Is it Time for an Employee Handbook Review and Update?

The New Year is approaching fast and that’s always a good time to review your current company policies as they relate to employees and update or incorporate them into an Employee Handbook. We are anticipating several new laws for 2023 and will be updating all our client’s employee handbooks as soon as we receive new verbage from our legal partners.

Employee Handbooks are an integral part of your workplace strategy and any policies contained within should be carefully considered on an annual basis.

Why are Employee Handbooks Important?

Up to date Employee Handbooks hare critical for several reasons. In addition to communicating government mandated information, employee handbooks help...

…Employees understand what expected of them

…Employees know their benefits in detail

…You to have structured policies that set the standard for employee behavior

…You ensure processes are in place to deal with problems or out of the box situations

It's important to define where you may have weaknesses with regard to your employee management practices. Are there employee behaviors you'd like to encourage or discourage? How can you incorporate your company culture into your handbook and make sure it is communicated clearly and understood by your employees.

Look back over the year and recall any areas where the lack of a policy caused minor issues to become larger problems. Here are a few policies to reflect on:

Attendance Policy

Do you encourage flex time or are you time focused and in need of more defined start and end times? Detail your expectations and if you have a structured flex time, be sure it’s in writing.

Dress Code

Clothing options have changed a lot in 2 years, does your policy need an update? Have clothing choices loosened up too much where you need to define them in more detail?

Travel Compensation Policy

Do you now have employees traveling, or do you have plans for future employee travel for your business? It would be helpful to have a fully detailed travel reimbursement policy in place.

Remote Workers

Do you now have remote workers? What are your policies for managing their time, reimbursing expenses, ensuring consistent communication? What are the criteria for being eligible to work remotely.

Business Expense Reimbursements

Are you covering expenses paid by your employees on your behalf? What about cell phone usage? Mileage? If they use a mobile timeclock, are you reimbursing a portion of their phone expense?

Sick Pay and Vacation Policy

Do you need to make changes to your vacation or sick polices? As your employees are with you longer, you may want to increase the amount of time off they receive at certain time intervals. Great employee benefit!

Performance Review Schedule

Are you focused on annual or bi-annual performance reviews or is a more flexible schedule more productive? Detail the parameters and make sure you follow up on what is documented.

Overtime and Timekeeping Policies

Are employee’s nickel and diming you to death with overtime? Are your timekeeping policy and practices making it easier to manage your employees? If you don’t use electronic timekeeping, maybe it’s time to update your process!

We could certainly go on and on, but these policies should spark some ideas of the types of issues you have in your workplace. The key is, leave nothing open for interpretation, be on the lookout for issues that are frequent sore spots, and don’t allow problems to persist without addressing them with a policy or procedures.

Sexual Harassment Training

As we’ve mentioned in earlier blogs, California’s Sexual Harassment Training requirement requires you to update employee training in harassment prevention every two years. Be sure your policy clearly states this and that you have a plan to incorporate a schedule for Infinium’s online training course or other state mandated course you choose to enroll them in.

How to Update Your 2023 Employee Handbook

If you are an Advanced HR and Payroll, or an HR Now client of Infinium HR, please select the link below which will take you to a brief form where you can detail any changes you’d like to make to your 2023 handbook. Our HR Department will be notified immediately and reach out for any further details needed.

If you do not have any policies you need to update, you don’t need to provide any info. We will update your handbook and send you a copy, as well as add them to our onboarding system as soon as they are completed.

Not an HR Client?

If you are not an Advanced HR and Payroll client, maybe it’s time to upgrade! Contact Mike Hayden at mike@infniumgroup.com to learn how affordable our outsourced HR is for your business.

As always, please contact us at 951-816-6434 or ana@infiniumgroup.com anytime if you have any questions.