Employee Handbook For Small Business – Starting a new position at a new company can often seem overwhelming, with many new facets, information, and policies to learn.
But giving your new hires an employee handbook early in their career (think: day one) is a great way to make sure the employee has all the necessary information and also has a resource to refer back to regularly if they have any issues. questions.
Employee Handbook For Small Business
An employee handbook is the Holy Grail of your company. It contains everything anyone could need to know about working within your organization. It’s basically your company’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
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While you may not include an entire section on towels, the employee handbook is one hundred percent your “Don’t Panic” document.
Whether you’re creating your first employee handbook, or updating an existing one, read on. I’ll explain what you should include in your handbook, along with some of the best employee handbook and design tips. I have also included pre-made employee handbooks and many examples of employee handbooks.
An employee handbook is a document created by an employer (usually the Human Resources team) to convey job and job information that employees should know. Sometimes called an “employee handbook”, “employee handbook”, “company policy manual” or even a “culture brochure”, an employee handbook is given to new hires after they accept an offer letter.
Employee handbooks are essential human resources, along with HR reports, performance reviews, and incident reports, so it’s important to get them right.
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Staff manuals and policy manuals may look similar, but they are two very different things. An employee handbook tells your employees what to expect, and it should be written in easy-to-understand language. A policy manual, on the other hand, is a document that tells your employees how to do things, and it can contain a lot of technical information.
For example, in your employee handbook you will tell your employees that they can work remotely for one month (one of the benefits!), but you don’t need to specify the smallest details in your handbook. You should keep relevant information such as how to apply for your remote month, and what to expect from remote work, in the policy manual.
The information in your employee handbook should match the information in your policy handbook, but it should be a flavor rather than a complete policy. Think of your policy manual as a terms and conditions document.
If you haven’t taken the time to write and design an employee handbook—you’re probably not alone. Especially new and small businesses often neglect producing an employee handbook. But as your company grows, it’s useful to create a central place for all your processes and policies to live in the past.
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Employee handbooks are incredibly effective in maintaining good workplace culture and integrating new people into the team. An employee handbook sets clear expectations for all employees to ensure that everyone in the organization can stay on the same page. In doing so, the employee handbook helps establish a culture where issues can be dealt with fairly and consistently.
An employee handbook is not only useful for your new employees, but also for your former employees. At all levels and levels of your company, an employee handbook can be useful. As mentioned, manuals can provide newcomers with an introduction to your company and internal structure.
Employee handbooks can paint a clear understanding of what their supervisors expect of them. They can ensure that policies, procedures and work practices are fairly and strictly enforced, to eliminate confusion and disruption in your team.
Handbooks can be a useful tool for your company to show how important you are to your employees – this is presented in the information you deem most important in your handbook (think support efforts and integration efforts). .
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Finally, handbooks work as a communication vehicle to facilitate employee integration within the company with a commitment to fostering a sense of inclusion across teams.
Every company will have different needs, but here is an overview of what you should include in a standard employee handbook:
What should be included in an employee handbook will vary from company to company depending on the company’s size and industry. If you are a large organization with hundreds of employees, the employee handbook is likely to be larger and more comprehensive than the employee handbook distributed to smaller and/or smaller companies.
That being said, writing a great employee handbook relies on a thorough understanding of the company and its culture.
Faq: Does My Small Business Need An Employee Handbook?
The employee handbook is an employee-facing document, so this is the perfect place to define your employee’s rights and duties related to work but in plain English instead of legal jargon native to contracts.
If you are creating an employee handbook for the first time, it may be beneficial to speak with members of senior management. Ask them what they think is the most important thing to communicate with a new employee. Making sure everyone is on the same page about expectations, policies, and behavior from the start is a great way to start the onboarding process.
Every great employee handbook starts with a great description. Be sure to take the time to plan the contents of the employee handbook before you dive in. This will ensure that you include all the necessary resources to make your manual effective.
Employee handbooks are really a personal choice – no one size fits all situation. Although the information in each employee handbook fits into some common categories, the depth that companies will go into each category depends on various factors such as company size, company industry, location ( yada) the company, company culture, etc.
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See below for examples of what to include in an employee handbook. Feel free to pick and choose the topics that are most relevant to your business, or go all the way and include the whole package.
Once you’ve chosen what to add, you can set the table of contents. This will help guide you through the rest of the employee handbook, and make sure you don’t miss anything. A table of contents is also a great way for your staff to quickly jump to a section.
Next you need to pick a design template for your employee handbook. Some large organizations will have an in-house design team, but if you’re faced with designing an employee handbook yourself a pre-made template can be a good place to start.
Use symbols, pictures, tables, images, graphs and charts in your employee handbook to break down your information to make it attractive and interesting to look at. These chapters will keep your readers engaged and attracted to the content included.
What To Include In An Employee Handbook
You can use this to emphasize important information that you want your audience to pay attention to. In this employee handbook example symbols are used to show new employees what to expect on their first day at the company.
Using visuals also helps keep your readers’ attention. An employee handbook contains so much information that it can be overwhelming, so avoid large text whenever possible.
New to graphic design and not sure how to use symbols effectively? Watch: Everything you need to know about symptoms (under 3 minutes)
A consistent design is key to creating branded internal comms documents. When creating an employee handbook you are giving new hires a taste of the company and its culture – so it is especially important to use the company’s brand guidelines.
New Hire Checklist
With the My Brand Kit tool, business users can enter their company’s fonts, color palette, and logos and see them instantly applied to their brochure layout.
Color psychology is something you may not have heard of, but you’ve definitely experienced. Just as certain colors like red and orange make us feel warm, they also feel friendly and welcoming. Blue and green can feel cool or calm.
It is important that the colors you use in your employee handbook reflect your organization and company culture. In this example, the color palette is very simple, only white, gray, and green, which looks modern and clean.
An employee handbook should be an evergreen resource within your company, with employees returning to it regularly. But when your employees refer back to the employee handbook they are likely looking for a specific piece of information.
Employee And Company Handbook Templates
Help your employees find the information they need quickly by using subheadings and subheadings in the employee handbook.
Avoid creating the dreaded ‘wall of text’ in your notebook by dividing the text into lists, columns or boxes. Columns are a great way to keep readers engaged with your writing. Our brains love lists for many different reasons (this New Yorker article is a good summary!), so be sure to break down complex information into easily manageable chunks.
A pop-up box is a great way to highlight the most important information on a page. For many staff handbook examples, like this one, important political dates or anything else is highlighted in a different color box. This tells your staff this information