2/6/2017

Why Your Employee Handbook Template is Terribleprocess.st/employee-handbook/

Ben Mulholland

February 6, 2017

Introducing new policies to ensure a safe and productive workplace makes sense on all sides.

Unfortunately, if your employees don’t know about your policies, it won’t do a damn thing to solve your company’sproblems. In other words, if your employee handbook doesn’t get read, you’re fresh out of luck.

There are two ways to all but guarantee your employees will never read your employee handbook.

Use a cut-and-paste employee handbook template

Never write one in the first place

Think of the copy-and-paste template as the cookie cutter cold emails we all love to hate – there’s no feeling of aperson behind it, so we tune out, ignore it, and get on with our day.

Unlike cold emails, however, if your employees ignore your handbook they’re inevitably going to fall victim to a rulethey didn’t know about.

Sure, you’re still covered for the aftermath (as long as it was in the handbook to begin with), but if you want toprevent these costly blunders from happening your employee handbook needs to be interesting and engaging.

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After all, wouldn’t you rather read a document that talks to you as aperson, rather than another cog in some merciless corporate machine?

Why create an employee handbook?

Employee handbooks are a great way to get your employees up tospeed with everything about your company.

Whether they’re an existing team member who’s unsure about yourcore business processes or a new hire who needs to be briefed on howto prioritize tasks according to your company values, this is thedocument that’s going to give them the foundation to flourish whilstworking with you.

Think of it as onboarding an employee to the company itself – you’vegot your regular process for introducing them to the rest of the team,syncing up and automating their workflows, and building relations with acollaborative remote culture, but the handbook is there to provide thebare bones of what they need to know.

Each handbook is going to vary depending on the company, where they’re based, what they value, and the imagethey want to present, but there are elements which need to be applied to all.

What to include in the employee handbook

The trick with creating an employee handbook is making a document (or physical book) which covers the basics butis interesting enough to keep your team’s attention.

A dull handbook is useless because no-one will read it.

Having said that, the basics that most handbooks should cover are:

Company values and mission

Employee benefits

Leave policy

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and conflict of interest statements

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Anti-discrimination policies

Compensation policies

Work schedules

Standards of conduct

General employment information

Safety and security policies

Computers and use of technology

Media relations

A signature page for the employee

Again, some of these (such as NDAs) will vary depending on the industry you work in, the company you work for,and even where your company is based. There’s also a few specifics that you need to bear in mind.

Company values and mission

The first thing you should do is set out your company values – that is, what the company as a whole is focused onachieving/providing. This both sets the tone for the rest of the document and helps you as the writer keep these coreideals in mind when working through the rest of the book.

Don’t start waxing lyrical. This isn’t the place to prove how great your company is. Here you should be saying whatyour company stands for, what it’s aiming to achieve, and how it’ll go about getting there at a high level.

Employee benefits

Here you need to outline the benefits you provide to your employees such as health insurance and retirement plans.You should also include the eligibility requirements for these benefits (eg, when the retirement plan kicks in).

The key with the benefits section is including it early, rather than towards the end. Everyone loves hearing about

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what they’re going to get out of a situation, and by including it early you’re setting their expectations as quickly aspossible while motivating them to go through the rest of the handbook.

Leave policy

Your leave policy needs to cover both your own personal allowances and those required by law. This meansdetailing allotted holiday, maternity, bereavement and sick leave, along with time off for court cases, jury duty andvoting.

Again, you want to lay this out as quickly as possible so that your employees know what to expect, and what spacethey have to work with.

NDAs and conflicts of interest statements

Here’s where the nitty-gritty details of the handbook begin, and the first call to order is protecting your company’ssensitive information.

Lay out any NDAs or conflict of interest statements which are necessary for the employee to read and agree to.Don’t waffle on with legalistic jargon if you can avoid it either – too jargonistic and the reader will tune out, meaningboth that they have no idea what they’re agreeing to, and what secrets they shouldn’t be telling.

If you feel the need for formal, convoluted language to cover potential loopholes, consider also providing a basicsummary of the agreement (whilst advising them to read the whole thing). That way the employee is guaranteed tounderstand the agreement – it’s better to prevent secrets leaking in plain English than to just cover your back with alegal document the no-one understands.

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Anti-discrimination policy

This is an easy one – you need to lay out that discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated, including religious,racial, sexist, and disability-based discrimination.

Think of it as both protecting your existing workforce from discrimination against new employees, but also assuringyour hire that this is a company which will not tolerate discrimination.

Compensation

Your compensation section should include everything not covered in your benefits and leave policy.

That is, details of any tax reductions, salaries (and salary increases), pay schedules, overtime pay, breaks, bonuses,etc.

Work schedules

Another self-explanatory section, your work schedules should tell your employee just that; their expected workhours, attendance, punctuality, and any guidelines for flexible hours.

For example, at Process Street we all work remotely, and so need to have set times to sync up and communicate.Therefore, in our work schedules handbook section, we lay out the times that our entire team hops on Zoom to havea meeting, and the expected number of hours to work each week.

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Having said that, we’re also more goal-based than strict time schedules, so if someone needs to take a day off theycan work around that. For example, I recently took a Wednesday off work to travel to Latvia and stay with BenBrandall for a couple of weeks – I worked at the weekend to make up for it.

Standards of conduct

Think of this as your “how to behave” section. Here you should describe any dress code, expected ethics, legalobligations (in terms of behavior) and how employees should conduct themselves around clients, if applicable.

