Five Things Your Employee Handbook Needs

When you are running a business that requires you to hire people in, you need to do what you can to keep them protected and safe. You have a responsibility to ensure that the people who work within your business are happy, safe and secure, and to be able to protect them, you have to ensure that there are policies in place to do it. 

Your business should be looking to experience growth and that can come with some management challenges. You need to ensure that you have the right policies in the employee handbook, commercial insurance to cover everyone and even the right routines to get through the day safely. With this in mind, you need to tweak your handbook as your business grows, and we’ve got five solid policies that you should add to your handbook below.

1. Add a dress code. Depending on the workplace, you might need to consider adding a dress code policy. Not only will this make it easy for people to identify your employees, you need to keep everyone safe. If your workplace requires high visibility clothing, it should be a part of the policies you put out there. Workplace attire can offer business consistency, culture and more. Inappropriate dress can break a business!
2. Add a dating policy. Do you want people to focus on their work or on their hormones? You could choose to add an agreement in the contracts that people don’t date each other within the workplace and take away from the distractions. You don’t want to be the pantie police, though, so if people do fall for each other at work, you need to write it down so that they keep it out of the office. 
3. A flexible working policy. When the pandemic happened, businesses got a fright. People had to work from home, they had to adapt, they had to help people to function away from the office. It’s turned out that businesses can thrive with remote workers, and that means that you need to have a policy in place for flexible working so that everyone is treated fairly at work. With the right planning, you can make this happen.
4. A gifting policy. It’s important that you remove the ability for customers and clients to swap gifts with workers as early as possible. Formal gifting should be applied not gifting for favors or for promotions. People shouldn’t be favored that way!
5. A great complaints policy. Lastly, you need to have rules in place for people to be able to safely complain or whistleblow when they feel the need to. Complaints have to be handled a certain way, and if you don’t handle them well, you’re going to need a plan to deal with them. 

The right policies in your handbook will really make a difference to the way your employees feel in the office. Put them in place early enough for everyone to agree to them and sign them when they become a part of the business.