In the United States, having an employee handbook is a “no brainer,” with no downside for the employer, attorney Harry D. Jones, international employment and labor law chair at law firm Polsinelli, told the McKnight’s Business Daily on Wednesday.
Jones and associate Emily Tichenor, also an attorney at Polsinelli, spoke Tuesday at a webinar moderated by SHRM-Kansas City.
“One upside [of a handbook] is, your employees know what to expect, and it’s a guidance. It’s actually a helpful document,” Jones said.
A well-written employee handbook clarifies company policies on points such as holidays, leave and what the company’s code of ethics governs, he said. Additionally, according to Jones, having an employee handbook is helpful to employers who need to mount a defense.
“For example, if you want to say you don’t like and don’t tolerate harassment, retaliation and discrimination, you’d better have it in a handbook,” he said.
“The third reason why having a handbook is important is because … for a business, it actually focuses the business itself on what it is and why it’s doing what it’s doing,” Jones added.
Employers that operate in multiple states should have one main handbook, with addenda that align with each state’s specific requirements, Jones said.
The handbook should be “comprehensive and yet succinct in the sense that you don’t really want to have 85 or 100 pages of text that are just talking in circles, because there’s a point where the diminishing returns,” Jones said. “If you have a lot of words, then understand that people will use it against you at some point.
“If you take five pages to describe how leave is calculated, for example, you can rest assured that if you’re in an FMLA [Family and Medical Leave Act] or wage claim dispute, all those words are going to be hyper-scrutinized by a lawyer or a judge or a jury,” he added.
Avoid being overly specific, Jones advised, or the firm might end up needing to revise its handbook every six months as rules change.
Also, he said, an employee handbook should be clear enough that it doesn’t create more arguments; the idea is to lessen arguments.
In August, the National Labor Relations Board proposed a new legal standard for evaluating workplace rules, which Jones said could affect employee handbooks.
“The effects will be that even in workplaces where you don’t have a union, you need to almost pretend that you do, because your risk is lower. The rules will sort of keep you away from mandating that people don’t gather, don’t discuss, don’t collaborate on discussing rules or pay or wages — all terms and conditions of employment,” Jones said.
The proposed standard favors employees, in reversal of a Trump-era standard that favored employers and instead builds on and revises the 2004 standard involving long-term care facility Lutheran Heritage Village–Livonia. That standard was overturned in 2017.
