Employee Handbooks - Should Your Company Policies Be in Writing?

Employee handbooks are useful for several purposes, but most importantly, for helping you avoid costly liability in employee lawsuits. Other important reasons are communicating your policies, procedures, and expected standards of performance and conduct. Policies addressing discrimination, harassment, workplace bullying, procedures for termination along with all other applicable employment laws should be included in your employee handbook. Policies addressing Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO), employment and compensation policies, time-off policies, employee benefits, employee safety policies, and corrective/discipline/termination policies should be included. Employees should have access to employee handbooks at all times via employee on-boarding, employee bulletin board, HR department, company intranet, etc. Each employee should sign an acknowledgement that they have been provided with a company handbook. Keep all acknowledgements on file with the HR department. Creating a handbook can be a daunting task with the quickly changing state and federal employment laws. TrendHR provides our clients with an employee handbook addressing current employment laws, and can draft a custom handbook at the client’s request with company specific policies.