Nine Reasons Your Employee Handbook Deserves an Annual Review

As a human resources or organizational leader, you know that your employee handbook is the cornerstone of your company’s HR framework, serving as a vital tool for communicating company policies and expectations to your team. Your handbook is essential for ensuring that staff and management are aligned on company and legal guidelines, which in turn helps foster a fair and well-organized workplace.

While reviewing your handbook and ensuring everything is up to date should be part of your annual process, this task can sometimes be sidelined. Neglecting this leaves your company vulnerable to several issues, including compliance issues and giving employees incorrect information.

Conducting an annual review of your employee handbook is essential for several reasons:

1. Legal Compliance: Employment laws and regulations frequently change at the federal, state and local levels. An annual review ensures that the handbook reflects the most current legal requirements, helping to protect both the employer and employees from legal disputes.
2. Policy Relevance: As a company evolves, policies may need to be updated or added. An annual review allows the company to ensure that all policies are relevant to the current state of the organization and its workforce.
3. Clarification and Consistency: Regular reviews offer the opportunity to clarify any ambiguous language in existing policies and maintain consistency in policy enforcement, which is crucial for fair treatment of employees.
4. Best Practices: It allows the organization to keep pace with changes in HR best practices and industry standards, thereby staying competitive regarding employee engagement, retention and attraction.
5. Company Culture and Changes: As the company culture evolves or the organization undergoes changes such as mergers, acquisitions or rebranding, the employee handbook should be updated to reflect these changes and communicate them effectively to employees.
6. Technological Advances: Rapid technological advancements require updating related policies, such as those on cybersecurity, remote work and social media usage.
7. Feedback Incorporation: Employee and management feedback can highlight areas for improvement in existing policies. An annual review is a chance to consider and integrate this feedback.
8. Risk Management: Regular updates can reduce the risk of outdated policies leading to misunderstandings or conflicts, which could result in grievances, lawsuits or damage to the company’s reputation.
9. Training and Onboarding: An up-to-date handbook is a critical component of new employees’ training and onboarding process, ensuring they receive consistent and current information about company policies.

In most cases, simply updating your handbook with recent information is enough. However, in some cases, a complete rewrite can be necessary. We recommend a rewrite if it’s been more than five years since you’ve last updated your handbook.

Managing your employee handbook may seem daunting, with so many other responsibilities; however, it is crucial for the health of your organization and its culture. If you need help reviewing or rewriting your employee handbook, RKL Virtual’s Workforce Strategies team can help. Reach out to your advisor or use the form below to get started.