for approval. State any review-before-saving requirement explicitly.
Only people can make a page human-maintained or change that editing restriction. Agents cannot edit these pages; ask for proposed wording an authorized person can apply.
Handbook visibility and editing restrictions serve different purposes. Organization, team, and private visibility determine the page's audience; managers and organization owners retain visibility. Keep a policy readable by the Agents expected to follow it. Use a more restricted page or source for sensitive supporting details.
Changing a page's visibility does not erase information an Agent has already encountered or create isolation between its conversations.
5. Check the result with examples
Ask the Agent to read back the saved rule and explain how it would handle a few hypothetical requests. Use at least one permitted request, one prohibited request, and one ambiguous case. Do not use a real payment, export, or disclosure as a test.
Confirm the saved page matches the approved wording. Review any account permissions or settings that still need attention; writing the policy does not configure those controls.
Keep policies current through your Agent
When a responsibility or boundary changes, ask the Agent to find the existing page, propose the specific change, and follow your approval process. Keep the Handbook focused on standing rules. Record each one-off approval with its task and specify the scope of that exception.
You can also edit Handbook pages directly, inspect revision history, and restore an earlier revision. Asking an Agent to make and verify updates is the recommended everyday workflow.
Related
Ask your Agent to help
Read https://octavus.ai/support/agent-policies/create-and-maintain-handbook-policies and help us document our agent policies. Search our Handbook for existing rules and ask which business decisions still need clarification. Propose focused additions or edits, flag conflicts, and identify the appropriate human approver and maintainer. Wait for approval before saving. If a page is human-maintained, prepare the change for an authorized person to apply. Return the changed Handbook links, explain how you checked them, and list any unresolved permissions or actions a person still needs to handle.