What Not to Include in Your Employee Handbook

October 3, 2023

Your handbook helps employees understand what your company is all about—from culture and values to the policies and procedures that make your workplace successful. Creating a helpful handbook means knowing what to include and, just as importantly, what not to include.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the employee handbook creation process and provide guidance on what topics to cover and what to avoid.

Why Employee Handbooks are Valuable

An employee handbook is much more than a book of rules—it’s a vital document that guides employees through their journey within your organization. The best handbooks are regularly reviewed and updated. Your handbook should grow and change alongside your company to ensure it remains useful and reflects the most up-to-date legal information.

Before we dive into handbook content, let’s take a closer look at why you should create an employee handbook.

Welcome New Hires: The handbook plays a crucial role during the onboarding process. It offers newcomers a comprehensive look into the company’s culture and operational procedures, making it easier for employees to get acclimated and learn the specifics of your organization.

Communicate Expectations: By outlining company policies and expectations, employees have a clearer understanding of how to succeed within your organization. Greater access to information results in fewer miscommunications or misunderstandings.

Highlight Your Company Culture: The best employee handbooks capture the organization’s heart and soul. By emphasizing the company’s values and guiding principles, employees can better understand your overarching goals and make decisions that align with the organization’s broader purpose.

Provide a Legal Safeguard: Your employee handbook also protects your company and its employees by communicating policies geared toward legal compliance. Policies on topics like equal employment opportunity and anti-harassment benefit the organization and its employees by promoting inclusivity and mitigating legal risk.

Assist in Conflict Resolution: If workplace disputes arise, it’s good to refer back to your handbook. It’s easier to make fair and consistent decisions when you’ve got your policies and procedures thoroughly documented and available to all employees—especially if employees were asked to sign an acknowledgement form.

No matter your company’s size or industry, it’s important to develop an employee handbook when the time is right.

Common Employee Handbook Mistakes

If you’ve ever created an employee handbook, you know it’s an involved process with many moving parts. To aid you in handbook creation, we’ve identified three common mistakes companies make when developing their employee handbooks.

Handbook Error #1: Create Legal Risk

One of your handbook’s primary objectives is to reduce legal risk. However, if you omit crucial policies or misrepresent legal rights, you could open yourself up to legal issues.

For instance, if you fail to state your at-will employment policy or miscommunicate employee rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), your company could end up in a precarious legal position.

You should always ask a legal team to review your employee handbook to ensure it doesn’t create unintended liability. By the time you’ve finished compiling your handbook content, legal review might feel like one more obstacle in the way of your launch—but it’s a step you can’t afford to skip.

Handbook Error #2: Fail to Make Updates

Once your handbook is finalized and distributed, you may be tempted to put it aside for as long as possible. However It’s important to remember that corporate policies and employment laws evolve, making it necessary to update your handbook at regular intervals. This keeps your handbook current and also gives you the opportunity to address areas of employee confusion.

When you routinely update your handbook, employees have greater trust in its relevance and reliability.

Handbook Error #3: Focus Only on Rules

While employee handbooks are heavy on policies and procedures, they shouldn’t be devoid of personality. Your handbook is also a reflection of your company culture. If your handbook is dry and overly formal, employees are less likely to engage with it.

Dozens of pages of legalese and policy-focused text tells employees they’re entering a legal transaction between two adversarial parties. A handbook that’s culture-first, with approachable “why” content, tells employees they’re joining a team with a purpose that just happens to have some rules for how they work together successfully. What do you want to tell your employees?

If you add elements like your company’s history, mission and vision, or fun facts, you can increase employee engagement, ultimately leading to greater compliance with policies and procedures.

What NOT to Include in Your Employee Handbook

We’ve written plenty about what to include in your employee handbook, but it’s equally important to highlight what you shouldn’t include. Here are several things to leave out of your employee handbook.

Don’t Include: Anything Resembling a Contract

Your employee handbook is a guiding document that states non-negotiable company policies and how employees must behave so that your organization complies with the law. It is not an employment contract. Be sure to steer clear of items like non-competes, non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), or any policy that might accidentally change the nature of the at-will employment relationship.

You’ll probably want to include a disclaimer at some point in your handbook. However, to ensure your tone remains positive and welcoming, start your handbook with information about your company culture—like your mission, vision, and values. The disclaimer can come later in your handbook, and we often recommend titling it something simple and non-adversarial, like “About This Handbook.”

Example Employee Handbook Disclaimer

Here’s an example disclaimer statement from our How to Write Policies & Procedures eBook:

This handbook is designed to familiarize you with our company and provide you with information about our brand, policies, guidelines, and programs, all of which affect your life here at Acme Incorporated. Please keep in mind that it is not intended to be 100% comprehensive, and it is not meant to address every application of, or exception to, the general policies and procedures described. If you have any questions about any topic covered within, please contact your manager or the people department.

This handbook is not a contract for employment, express or implied, and it does not guarantee any fixed terms and conditions of your employment. Your employment is at-will, and you or we are free to end the employment relationship at any time, with or without cause and without prior notice.

