Referred to as the Holy Grail for an organization operating worldwide, an employee handbook is a document that includes everything there is to know about your company. It is an organizations’ user manual.
If you are looking for ways to create an employee handbook or want to customize the current one, then you’re at the right place. In this piece, we will touch base on design ideas alongside best practices that employee handbooks should follow.
Why Is Employee Handbook Important?
Commonly referred to as culture code, company policy manual, staff handbook, and employee manual, an employee handbook is crafted by Human Resources to communicate job and employment-related information.
Everything is to be mentioned in an employee handbook from conduct policy to employee benefits so your employees can know the business and resultantly, add value to it.
Now let’s talk about customizing your employee handbook!
1. The Right Color Scheme
The color and theme of the template sets the mood of the handbook and communicates the kind of environment the business has. What color palette to go with is decided by what your company offers and reflects.
If your company’s handbook is in the tones of blacks, it will give off of a boring and dull feel to your handbook while using warm hues of orange, yellow and red will give off a welcoming vibe. Before deciding your palette, it’s a good practice to look at some templates of the famous handbooks. This will give you some data points and help you in decision making.
2. Company’s Vision, Mission And Values
Each company and/or business is defined by its mission statement, its vision and the values it practices. Custom editing this part of the employee handbook is by far one of the most important customization that you’ll need.
While on-boarding new employees, it is necessary that they are made aware of what the business is and how things work. This will help the employees understand what they are getting themselves in and also help them understand their role in the business.
3. Company’s Policies
Copy and pasting the policies from a legal website is just not enough. Depending on a number of factors like the scale of your business, the states you operate in and other numerous factors, you must curate a proper policy section. The more thorough your policy section is, the more loopholes and lawsuits you can avoid.
Consulting a lawyer for this task is your best bet. Have all the legal policies included in your employee handbook so in case of legal action, you and your employees are fully aware of the situation.
4. Visuals, Infographics and Charts
All words and no play? Reading a thick, professionally worded handbook will bore your employees. Play with the visual memory a little and add graphics, charts and illustrations. This will take some extra time of your design team but adding infographics will be more engaging and will have a higher probability of being read thoroughly by your employees.
Get creative, use a chart to show the retention rate of your company’s employees or show the number of different holidays and working days using a bar graph. There are a number of options you can play around with!
5. Leaves And Holidays
There are national holidays that every company is bound to abide by and then there are other policies on annual and holiday leaves which each company differs in. Clearly state the leaves policy, work from home policies or sick leaves policies that you have.
While it is important to be clear in this regard, it is also important that you allow some flexibility in this section. Someone in your company might get severely injured or need to make some frequent visits to the doctors. In that case, the employer must offer some benefits to the employee(s).
While these 5 points are not the only ones that you should be customizing in your employee handbook, they are still some of the most important ones. Your employee handbook reflects your company. Make sure it’s worth it!