Employee handbook: what to include and what to leave out

An employee handbook has two readers who want opposite things. A new joiner wants orientation: how this place works, what is expected, where to find things. Someone in a dispute wants precision: exactly what the policy says, and when it changed. A handbook that serves only the first is warm and useless in a disagreement; one that serves only the second is a legal document nobody finishes.

The way out is structure, not length: a short readable core, with the precise policies as separate, dated sections.

What belongs in an employee handbook

• Welcome and how the company works — a page, plainly written: what you do, how decisions get made, who to ask.
• Working arrangements: hours, remote and office expectations, core hours if any, and how time is recorded.
• Pay and benefits in outline, with the detail in the contract. The handbook says how and when; the contract says how much.
• Time off: holiday entitlement, how to request it, notice expected, sickness reporting, and parental and other statutory leave as your jurisdiction defines them.
• Conduct: the short version of what is expected, plus the specific policies that must exist — harassment, discrimination, health and safety, data protection.
• Equipment, security and data handling: what devices are used, what may be installed, what happens to accounts and files when someone leaves.
• How problems are raised and handled: grievances, disciplinary steps, and who to go to when the person to go to is the problem.
• Version and date, with a note that the handbook is not a contract where that is legally the case in your country.

Two rules keep a handbook usable: every policy gets a date and an owner, and anything that changes often — pay scales, tool lists, office rules — is linked rather than embedded. A handbook reprinted every time the coffee policy changes stops being reprinted at all.

What to leave out

• Individual contract terms. Salary, notice period and job title belong in the contract, not the handbook.
• Aspirational culture writing that promises things the company does not actually do. It reads as dishonest to anyone past week two, and it can be quoted back at you.
• Rules with no consequence and no owner. If nobody enforces it, it is decoration that undermines the rules that matter.
• Detailed process documentation — how to file an expense claim belongs in the knowledge base, linked from here.
• Legal boilerplate copied from another country. Employment law is local and the copied version is often wrong in ways that matter.

Writing and keeping it current

1. Start from the list above and write the shortest true version of each section. Aim for something a person will actually read on day one.
2. Have someone qualified in your jurisdiction check the statutory sections — leave, dismissal, discrimination, data protection.
3. Date every policy and name an owner. An unowned policy is one nobody will update.
4. Publish it where staff can find it without asking, and where the current version is unambiguous.
5. Record acknowledgement — that people have read it — if that matters where you operate.
6. Review annually and after any legal change, and note what changed at the top rather than editing silently.

Ettex Write is a reasonable home for it: rich formatting with headings and tables, reusable text styles so sections look consistent, an outline view for navigating a long document, comments and @mentions for the review pass with whoever checks the legal sections, version history that shows exactly what a policy said before it changed and restores any earlier state, and export to PDF, DOCX, ODT or Markdown. That version history is the part that matters most — in a dispute, what the policy said at the time is the question.

The onboarding version

Most companies get more value from a two-page first-week document than from the handbook itself: who your buddy is, what you should be able to do by Friday, which tools to set up, and where the handbook lives. The handbook then becomes what it should be — a reference, not an orientation.

Two documents are often expected inside the handbook and are better kept beside it. An annual leave policy changes at a different cadence from the rest, and a hybrid work policy tends to be revised twice a year while the handbook is reissued once — folding them in means either the handbook goes stale or it is reprinted for a paragraph.

A good employee handbook is short where it can be and precise where it must be, with a date on every policy. Write the orientation separately — the two jobs fight each other in one document.