5 Steps To A Great Employee Handbook

I love Inc. magazine. It's one of the few magazines that I read cover to cover every month, because every issue is packed with great information for the entrepreneurial business. They have sales & marketing tips, finance, business strategy, case studies, and all kinds of other useful info.

One of their regular sections is a pull-out how-to section on policies and best practices. This month, the how-to is focused on creating an employee handbook. They cover the five key components of an employee handbook and outline several "gotchas" to beware of. You can get a copy of the guide here.

Employee handbooks are critical resources for companies of any size, since they help cover your butt on the legal side, and spell out what's expected of everyone in the workplace. The problem is that most small businesses (who can really benefit from them) can never find the time to put them together. And even if you do block off some time to work on one, it's tough to know where to start. This guide fills in a lot of the blanks and gets you started down the right path.

For any of you that don't yet have a handbook, this guide will make it much easier to put together a good one. For any of you that have one already, you can compare it to the best practices in the guide and see if there are areas for improvement.

We put together an employee handbook a few years ago and it's made a huge difference for us. Even so, going through this guide I found a few places where we can tighten up our own policies.

Enjoy!