What is an employee handbook?
Also known as a staff handbook or manual, your employee handbook is an essential tool in communicating your expectations and your organisation’s culture to your workforce. But drafting an employee handbook can be a daunting task.
Your handbook should include all policies and procedures relevant to your organisation and should cover all eventualities from time off due to sickness, to acceptable IT usage. Clear communication of these expectations allows all staff to work towards a shared goal and unite together as a workforce.
An employee handbook also provides transparency and ensures all employees are treated consistently. It is important for the security of both employers and employees; employers are able to utilise the handbook to demonstrate they have acted fairly and reasonably and employees have clear guidelines for how they are expected to behave and what are the potential consequences if they don’t.
Reading the employee handbook is usually part of the induction process during a new employee’s first few weeks. They can then sign to agree they have read and understood it. Subsequent updates of your employee handbook can then be circulated as and when to all existing employees (as long as your employee handbook is not contractual – we will cover this further below when we take a look at five mistakes you should avoid when drafting your employee handbook.
Are employee handbooks a legal requirement?
It is not a legal requirement to have an employee handbook. However, it is mandatory to cover key policies and procedures and for these to be written down formally. These key policies include a disciplinary/ dismissal policy, a grievance policy and a health and safety policy. All other policies need to be carefully selected and written to reinforce the expectations of your organisation and ensure best practice is followed. There are of course other statutory entitlements your employees receive as a part of their employment which for ease and clarity would be best laid out in an organisation policy.
Although these policies do not need to be found within an employee handbook, it is a logical umbrella location for all of these essential documents. It also provides clarity to all members of your workforce, as there will be one specified location should they need to access any information relating to the organisation.
The benefits of a well drafted employee handbook
A well drafted handbook is an excellent first impression of your organisation. A well written and clearly laid out handbook will mean employees will feel confident about the prospect of you handling any topics or issues relating to their employment.
A comprehensive employee handbook also safeguards you as an employer and helps your organisation grow and develop. Imagine not having a redundancy policy and then entering a situation where organisational change needed to happen. The last thing you would need or want to do is to have to quickly draft a policy under pressure.
In addition, a well constructed employee handbook can also be an excellent tool for middle managers. They can act as a guide for how to navigate certain situations in the workplace, without having to involve senior leaders. It can also act as a great FAQ for employees, for instance those looking to find out how your organisation’s maternity pay is structured.
What should be included in your employee handbook?
What is included in your employee handbook may be very different to another organisation. For example, some policies would be sector specific and would be of no benefit or relevance to you or your employees. However, there will be key areas which should be covered.
An Introduction to your organisation
First of all, it is always a good idea to have a general introduction to your handbook. This is a perfect way to set the tone for your organisation, it can highlight the ethos of your workplace. The introduction can give some background to your organisation; what your goals are; the key service areas/ products you offer.
Company structure overview
Another useful section is a Company structure. This can include information such as management reporting lines and who is in which team or department. It can also cover information regarding who to contact should you have a query (whether that’s a line manager or someone from a specific team). This section could detail how to find contact numbers or office locations for those individuals. This section is best described as a ‘signpost’ for general information anyone may need.
Policies and procedures
Importantly, the main part of your employee handbook should relate to Policies and Procedures. In addition to the mandatory policies referred to above, these could include:
- Performance management
- Family friendly leave
- Absence Management
- Behaviour
- Flexible Working
- Training and development
- Communication
As outlined above, these policies are not a legal requirement for your employee handbook. The only policies legally required would be a disciplinary/ dismissal policy, a grievance policy and a health and safety policy. However, it is best practice to include policies covering a wider scope of workplace activities for clarity for both employees and managers.
Keeping your employee handbook up to date
It is essential that you explain in your employee handbook that the content of your handbook is subject to change. Employment law is ever changing and with this, our policies should change too. These amendments, big or small, ensure your organisation is always up to date with current legislation and is legally compliant.
Maintaining an employee handbook can often be quite a time consuming task but one that is critical to the smooth running of an organisation. Reviewing your policies twice a year should capture any changes to employment law and give you peace of mind that your policies and procedures comply to any recent amendments. (Top tip – use an external employee handbook company to take care of this for you.)
Ideally, it is best to keep an electronic version of your handbook as this is easier to update and circulate. However sometimes it is not always practicable to do this in organisations where employees don’t have access to computers. In some instances a hard copy of the employee handbook will need to be kept somewhere all employees can easily access it. In this scenario, it is always best practice to include a footer in your policies and procedures detailing the date the policy was last updated and which version it is. This way, employees can always check they are referring to the most up to date document.
Five mistakes to avoid when drafting your employee handbook
To get the most out of your handbook, try to avoid making these mistakes:
1. Not thinking about your culture
Template employee handbooks, policies and procedures can all be accessed fairly easily from the internet. A good template handbook is a great place to start when drafting your first handbook but remember, it’s just a starting point.
