Should your business have an employee handbook?

All businesses begin with an idea, a vision. But not all business owners take the important step to memorialize their ideas and vision into a written business plan, which we highly recommend for any business owner prior to launching their new business venture. One step further is the creation of an employee handbook that can help a business owner protect its business and guide its employees to maintain the integrity of the business’s mission and vision.

• Establishes Employee Expectations: An employee handbook should include the company’s rules, policies and procedures, which can help ensure that employees are collectively abiding by the same set of expectations. This can help lessen inconsistencies among the workforce and can help business owner(s) more efficiently onboard employees and manage their businesses. Also, keep in mind that as the business grows, changes and develops over time, the business’s rules, policies, procedures and overall structure will also evolve. As such, the employee handbook should be “living” document that is consistently revisited and updated.

• Establishes Company Culture: A company’s culture depends on the collective understanding among a company’s business owner(s) and employees of the vision, mission and values of a company. An employee handbook can state a company’s vision, mission and values, which can set the tone for an employee’s expectations of their role in fostering and representing the company’s culture. Having a clearly established business culture can also serve as a great marketing tool to recruit other potential employees to the company who ideally support and are excited about the company’s culture.

• Compliance with Laws and Regulations: An employee handbook should include any laws and regulations applicable to your business and provide employees guidance on such laws and regulations, including explanations on how to abide by them. Similar to the mission and vision of a business, applicable laws and regulations are ever-changing and new laws and regulations can be enacted. Your business attorney can help keep you up-to-date on the laws and regulations that impact your business and can alert you to any new and upcoming changes to or enactments of laws applicable to your business.

Please contact Serna Legal Services at [phone] or info@sernalegalservices.com if you’d like to learn more about this topic or you’d like to take the first step toward creating an employee handbook for your business. Remember that with Serna Legal Services, your business will ¡Celebra! Legal Services!

This content is published by Serna Legal Services, LLC and is available for informational purposes only and is not considered legal advice on any subject matter. By viewing this content, the reader understands there is no attorney-client relationship between the reader and the publisher. The content should not be used as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed professional attorney, and readers are urged to consult their own legal counsel on any specific legal questions concerning a specific situation.