A note on dress code – don’t go full dictator on items like dress length but remember to mention any importantelements such as the prevalence of tattoos and/or piercings, especially for roles which deal with clients. I’m notagainst tattoos (I have one myself), but caution is the best way to go when addressing a new client for the first time.

General employee information

Another cleanup section, here’s where you should go into the various job classifications, along with the length ofprobationary periods, termination, resignation, transfer, and relocation procedures, along with any union informationrelating to your employees.

While they should have already been conducted by the point you give them the handbook, you should also reiterateany background checks you employ.

Safety and security

“Health and safety”, the words many love to hate. Nevertheless, your health and safety procedures (and potentialhazards) need to be set in writing, along with how to report any incidents which occur, and what securityresponsibilities your employees have.

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If your new hire needs to lock up a filing cabinet or part of the building at the end of the day, this is where they needto learn about it.

Computers and use of technology

Although you need to do some final cleanup on the security measures your team needs to employ (this time with thetechnology they use), this section should also tell them what the appropriate use of the technology available is, andhow to take precautions with sensitive information (such as client data).

Media relations

You need to present at least a semi-consistent front to the media (and, really, any outside source). As such, here iswhere you need to lay out the procedure for dealing with any calls or inquiries.

At the very least you should tell your employees who to contact if they are approached by a media source so that itcan be passed on and have a consistent response delivered.

Employee signature page

Finally, you need to have a page for the employee to sign to officially record that they’ve read the whole thing and adate for when they completed it.

This is partially for your records (to note when the employee finished the handbook), but also to guarantee both thatthey have gone through the entire handbook, and that you have some backing in the event of problems arising.

After all, if your hire complains that they weren’t told about your dress code, for example, you have written evidenceto prove otherwise.

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The key to success when creating an employee handbook isn’t just covering all of the points above – it’s aboutcapturing the essence of your company and bridging the gap between your new hire and your existing culture.

Some great examples of this are:

Valve

Metal Toad

Netflix

Facebook

Hacking Inc.

Valve

Valve is an odd company, in that it allows its employees to work on whatever takes their fancy. Not only that, but theyaim to have a “flat” company hierarchy in order to ensure that no-one can be excluded, and no-one has ultimatepower over another in terms of a decision-making process.

This might sound like utter chaos, but in the years since forming in 1996 they’ve produced not only some of the mostinfluential and long-lasting games of all time, but have succeeded in releasing the most popular gaming platform andmarketplace on PC.

Incidentally, their handbook is a brilliant example of how to convey the company’s culture as well as the basiccompany structure and benefits, full of humor and illustrations to make it anything but a dry read.

See Valve’s employee handbook here

Metal Toad

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Metal Toad, meanwhile, have taken a storybook approach to their employee handbook “Toad Lore”. Stemming fromTim Winner (now the Senior Vice President)’s desire to answer the questions that their employees *really* wanted tohave answered, they went one step further than even Valve and made a leather-bound book to complete the image.

Complete with charming images and Tolkien-style maps, Metal Toad’s handbook serves as a charming and aboveall engaging introduction to the company.

See Metal Toad’s employee handbook here

Netflix

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Netflix has a little more of a traditional employee handbook in the form of a 124-page Slideshare. It doesn’t treatitself as a storybook, but instead covers the basics a handbook should without spending the time to wax lyrical.

It gets the job done, and in a highly accessible and engaging format (much like Netflix itself).

See Netflix’s employee handbook here

Facebook

With a company as large as Facebook, you’d think creating a short, encompassing handbook would be next toimpossible.

Ben Barry (a designer for Facebook) says as much when talking about his time with the social behemoth – over theyears, the company’s mission, history, and culture had become murky beyond sight to any and every new employee,because much of it had been discussed in meetings or over FB chat or email threads.

“Those who had been present at the time had context, but for new employees that information wasdifficult to find, even if you knew what you were looking for.” – Ben Barry

The solution? A charming little red book with bold colors and minimal text, designed to onboard employees into theculture of an otherwise sprawling empire.

See Facebook’s employee handbook here

Hacking Inc.

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Although a fictional creation of Hewlett Packard, Hacking Inc’s employee handbook is another great example of howa handbook can be used effectively.

The document is filled with gifs, interactive graphs, tongue-in-cheek nods to HP “thwarting” their attempts to hack theworld, and more.

See Hacking Inc.’s employee handbook here

Create your own employee handbook

So, you know what to include and how to keep the handbook engaging. Now it’s time to write (/update) your own.

Despite bashing them earlier, copy-and-paste handbook generators aren’t terrible for getting an idea of the kind oflegal issues you need to cover. Check out a couple such as this one on Formswift and this one from Rocket Lawyerto get your bearings, then start planning out your own handbook.

Remember; the key with writing a handbook is that it needs to engage the reader while onboarding them with yourcompany’s culture. You’re not just telling someone what their work schedule and bonuses are – you’re showingthem the mindset that they should have when going into their first day of work.

You also need to figure out how you want to record your employee handbook. You could create a storybook likeMetal Toad or Facebook, a Slideshare like Netflix, or a PDF akin to Valve’s, but there’s another way to make thehandbook itself actionable and engaging – by using Process Street.

By recording your employee handbook as a template in Process Street you can assign it to the employee who needsto read it, have them tick off each task (section) as they go, and even insert form fields to let them put in their owninformation or files (such as a signed document).

Don’t just take my word for it either – Boomtown (one of our customers) have made their own employee handbookinto part of their Agent Onboarding checklist.

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