If you haven’t kept your most up-to-date policies and procedures written down somewhere, you absolutely must correct this as soon as possible. A written guide to your business’ policies and procedures is crucial, as it is intended to give your team a resource to turn to for an answer to any questions concerning their employment. Let’s go over some things you must include in your written employee handbook.
All Business Requirements and Responsibilities
It simply needs to be said: your employee handbook should be the consummate resource for any questions your employee has about their employment and the conditions of such. This ensures that each member of your team will at least have access to a resource that provides a lot of information that they will need, such as:
- FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) information
- Non-discrimination policies
- Sexual harassment policies
- Worker’s compensation policies
Furthermore, it should also provide them with a guide to your internal policies, like:
- Paid-time off policy
- Payment times and promotion/review policy
- Employee behavior expectations
- Employee dress code
- Benefit structure
- Remote work policy
- Social media and employee device policy
It also isn’t a bad idea to include some content to help set the tone of your organization for your employees. For instance, including your company’s mission and history into your handbook and endorsing the company culture you want to encourage is a good way to set the tone from the get-go.
Consider Your Layout
For your handbook to be optimally useful, you need to organize it so that it is as useful as you can make it. Arranging its contents to feature the most useful information at the very beginning can make them, well, more useful. Explaining all your policies in great detail and summarizing them in depth will help to do this, as well.
Update It
Here’s the thing: circumstances change over time, which means that you may eventually have to amend your policies to match. This is especially the case when the cause of these changes is based in the development of the technology that is available to businesses. As these changes are important to keep up to date with, your handbook will need to be adaptable… which, as you may have predicted, means it should be digital.
While it may seem silly to focus so much on what seems to be such a small detail, a good handbook can set the tone for your entire administrative and IT strategy. For assistance in creating the IT policies that will do your business the most good, give CoreTech a call at (270) 282-4926.
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