Webinar on Employee Handbooks: 2018 Updates

Overview: The purposes and the scope of employee handbook policies and the practices are changing and expanding. From a siloed HR activity that creates insular documents concerned primarily with communicating the organizational work rules and benefits, employee handbook policies and practices have evolved into a critical component of an organization-wide management process that maximizes organizations' achievement of business objectives, enhances the value of their human capital, and minimizes legal risk.

To increase the effectiveness of their employment policies, organizations will have to:

• Enhance their business, operational, and legal intelligence to ensure they have identified the changing external and internal factors that affect their policies
• Increase internal stakeholder participation in the handbook development process to obtain greater employee commitment and operational alignment
• Establish new metrics to assess handbook policy and practices performance and measure the achievement of organization goals
• Implement internal controls that identify and alert management when employee handbook process failures occur

Thus employee handbooks will increasingly have to ensure that they are aligned with strategic and business objectives, are properly drafted, and are effectively implemented. Additionally they will have to:

• Enhance the employment brand
• Play a key role in recruitment and retention
• Enhance employee relations, employee morale, and productivity
• Contribute to uniform and consistent application, interpretation, and enforcement of organizational policies and rules
• Protect the organization against claims of improper employee/supervisor conduct
• Reduce the organization's exposure to employment related liabilities

From this perspective, employee handbooks will continue to play an important role in communicating with and providing information for employees.