Developing Effective Employee Handbooks: 2020 Critical Issues and Best Practices

OVERVIEW

A survey of employers’ revealed that organizations use employee handbooks to address key business, legal, and talent management issues. Unfortunately, they often limit the effectiveness of their handbook policies by using ineffective employee handbook practices. As the survey report noted, in many organizations there is a disconnect between the drafting and issuing of handbook policies and the practices that ensure those policies are effectively implemented. This disconnect can lead to missed business opportunities, lost strategic goals, increased legal action, and the loss of critical talent.

Employee handbooks have become a valuable tool in providing important information to employees. Handbooks describe what employers expect of their employees, and what employees can (should) expect from their employers. Handbooks provide critical information about their employers, workplaces, and HR policies and procedures, and describe how employees are expected to fit in.

Additionally, employee handbooks 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 commitments 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 for employers the opportunity to make their workforce more committed to and supportive of organizational goals. At the same time, they also provide the basis for employees’ legal action and can significantly reduce employees’ commitment to organizational success.

WHY SHOULD YOU ATTEND

The purposes and the scope of employee handbook process, policies and the practices are changing and expanding. From a siloed HR activity that creates insular documents concerned primarily with communicating the organizational work rules and benefits, employee handbook process, policies and practices have evolved into a critical component of an organization-wide management process that maximizes organizations’ achievement of business objectives, enhances the value of their human capital, and minimizes legal risk.

Thus, to increase the effectiveness of their employment policies, organizations will have to:
1) enhance their business, operational, and legal intelligence to ensure they have identified the changing external and internal factors that affect their policies.
2) increase internal stakeholder participation in the handbook development process to obtain greater employee commitment and operational alignment.
3) establish new metrics to assess handbook policy and practices performance and measure the achievement of organization goals.
4) implement internal controls that identify and alert management about employee handbook issues.

AREAS COVERED

Employee handbooks will increasingly have to ensure that they are aligned with strategic and business objectives, are properly drafted, and effectively implemented. Additionally, employee handbooks will have to:

• Enhance the employment brand;
• Play a key role in recruitment and retention;
• Enhance employee relations, employee morale, and productivity;
• Contribute to uniform and consistent application, interpretation, and enforcement of organizational policies and rules;
• Protect the organization against claims of improper employee/supervisor conduct; and
• Reduce the organization’s exposure to employment related liabilities.

From this perspective, employee handbooks will continue to play an important role in communicating with and providing information for employees.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Key employee handbook issues in 2019
• A review of the NLRB’s recent memorandum on employee handbooks
• How organizations can reduce the gap between policy issuance and effective implementation.
• Review the basics of employee handbook development and employee handbook changes, 2019
• Discuss the expanding purposes and scope of employee handbooks
• Learn about employee handbook manual template and the dimensions of critical handbook policies
• Understand the framework of employee handbook audits activities

WHO WILL BENEFIT

• HR Professionals
• Risk Managers
• Internal Auditors
• In-house Counsel
• CFOs and CEOs
• Management Consultants
• Other individuals who want to learn how to use develop and implement employee handbooks

SPEAKER

Ronald Adler is the president-CEO of Laurdan Associates, Inc., a veteran-owned, human resource management consulting firm in Rockville, Md., specializing in HR audits, employment practices risk management, benchmarking and HR metrics, strategic HR, employee surveys, and unemployment insurance issues.