What Should Your Employee Policy Manual Contain?

If your business has employees, you need to have a HR Manual. Your employee manual protects both you and your employees and it should list out each employee policy that governs your employees

1. Legal Compliance

From the day your first employee walks in the door you also inherit a whole pile of legal obligations you must comply with. The majority of these legal obligations require you to document your policy on certain areas and to educate your employees on these obligations.

You need to ensure you have addressed all workplace health and safety, sexual harassment, bullying, racial vilification, anti-discrimination and privacy requirements. You also need to comply with all industrial relations and financial obligations.

2. Employee Education

Employees need to know their rights, responsibilities and entitlements. By having them in your employee policy manual you can quickly educate all your employees. You can quickly refer an employee to a particular employee policy in your employee handbook if they have a question to help them know where to find the information.

3. Productivity

Your time is precious. By writing down and sharing the information with your employees you save repeating yourself. You also will reduce new employee orientation time as everything is well documented.

4. Clarity

By documenting your employee policies both you and your employees know what procedure you will be following for particular issues. This is vital for procedures such as employee appraisals, employee probation and discipline processes.

Your employee manual draws the proverbial line in the sand and declares "this is how we do things around here".

What Should Go Into Your Employee Manual?

Many people get hung up on how big or small their employee manual should be. The bottom line is that it should contain all of the information that your employees need and want to know about their employment.

Generally employee manuals contain information about:

· Job descriptions – how you write them and what duties each role performs

· Recruitment and selection – the process you follow to hire and reference check an employee

· New employee welcome and employee induction process – how you welcome new employees into your business and the process you use to ensure they know the rules of your business

· Employee Probation – how you manage an employee probation and what you do if you don't confirm the probation

· Rosters and hours of work – how rosters are developed, what the hours of work are, how to change rosters, overtime, public holidays, time sheets and punctuality

· Pays & personnel records – when and how pays are made, what is contained on payslips

· Staff benefits - Any staff discounts or benefits you offer for goods and services

· Leave – this includes annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, adoption leave, long service leave, compassionate leave, study leave, jury service leave, ceremonial leave, leave without pay

· Moonlighting – can your employee work another job

· Termination of employment – what happens when someone resigns, is made redundant, abandons their employment or is sacked

· Privacy, confidentiality and intellectual property

· Dress standards and personal appearance

· Travel and expenses – rules and reimbursements around travel in the course of employement

· Employee Appraisals – the process you use to appraise employee performance

· Learning and development

· Poor performers – what you do if they are not performing to a satisfactory level

· Personal Behaviour – all of the legal requirements such as anti-discrimination, workplace bullying and harassment, workplace health and safety need to be included here

· Code of conduct – the minimum acceptable standards of behaviour

· Discipline – How you deal with an employee who breaks the rules

· Alcohol and illegal drugs

· Grievances – how you will resolve any grievances from an employee

· Administration - all of your administrative procedures including phone procedures, blogging and internet use, personal calls, computer policies, equipment use, customer complaints

Version Control of your Employee Policy Manual

Each employee manual needs some form of version control. The legal reason behind this is if you end up before the courts at any stage they will want to see the version of your employee policies that were in place at the time of any incident. You will need to keep records of each change and the date that it was changed.

The simplest way to ensure all employees access the most up to date version at any given time is to store the document in a central location such as an intranet or shared directory. If you use a paper based employee policy manual, then keep track of the changes in the footers.

Your employee policy manual does not have to be complex, but it does need to be comprehensive and compliant with all legal requirements.