Everyone wants a user or reader-friendly employee handbook, but also employers should not underestimate the seriousness of managing the process and the content.
Employee handbooks can be published online or as a hard copy document. It’s important that they are consistently distributed and that every employee has access to the information.
Because this employer-created document covers multiple employment-related policies, as well as the relationship between the organization and its employees, the employee handbook must be accurate, up-to-date and reliable.
What areas are important? For sure, communication—meaning how numerous policies and relationships are communicated. Just a few examples of other employee-related areas that are normally covered include:
- Employee expectations
- Employee performance and conduct
- Employee benefits
- Employee absences
At the same time, if insufficient care and attention are paid to the communication and tone of the content, you might see employee morale negatively affected.
Equally important: If information contained in your employee handbook is inaccurate or out-of-date, it can create legal risks for the organization.
This is why I always recommend that employers have legal counsel review and approve an employee handbook prior to publishing and distributing it to employees. You specifically want an attorney who specializes in employment law.
Employers must further understand the consequences of publishing or distributing an inaccurately prepared handbook. Content contained in an employee handbook is of a very serious nature, covering such issues as at-will employment and clarifying the employment relationship. For instance, what is a contractual relationship?
Other important areas to cover include your company policies relating to such areas as sexual harassment, which is federally and, in many cases, state regulated. Another policy example relates to leave requests such as those covered by the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA), another federally and, often, state-regulated employee benefit.
Employers will also want to cover employee conduct guidelines and any related progressive discipline programs or processes. It is very important that all preparers take great care and diligence. Any misstatement or misrepresentation of policies can lead to employee confusion or misunderstanding.
Once the employee handbooks are published and issued to employees, it is also very important to consistently apply the handbook policies. In other words, employers must be prepared to follow and enforce those stated policies.
Understandably employees have expectations that the policies will be enforced in a fair and consistent manner across the organization, with all employees and at all levels of the organization. Obviously employees do not appreciate it when they see management failing to apply policies consistently and in a uniform manner. And you do not want to lose valuable employees due to these types of oversights.
As a closing note of caution: Poorly written handbooks can contain policies that either cannot or will not be enforced. When this happens, employees can use these lapses as reason or justification for bringing claims against an employer. You do not want to see your employee handbook used against you in a court of law.