Most businesses need some formal written policies – whether an actual “handbook” or a collection of pages on key employment-related topics.  It is a type of preventive medicine, and can also serve as a good business planning tool.  Should your business have an employee handbook? For a small business in particular, this question is hard to answer. Whether to have a handbook should depend largely on the size of your business. If you have only a handful of employees, the time it would take to assemble a handbook probably won’t be worth it. However, you may still want to have some kind of written document to communicate your general work policies to employees — perhaps a one-page document would be sufficient. Remember that you are intending to grow – your policies and guidelines need to be able to grow with you.

Conversely, if you have ten or more employees, you might want to put a simple handbook together. Some employers feel that handbooks can pass on valuable information to your employees, such as:

• what you expect of them and what they can expect of you
• what your business’s service policy and objectives are
• what place your business has in the community and the industry
• what makes your business a good place to work

If you’re undecided about whether to invest the time in creating a handbook, consider some of the other uses for a handbook in addition to communicating important information to employees. Provided the appropriate content is there, the handbook can serve a number of purposes:

• Managing People. They will help you and your managers staff save time. Formal policies help cut down on answering the same questions over and over again, and provide guidelines for handling common situations.
• Written policies ensure uniformity across your business and help prevent disputes.
• A motivator. A handbook can give employees a sense of being a part of something larger. If your handbook includes information about the business’s history and goals, it can provide a positive motivation for keeping employees excited about their jobs and involved in the company’s success.
• A reference. With a handbook, everyone knows the rules of your workplace. When an employee breaks a rule, you can refer to the handbook. It helps make enforcement and discipline easier, but also communicates employee entitlements which helps promote a positive employee experience.
• Your shield from charges of discrimination or unfair treatment. If discrimination or unemployment claims are brought against your business, your handbook can provide persuasive evidence that you had clear, reasonable rules against certain conduct which were communicated to employees and fairly enforced.
• Spending time thinking about the messages you want the employees to have regarding your business, and distributing those messages consistently can improve leadership, and help keep the business on track with its mission.

When it comes to employee handbooks, one size does not fit all. Think twice before making a few changes to a friend’s “borrowed” handbook and calling it your own. The tone of the handbook may be appropriate for a transportation company but is it really suitable for your financial services organization? In addition, keep in mind that the integrity of a “borrowed” document is questionable since you have no idea who originally wrote the handbook and if it is in compliance with local regulations.

As tempting as it may be, avoid downloading handbooks from the Internet. Yes, the handbook may be fine for a company based in Ontario, but may not be appropriate for a multi-province employer like you. You don’t want to find out the hard way that you are giving out a document that is inappropriate for the locations in which you operate.

So, if you are still one of those doubters that thinks employee handbooks are just for big business consider purchasing a tape recorder so you can remember your answers to the questions you are most likely to hear over and over again. “Do we get Remembrance Day off?” “When am I eligible for three weeks of vacation?” “How much maternity leave am I entitled to and what will happen to all of my benefits while on leave?”