2 Necessities To Include In Your Company’s Employee Handbook

If your company is getting ready to expand and add dozens of new jobs, now might be the time to create an employee handbook. Employee handbooks are a great way to guide, manage, and control your employees, but they are not easy to create. If you would like to make one of these, you may want to hire a business lawyer to help you. Here are two things a lawyer might suggest including in your new handbook.

Employee job performance evaluations

While there are numerous items that should be included in your employee handbook, one you may want to include relates to employee job performance evaluations. An employee job performance evaluation is something you may want to complete every few months, or even just once a year.

The point of including this is to let your employees know:

  • How often these will be completed
  • The standards used to evaluate an employee's job performance
  • What can potentially come from these (for example, you may want to give raises for good evaluations, but you could also know that their jobs may be in danger from poor performance evaluations)

Clearly stating this information will help your employees know what is expected of them as well as the consequences for poor performance.

Warning system

The second crucial element you should consider adding to your employee handbook relates to the way you warn and punish employees for bad or poor behavior. This is a system you will have to set up yourself, but your lawyer can make sure that your system is created in a way that is legal, fair, and ethical.

This may include a tiered system, such as:

  1. Warning – If an employee does something wrong, the employee might get warned with a write-up letter. While there may be no consequences for this, you might only issue one written warning.
  2. Time off of work – If the same employee again does something wrong, this time you might punish the employee by giving him or her an unpaid week off of work.
  3. Firing – For the third offense, you may decide to fire the person.

Having a system like this will help your employees fully understand how your company operates, but you will need to make sure you follow through with the system in place for every employee you have.

If you would like to learn more about employee handbooks, hire a business attorney, like those at Abom & Kutulakis LLP, to help you create a good and effective one for your company.


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