Whether you’re an HR manager trying to breathe new life into your company’s policies or a business owner creating your first handbook, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’ll talk about what an employee handbook is, the benefits of handbook templates, and factors to consider when choosing a template. 

We’ve compiled a list of basic employee handbook templates to help inspire your handbook creation process. Most of the templates we’ll feature are suitable for companies with fewer than 50 employees — people looking to create simple handbooks housed in Notion, ClickUp, another wiki tool, or in a Word doc or PDF. However, we’ll discuss some more advanced options, too.

We’ll also go over template customization and implementation, followed by best practices for handbook maintenance.

As a business owner or HR professional, you have many priorities, like hiring, training, and ensuring operations run smoothly. Your employee handbook can help you perform these tasks by giving employees easy access to the necessary information.

Employee handbooks give all employees clear guidance on your company’s policies, procedures, and expectations. Better yet, an effective employee handbook benefits people at all levels of your organization — from new hires on day one to managers celebrating ten years at the company.

In this article, we’ll explain what an employee handbook is, why it’s important to have one, and what it should include.

We’ll also discuss when to create your employee handbook and provide guidelines to help you get started.

Lastly, we’ll go over the various platforms you can use to create your employee handbook, including Microsoft Word, Google Docs, knowledge management platforms, or specialized employee handbook software like Blissbook.