Writing a Proper Employee Handbook

By explaining ethics and required behaviours for the workplace, an employee handbook can help minimise workplace disputes. It also enables a company to be open and honest about its stand on matters like bribery, discrimination and harassment, as well as providing processes and procedures on how to report any violations regarding such issues.

When it comes to providing an employee handbook to your company, you have two options. You can create it yourself, or you can ask your human resources department to create one for you. When it comes to the latter, you can’t really go wrong with having a professionally produced and written document.

Having an employee handbook helps you to explain your company’s stand on certain issues. It also allows your employees to have a reference that can be referred to when it comes to dealing with such issues, if they need further clarification on a specific matter.

An employee handbook can be very informative and very helpful if used properly. You have to make sure that your employees understand and follow all of the instructions contained within it. The document shouldn’t be too wordy nor too short. You have to make sure that the instructions your employees are given are relevant and are capable of being carried out, by using easy-to-follow steps and instructions.

You can’t afford for your employees guidelines to be too specific. For example, you can’t just give an employee a copy of the company handbook and expect him- or her-to deal with whatever issues they may encounter. There are times when your company’s employee handbook is just not adequate and will need to be referred to. This is especially true when dealing with issues concerning your company’s more complex policies, such as bullying or harrassment where the process requires multiple steps to be actioned.

Even with the most professional production values imaginable, it will still be hard for an employee to know when reading your employee handbook, that the company has put enough thought into each section and each instruction. This is especially true in the latter half of the handbook, where many of the instructions are given in regards to how to handle particular situations.

So if you don’t want to waste the effort put into a section or a instruction, you should be explicit with your employees in stating what’s in and not in your company’s employee handbook with the fallback that if then information required cannot be found, to contact their line manager, HR manager or company owner for further advice and guidance.