Your employee handbook is an essential tool in establishing and embedding the culture of your organisation. If you’re using a template, think about the tone of the language used. Is it professional, friendly, easy to understand? Or is it more formal and legal? Whatever the tone, adapt it to suit the culture of your workforce.
Think as well about including policies that reinforce your culture. For example, wording around what is and isn’t acceptable in the workplace, like offensive language and swearing, timekeeping and ways of working with colleagues.
Top tip: Our Client Members have access to a library of template HR documentation, including an employee handbook. And, we can also partner with you to create a bespoke employee handbook to suit your organisation.
2. Making it contractual
This mistake is very common. To ensure that employees comply with the rules set out in their employee handbook, many employers state (often in both the contract of employment and the handbook) that the employee handbook is contractual. The problem with this is that it means you have to follow the policies and procedures in your employee handbook exactly or you may be breaching the contract of employment.
Whilst you do need to follow your policies and procedures, there will be times when it is not always completely possible and you will need the flexibility that making an employee handbook contractual prevents.
More importantly, you will need to regularly change and update your employee handbook as legislation, best practice and your internal practices change. This is easy to do with a non-contractual employee handbook as you can usually make the changes and update your team (there may be some changes however that require more process than this – for example if you are changing benefits that have become custom and practice).
If your staff handbook is contractual you will need to consult with the workforce each time you make changes. This can be very time consuming and also may prevent you from making the changes required to support the growth of your business.
3. Not including all of your policies and procedures in the handbook
Some employers like to have a short handbook which refers to longer policies when needed. This can work but is often complicated as the business grows because you have different documents in different places, all of which need continual updating and ensuring everything links together can be hard work. You may also find you’re updating practices as you go along, (for example if you have a new clocking in system and a process is implemented for this), but this is not updated anywhere in the handbook. Before long there are a range of processes, procedures and policies all in different places.
The best thing you can do to make sure everyone has access to all the information they need in relation to working with you is put it in one place. Printed handbooks can still be useful for some employers. However, wherever possible, we recommend putting everything online where it’s easy to find.
Tools you can use for this include your HRIS, such as PeopleHR or BreatheHR, your own intranet or filing system like DropBox, or, something we use called Trainual.
4. Including specific detail that will be difficult to follow in practice
Whilst your employee handbook will hopefully be non-contractual, there is still a requirement on you to follow your own processes. After all, you are asking your employees to follow these, and will likely be saying that if they don’t follow them, it could be a disciplinary offence. It’s reasonable therefore for your employees to expect that you will comply with the processes you’ve set out in your handbook.
Be careful then to make sure you don’t include detail in your handbook that will not always be possible to comply with. For example, if you say that you will investigate and provide an outcome to a grievance complaint within 5 working days, that will probably be very difficult for you to do if you receive a complex grievance with a lot of documentation and evidence that needs to be considered.
In this case, it is best to say that you will investigate and provide an outcome to a grievance within a reasonable timeframe, depending on the nature of the grievance.
Similarly, don’t include lots of management guidance that might be difficult to follow and cause employees to become frustrated. If you do want management guidance, keep that out of the handbook and create a separate management guide, “How we manage our staff at company name”.
5. Not keeping it up to date
It is so easy to allow an employee handbook to become out of date because we are all faced with so many competing priorities at work. However, keeping it up to date will save you time in the long run as your employees will always have access to all the information they need about their roles. Expectations are clear and employees can self service when they need to know something.
One way to keep it up to date is to review your handbook twice yearly. A good time to do this is in April and October because they are the two main times of the year when employment law changes are made. You can take this opportunity to consider if anything else has changed in your policies, procedures, and ways of working and update your employee handbook accordingly.
If your employee handbook is online, this will be much easier than a printed copy. However, if you do need to have printed copies, consider keeping a few copies in the staff canteen and/or breakout rooms so that you don’t have to replace lots of versions.
Another idea is to have a few PCs that non-office based workers can access. They can then use these PCs to view the employee handbook when they need to.
Creating an employee handbook for your organisation
To sum up, having a well written and bespoke employee handbook in place is a valuable HR resource for both employees and managers alike. Not only will it assist you with legal compliance, but it will also contribute towards the reinforcement of your company culture, and enable you to manage HR processes smoothly. However, it is important to take care to ensure that your employee handbook works for your business, and is regularly reviewed to ensure it is up to date. To do this, it’s beneficial to seek external support from an outsourced employee handbook company / HR consultancy.
How we can help – Employee Handbook Company
We hope you found this guide useful. If you’re in need of an employee handbook company and would like support with drafting an employee handbook for your organisation, please contact the team on 0330 223 5253 or office@fitzgeraldhr.co.uk. We would love to hear from you. Our employee handbook services include refreshing your existing handbook, starting from scratch or providing you with a legally compliant template to use.
