Good handbooks are guides that reflect the constantly changing landscape of business, anticipate problems, improve employer/employee/management communications, and signal conformity with resultant compliance requirements. No longer are handbooks documents that after a one-time distribution can be counted upon to address any workplace situation that occurs for the next 5 years.

Handbooks are often overlooked as being one of your business’s most important business documents. Handbooks are what an employer communicates to its employees as the guidelines and expectations to the workplace relationship between them. In addition, handbooks are distributed to managers as guides for how they are expected to handle employment situations. Handbooks are also increasingly becoming defenses against an employer’s liability for the actions of its employees. Handbook communications are so crucial to good employment relationships and (business situations) on all sides, that it’s crucial to exercise care that a handbook is clear and current, but with enough flexibility that an employer can address situations with some individualization.

Even with such painstaking care in writing, HR professionals are frustrated daily by employees who consider handbooks to be merely strongly-worded suggestions and managers who do not even consider them that.

This webinar will help you do 3 things; understand current hot spots in handbooks, best practices to help your handbook address situations you’ve probably not even thought of yet (but soon will have to handle), and lastly, strategies to get both your employees and managers to buy into and comply with your handbook.

•  How COVID-19 has affected employee handbooks.
• How to be precise and clear while still leaving room for individualized interpretation.
• Today’s compliance and business policy hot spots.
• Policies you need today or will be horrified in 2 years (likely less) that you don’t have.
• How to write policies that are easy to change as the workplace evolves and compliance requirements change.
• Sure-fire ways to get your managers to enforce policies as they are written.
• How to get employees to buy into handbooks.
• Tightening up “policy holes” in handbooks without writing 4,000 pages while leaving no room for interpretation.
• How to write a handbook that foils the manager and employee who just won’t follow the rules because they are talented at legitimately breaking them.

Employee handbooks are a critical tool in providing important information to employees. They describe what employers expect of their employees and what employees can (should) expect from their employers. They provide critical information about employers and their workplaces and how employees are expected to fit in.

Employee handbooks further formalize the mutual expectations of organizations and their employees. In delineating these expectations employee handbooks create opportunities and risks for employers. Handbooks provide organizations with the opportunity to enhance the value of their human capital, make their organizations more competitive, and improve individual and organizational performance. Conversely, handbooks can impede the achievement of business objectives, increase employment-related liabilities, and reduce managerial prerogatives by making promises or committing to certain procedural safeguards that the organization did not intend to make. As noted in the recent memorandum from the General Counsel of the NLRB: incorrectly designed employee handbooks can violate the law and have a "chilling effect" on employees' activities.

Thus employee handbooks increasingly provide employers the opportunity to make their workforce more committed and supported of their goals. Unfortunately, they also provide the basis for employees' legal action and can significantly reduce employees' commitment to organizational success.