Home Health & Hospice Week

A well-written handbook can ensure consistency.

Now’s the time to make sure you have a comprehensive employee handbook — before it’s too late.

Many businesses evolve to their current size from smaller circumstances. When your company grows organically, you may not identify a moment that presents itself as the right moment to introduce some formal conventions for managing employees. However, even if you haven’t yet experienced a situation in which a handbook would have been useful, make sure you are prepared for all circum­stances by writing down your agency’s policies and protocols and making everything accessible to staff.

In fact, you can help your agency and your staff by creating and maintaining a compre­hensive employee handbook customized to your exact practice.

“In every industry there are basic principles that define how things should be thought about and done. The same is true in the area of managing people. You can do it effectively or haphazardly. To do it effectively, you need an employee handbook,” says Barbara Freet, president/CEO and founder of Human Resource Advisors in Walnut Creek, California.

An employee handbook can be an important exercise for thinking through policies and protocols. By anticipating questions your employees may have, you can figure out and plan your responses to situations before they actually happen and catch you unawares or unprepared. With a handbook, you can keep everyone on the same page, literally.

“If you have a well-written, current handbook, it is a guide for management to ensure consistency; it informs employees, and it proves your intent to follow the law,” Freet says.

Since labor laws and employee/employer rights may differ from state to state, having an accessible and thorough handbook can be really important in setting and managing expectations for everyone. If staff know the agency’s stance on a particular situation and have a resource they can reference, everyone is safer from litigation and other difficult or unpleasant circumstances because everyone is informed.

Include These Items

The employee handbook is the place to address all kinds of issues, from establishing an employee dress code to detailing the protocols surrounding harassment. You can address the questions that cause employees to knock on your door or email about throughout the year concerning benefits or vacation allotment. You can also outline your agency’s expectations for how employees should engage with patients, as well as deliver care.

“A customized employee handbook has the answers to most employee questions and defines your expectations about patient care, attendance, punctuality, vacation planning, paying for continuing education, and more. It also proves your intent to pay employees properly, have a [company] free from discrimination and harassment, and hire the best person for the job regardless of gender or ethnicity. How can you prove your intent? By pointing to your customized employee handbook,” Freet says.

By including information about labor and employment, you can make sure you have the evidence on hand that your agency intends to abide by local, state, and federal laws, Freet says. For example, if your state is an employ-at-will state, you can outline your agency’s policies about at-will employment and termination.

Remember, just because you haven’t had any issues in the past does not mean that you won’t have any in the future. While you should still post notices of employee rights in areas frequented by staff, the employee handbook is another ideal place for a compendium of everything employees need to know or may want to reference. Make sure to include your policies on family leave, alcohol and drug use and abuse, employee punctuality, as well as rules on electronic communications and the use of personal or company electronic devices.

Basically, an employee handbook is the resource you and employees can point to when setting responsibilities and maintaining account­ability. An employee handbook provides a means for communicating expectations, serves as a record of policies and procedures surrounding staff, and offers proof that employees will be treated consistently across situations, regardless of the individual staff member’s job or role or length of time employed by the agency.

Utilize this important resource to protect everyone who works in your agency, including the business itself.