Last, the policies, procedures, and benefits described within may be altered or discontinued from time to time. Although we will try to communicate changes with you when they occur, a policy may be changed or eliminated without notice.

Again, you’ll want to have a legal team review your handbook to ensure it’s free of problematic language.

Don’t Include: Discriminatory Policies

Review your handbook carefully to ensure that no policies are discriminatory. And we’re not just talking about policies specifically geared toward equal employment opportunity. It’s important to look for inadvertently discriminatory policies, too.

For example, you’ll want to ensure your dress code doesn’t infringe upon any legally protected characteristics. You’ll also want to double-check that none of your policies could be construed as ableist, interfering with an employee’s rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

These policies can not only lead to legal trouble—they can also undermine your attempt to create an inclusive workplace.

Don’t Include: Policies that Conflict with Employment Laws

Every policy should be in line with current employment laws. For instance, if your company operates in multiple states, it’s important to remember that certain policies—like those regarding overtime, meal and rest breaks, or sick time—may differ from one region to another. It’s also common for different geographies to have their own policies related to leaves.

Here’s an example of a company that was sued for unpaid overtime after employees argued that the company’s policy on overtime pay was not in compliance with the law.

If you don’t inform employees of their rights, you can face significant legal complications, causing employees to lose trust and confidence in your organization. This is yet another reason to prioritize regular updates and legal review.

Note: In order to make it easy for you to keep your policies compliant with changing laws, Blissbook now tracks federal and state laws and alerts you when a law change might impact your policies. For example, the NLRB recently tweaked their standards for determining whether or not your policies comply with employees’ rights to organize, form, or join a union.

Don’t Include: Jargon and Complex Language

Your handbook should be clear and easy for everyone to read, regardless of their role or background. Therefore, it’s best to avoid jargon or complex phrasing. By using straightforward language, you can eliminate confusion, misunderstandings, and legal issues.

Here are some tips to help ensure your handbook is easy to read:

Write short, direct sentences
Use bullet points to break down information
Provide clear headings and subheadings
Break up text with design elements
When possible, cover the basics and hide excess information (which Blissbook makes easy with its Read More buttons)

This list from our Acme sample handbook illustrates how bullet points can help turn lengthy paragraphs into more digestible content:

Don’t Include: Vague Statements

When developing your handbook, you should be absolutely clear about your rules, especially when it comes to policies that emphasize compliance with employment laws.

For example, you don’t want to create any ambiguity that would allow people to harass, retaliate, or discriminate against others in situations where it’s clearly against the law. The same advice applies to policies on topics that may interfere with employees’ rights to organize, form, or join a union, as the NLRB just changed their standards to specifically address companies with overly broad policies.

Don’t Include: Inflexible Discipline Guidelines

In contrast to the previous “Don’t,” when discussing employee discipline, it’s best to write your policies in a way that allows your organization to use its discretion based on the specifics of the situation. For example, some violations of your drug and alcohol policy might simply warrant a reminder (e.g. an issue related to the use of prescription drugs), whereas other violations justify immediate termination (e.g. an illicit drug deal in the break room).

Take care not to write yourself into a corner that forces you to respond to a situation in a specific way if you think you may need flexibility in your response. That said, be sure to analyze how you’ve responded to similar situations in the past, and if you do have varying responses, make sure you have specific objective reasons for your responses.

In our How to Add a Signature Page to Your Employee Handbook article, we emphasize the value of stating that the employee handbook is subject to change. This gives you the flexibility to make decisions that align with each policy’s intended purpose, and it also reminds employees that it’s their responsibility to review the handbook from time to time.

Don’t Include: Outdated Information

A static handbook can become a liability. We talked earlier about the importance of ensuring that your policies comply with the latest employment laws. Also keep in mind that, if you’re not adhering to a certain internal policy or procedure anymore, you’ll confuse your employees by including it in your handbook.

For example, if you’ve changed your philosophy regarding remote work but still have detailed procedures about how to request remote working arrangements, consider how to update the policy to eliminate ambiguity. Or, if a certain policy has become obsolete, it’s often best to delete it altogether.

Note: If you need help keeping up with changing laws, contact us.

Be sure to communicate handbook changes to your employees. Blissbook simplifies the update process by notifying employees when you’ve changed your handbook.

The annotations feature highlights what’s changed so employees know exactly where to look.

Tips to Create an Effective Employee Handbook

Now that we’ve gone over the don’ts, here are some resources to help you make your handbook as informative and effective as possible:

For more in-depth handbook resources, check out our two free eBooks:

Build a Compliant Employee Handbook with Blissbook

The most effective employee handbooks aren’t merely focused on listing policies or rules. Instead, they are written in a way that fosters a sense of belonging among employees, clarifying what they can expect from the organization and what is expected of them in return.

Blissbook streamlines the process of creating, updating, and managing your employee handbook. We offer expert insights and resources to ensure your handbook remains legally compliant while showcasing what makes your company unique.Sign up for a trial to discover how easy crafting an effective employee handbook can be.