Employee handbook

An employee handbook can help to welcome new staff, provides employees and managers with a handy source of reference and, by providing clear guidelines and policies in one document, you spend less time answering questions and explaining your rules and procedures.

Advice and good practice

• A good handbook will create a great impression for your business.
• Take some time to carefully customise the information, to ensure that it is of maximum benefit to you and your employees.
• The employee handbook is a non-contractual guide, therefore it can easily be updated. Check your handbook periodically to ensure that it's kept fully up to date - we would recommend an annual review and further updates whenever there are major changes (eg legal updates, new technology, restructure of the business).
• If you make changes to the employee handbook, it is important to know which version was issued to which employee so make sure that you date and/or reference each version.
• Incorporate your logo and as much information about your organisation as possible - this will help your employees to feel they belong.
• Ensure that each employee has a personal copy of the handbook. It is advisable to include this on your induction checklist and ask new employees to sign to confirm that they have received a copy.
• Make copies generally available also eg on your noticeboard or intranet.
• Use straightforward language. If the handbook is too vague or too technical it will not serve its purpose! Make it easy to understand, clear and user-friendly.
• Be prepared to answer questions regarding the contents of the handbook.

Features

The employee handbook is split into eight main sections:

• About your business
• On joining us
• General terms and conditions
• Your career with us
• Your health, safety and security
• Other rules and general information
• On leaving us
• Our policies and procedures

The employee handbook:

• provides you with a detailed template, containing all you need
• helps you to meet legislative requirements with minimum effort: we give you suggested wording, but all sections are customisable
• can be tailored to incorporate terms and information relating to your business
• is professionally formatted for you
• is structured so that you can include all of your essential employment policies at the back as an appendix if you wish
• is easy and quick to produce.

Policies and procedures which affect all employees, or all employees in particular groupings, should be covered in the handbook. Details specific to individuals should be set out in their statement of terms and conditions of employment or contract of employment for example, salary/wages, hours of work, holiday, overtime, notice period, job title.

Copies of the handbooks you generate are stored on our server so you can retrieve previous versions.

If you wish to include your logo on the handbook cover, it may be possible to do this - simply email us a copy of your logo as an attachment - either a jpeg, gif or png file (ie something which is web-compatible rather than print compatible). We can then add this to your client record for you to try out.