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The Employee Handbook is an essential communication tool that organisations must ensure is up to date, comprehensive and communicates effectively with your new and existing employees. It should sit alongside and compliment the Contract of Employment. Handbooks are used by organisations to inform new and current employees over the course of their employment relationship with an organisation.

While a Contract of Employment acts as the essential document governing the employment relationship, Employee Handbooks are incredibly useful in communicating details on policies and procedures to new employees without the contract becoming too long and bulky. 

The Employee Handbook is a useful source of reference for an employee who is unclear about any particular issues and an invaluable communication tool for the company’s Human Resources department and for organisations overall.

What benefit does an Employee Handbook offer to companies?

An employee handbook has several advantages for an employer, regardless of the size of the organisation. The Handbook can aid companies by helping them to put staff members at ease by spelling out the company’s policies and expectations in a positive and accessible manner. Further to this, an Employee Handbook can be rolled out across multiple organisation locations, leading to standardised and consistent employment policies and procedures across the organisation as a whole. A well-drafted Employee Handbook:

• Clarifies and communicates the rules and regulations across the whole organisation, eliminating possibilities for confusion on the part of both employee and employers
• Enables the employer to set out company policies concerning, for example, reclaiming the cost of training where a new joiner leaves the company within a pre-defined period of time
• Provides clear and defined guidelines upon which the employer can rely in any legal disputes with the employee, should they arise
• Sets out the procedures for disciplinary and grievance actions, making performance management easier for the employer
• Provides clear guidelines for all managers on how to manage employees
• Sets out clear lines of communication between staff, management and directors of the company
• Boosts engagement between staff and management
• Ensures effective communication with staff

 An effective Employee Handbook can also serve to motivate employees. An effective Employee Handbook will cover not only the negative obligations on an employee, but also will spell out what the employee can expect from the company and what is expected of the employee in order to excel within the company.

A Reflection of Your Organisation

While an Employee Handbook serves as an important protection against legal disputes, it also provides a very valuable medium by which you the employer can affirm and uphold the values and ideals of the business throughout the employee cohort through policies specific to your organisation.

Before you write your Employee Handbook, take the time to determine what values are important to your business. This involves a consideration of how employee behaviour can best represent the company, how the organisation values and treats its employees, and the means by which the organisation accomplishes its business objectives in the day-to-day running of the enterprise. These considerations will help you to form concrete policies laying down the guidelines as to what is and is not acceptable behaviour in light of the values and mission of the company. In doing this, you are ensuring that your Employee Handbook is not only a protective measure to guard against liability, but it is also a reflection of the organisation, its culture and ideals, and the type of behaviour the company stands for.

Tips for your Employee Handbook

Your Employee Handbook should be clear, easy to understand and accessible to all employees. A copy of the handbook should be provided to each new employee when joining the company and a copy published on the company website or intranet for future reference.

There are a number of standard provisions every Employment Handbook should:

• Supersede all previous extraneous company policies. This is an important point to clarify, in order to ensure that the Handbook is the ultimate point of reference and to ensure that there remains a consistent understanding of the company’s current policies.
• Be subject to change. It is important to retain the ability to edit and revise the Handbook where necessary, as it is inevitable that over time both employment legislation and company polices will evolve in response to the external environment.
• Be acknowledged by the employee. All Handbooks must contain a page where the employee signs and verifies that he or she is aware of the guidelines and will abide by them. This acknowledgement allows the company to later rely on these guidelines as legally enforceable should a dispute arise.
• In the event of a conflict of content between the contract of employment and the Employee Handbook, the contract of employment will always prevail.

 It is suggested that the four most important policies and procedures to cover in an employee handbook are those relating to:

• Grievance resolution procedures: The Handbook should set out standard procedures for resolving an employee’s work-place grievance. Not only will this reduce the unnecessary stress on employees and allow for speedy resolution of issues, it also sends a good message to employees that you care about their comfort and satisfaction within their jobs
• Disciplinary procedures: Defining what constitutes misconduct and the procedures and consequences which will follow is necessary for the functioning of any organisation. While predictability and consistent standards are crucial to employee accountability, disciplinary clauses should always include a disclaimer reserving the right to judge the appropriateness of behaviour on a case-by-case basis. Notably, if the handbook contains the company disciplinary procedure, then it must be issued to all employees within 28 days of the commencement of their employment, as per the Unfair Dismissals Acts 1977-2015
• Dignity at work provisions, including anti-harassment, anti-bullying and equal opportunities
• Health and safety provisions

 Other recommended topics for inclusion in the Employee Handbook include:

• General Policies and Procedures: To include dress codes, pay periods, time sheets, telephone use, holidays and anything else that is pertinent to your business
• Leave Policies: To include your work policy on annual leave, sick days, sabbaticals, maternity leave, etc.
• Conditions of Pay: To include wage deductions, overtime, unpaid leave, bank holiday working
• Termination of Employment: To include notice periods, redundancy, reference policies, etc.
• Communications between employees, managers and directors within the organization

In summary, the Employee Handbook serves a wide-ranging set of guidelines read in conjunction with the contract of employment. It is recommended that to ensure that your handbook fully complies with legal obligations and that these legal obligations will have to be updated in line with any developments in legislation every 18-24 months. Employers should seek guidance from a human resources organisation or an employment law practitioner in relation to ensuring their employee handbook is compliant with employment legislation.

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Paradigm president Evelyn Carter details her three-part framework for promoting better accountability around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategies in the workplace.

According to Carter, “[w]ithout a framework for measuring and evaluating their efforts, the resolve that many leaders and organizations have shown around improving DEI in recent years will falter when challenges arise.”

To prevent this, Carter developed a three-part framework for driving accountability around DEI. Although her framework is centered around hiring, she emphasizes it can be applied to other areas, including performance management, compensation, and retention.

What most people get wrong about diversity, equity, and inclusion

1. Educate: Explain why the changes you are making are important

Because people “are more likely to persist in the face of change when they are intrinsically motivated,” Carter suggests highlighting the ways in which proposed changes are personally relevant to the company and its leaders. In addition, she suggests sharing data on how low representation of people of color makes it hard to attract applicants from those demographics. 

Picklist: How to embed equity considerations into existing strategic priorities

“Emphasize how your homogeneous workforce raises questions of belonging for those from underrepresented groups, creating a revolving door of talent for the people you do hire. With every problem that you share, demonstrate how it undermines the company’s DEI values,” Carter writes.

For instance, when one company debuted a new structured hiring process, a talent leader expressed frustration to Carter because they were having a difficult time getting the CEO on board with the process. In that situation, Carter said the CEO “needed a clearer view of the why, not just the how.”

“Providing such education might have made it more likely that the CEO would willingly comply with the new process, or, at the very least, made it easier for that talent leader to hold the CEO accountable for doing so,” she writes.

2. Listen: Ask for and implement feedback

“While it can be tempting to create a plan with goals and proposals around DEI, and then present that fully formed solution to your leaders, people are more likely to adopt changes if they help create the solutions themselves,” Carter writes.

Accordingly, rather than simply telling leaders what they should do, Carter suggests highlighting existing problems and potential solutions and then asking for leaders’ input and feedback. “This will help you design a series of accountability strategies that allow you to ensure your new process has the intended impact,” Carter writes.

As companies work to craft DEI strategies with leaders and employees, Carter also suggests crowdsourcing accountability mechanisms. “Consider proactive efforts—ways you can incentivize people toward the behavior you hope to see—and reactive ones you can leverage when folks go astray,” Carter writes. “This collective discussion will make accountability feel less punitive and more like commitment to a shared goal that you improve upon constantly.”

3. Recognize: Celebrate successes—but encourage those who need it

According to Carter, “sometimes the best-designed processes go unused, because change is hard.”

To mitigate this, she suggests encouraging and rewarding individuals who use the process well, but also giving a lot of encouragement to those who do not use the process well. “Establish a regular debrief cadence where people can share insights with others. Acknowledge that none of this is easy or simple and reinforce that these changes will align your company’s DEI impact with your intent,” Carter writes.

When employees are resistant to a new process, Carter urges companies to consider the planned accountability strategies that they developed in step two of her framework. The first few times a person falls short, she suggests asking questions about the challenges they’re facing, and why they aren’t using the process. According to Carter, their answers could further refine processes for everyone’s benefit.

In addition, she suggests emphasizing a growth mindset, while reminding employees that “learning often yields mistakes and failure, but that it is net positive over time.”

According to Carter, “until there is meaningful reform and accountability around how individuals apply such rules, no manner of policy updates will yield change.”

“In lieu of waiting for a crisis to emerge, be proactive about bringing stakeholders on board for any process changes you make—and don’t be afraid to hold them accountable for that plan’s success,” she adds. (Carter, Harvard Business Review, 2/25)