Name: Why You Need to Be Paying Attention to Your Handbook Right Now
Uploaded: 2026-08-18T18:00:44.458Z
Duration: 30 min 52 s
Description: Why You Need to Be Paying Attention to Your Handbook Right Now

Transcript for "Why You Need to Be Paying Attention to Your Handbook Right Now": Alright. Hi, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be. We are here today for a thirty minute live AMA, which stands for ask me anything. We're going to be talking about why you need to be paying attention to your employee handbook, right now and and forever in the future. So let's take a look at today's agenda. We'll just jump right in. First up, we're gonna talk for a little bit about why you need a really good handbook, not just any handbook, but a good handbook. Then we'll get to live q and a as well as, the portion where I address pre submitted questions. You'll hold the option to submit questions ahead of time. So I'm actually gonna get to, I think, all of those that were submitted, and then we'll go to live questions as well. That should be a good time. Then we'll have a quick takeaway and just a couple of polls. So for those of you who have not been to a webinar in the forum, my name's Kara Govro. I practiced employment law as well as bankruptcy law, before was twelve years ago at Mitratech Mineral, which is part of Mitratech. And, myself and my team spend our time looking at all the laws that pass at the local, state, and federal level that relate to employment, figuring out what they mean, figuring out what they mean. Sometimes they're not written all that well. And then also really figuring out what they mean for you as an employer and what the takeaways are. So, I spend a a lot of time looking at the laws, and I've been giving this handbook webinar or something similar to it, for, you know, more than a decade at this point. And handbooks are actually way more important now, than they were a decade ago when I, you know, was first giving this. So without further ado, we will launch into why you need a handbook. So I know it's a time investment, and it's, in many cases, a money investment. So sometimes it feels a bit unnecessary, particularly, maybe if you're a small business. You might be so seasoned or have been in your industry so long that you feel like everything should be pretty obvious. But often it's not. Someone who's new to the field, someone who's new to the workforce, or even someone coming from from a competitor that maybe did things very differently than you do things, or someone who came from a state with very little regulation, and now there's a lot of regulation. Things are different from company to company. Not everyone knows everything. A lot of the things that we think are obvious are not that obvious. So the number one thing our handbook does for us is set expectations. Employees cannot meet your expectations if they don't know what they are. They need to know what you want from them. Now, obviously, we have performance management for what you want from them in their job, but there's a lot of extraneous stuff around the job, like, you know, taking a day off, or what to do when you're sick, or the leaves that you're entitled to, or the dress code, or what to do if you receive a complaint or need to lodge a complaint. So there's a lot more going on that we can't just deal with in the performance management process. That stuff goes in the handbook to set those expectations. I know a lot of employers feel like they wanna have the handbook because they want to be able to basically use it as a rolled up newspaper for naughty employees, you know, swat at them, when they've done something wrong. But, really, we want them to not do the thing wrong in the first place because they've got that handbook, and they've read that handbook. And so they know what's expected of them. We don't have to get to the next step where they're in trouble. So one piece of that is, in fact, giving employees time to read your handbook. So depending on how big it is, if it's a 10 pager, you know, maybe they only need thirty minutes. But most people can't read more than 20 to 30 pages an hour. So if you have a 100 page handbook because you're in multiple states, including California, and that employee's in California, so they need to read the employee the, excuse me, the California policies, we wanna give them a couple hours to do it, and we wanna do that during work time. We can't send hourly employees home with a handbook and say, read this on your own time. Technically, you can do that with exempt employees, but, I think they won't do it. So I would tell them to go ahead and do it during their workday. So this is actually a really key element of having a handbook. Yes. We wanna set our expectations, but if our employees don't read them, then we're in the same position we were in before. Then we can use it as a rolled up newspaper if we told them to read it. But if if we didn't give them the time to do that, that's that's not really reasonable. So that's sort of a key aspect of having a handbook is giving employees time to read it. And that also means making sure it's written in a way that they can understand. And in in many cases, translated. If if they're not speaking English as a as a first language, then we might wanna consider whether we're translating that handbook to, again, set those expectations in a manner that people can understand. Also really key, especially these days, it helps employees, managers, and even HR understand what the legal landscape out there looks like. So namely, there are a lot of leaves these days, particularly if you're in California, Washington, Oregon, New York, New Jersey. These states have a lot of different leaves. There there are a couple dozen states that have a lot of leaves. There are some states that have hardly any leaves, but many of them have a lot. And the best way to keep track of them, honestly, is by putting them in the handbook. Honestly, is by putting them in the handbook. So we want them in the handbook, and then we wanna make sure that they're getting updated when the laws are changed or updated, which is another layer of this. So if you're in California, they update their sick leave and their, like, domestic violence victim leave basically every year, and they are intertwined and very complicated. I mean, they're they're hard for us to figure out how to update, but that's the kind of thing you need to be watching for. Because just because, you know, you found out about a sick leave and you wrote something down in the handbook doesn't mean that's gonna be accurate a year or three from now. States are continuing to expand on these types of leaves. So that's just that's just one thing, right, that that helps HR and management understand the landscape. We also, of course, want, you know, harassment, anti harassment, prevention type policies and complaint procedures that helps everybody understand what's out there, how to use it, how to do it, and and every other kind of, you know, policy and procedure we've got going on out there. So it outlines policies and procedures. How does someone request a day off? What is the dress code here? We have a question about the dress code, which I'm looking forward to to getting to. Generally, let's say you're a restaurant, I wouldn't recommend putting, like, food handling into the handbook because it will make it very long, and the handbook might not be as accessible as your other, you know, food handling and safety guidelines. If if those are in a a separate booklet or separate location or posted on the wall, we wanna make sure those are really easy for people to see all the time. But you can. There's nothing stopping you from from putting all of your policies and procedures in one place. But we do wanna make sure we're at least putting together all the policies and procedures that are related to the employment relationship. It can reduce risk. Absolutely. You know, that's why employers want them. They think this will reduce my liability. And in most cases, it will. It will be a significant help, to reducing your risk. However, it needs to be used correctly. So if you've got some managers following the procedures and the processes in the handbook and others that aren't, that's a huge problem because then you've laid out the process. You said, this is what we are going to do, and then you haven't done it for some employees. So an improperly used handbook can actually set you up for potentially more liability, than than no handbook at all. But that's not the goal. The goal is have a handbook, make sure everyone reads it, make sure everyone understands it, make sure your managers are doing what it says, and then it's gonna help you tremendously. All around, it will help you set expectations. It will help employees meet those expectations. It will help you in many cases if you get into, you know, a a legal situation and the handbook addresses that, and you've used your handbook correctly and consistently, it it will be good backup for you. And then finally, it does demonstrate a commitment to compliance, particularly if you're in some or several of those states that have a ton of leave laws, because you're saying, look, we recognize that these leave laws are out there. We want to give them to you. We want to follow the law. This is how we're gonna do it. Alright. So let's jump into your questions. If you have questions for me, to take live, please submit them in the chat. And I I can see that. I have that up, and I will take those as they come in. But I will go ahead and start with our presubmitted questions. So, someone asked if an organization that has a lot of stand alone policies, do they need to be added to the handbook or can you use an appendix? If it's an appendix to the handbook, you're essentially just putting it in the handbook, right, if these two documents are attached, if they're all one PDF. So it doesn't really matter. Go ahead and call it appendix if you want. If these policies are just floating around and being distributed occasionally on an as needed basis, I would recommend putting them in the handbook so you have one central location for all the stuff that you want employees to know about. Is that required? No. Handbooks are not required by law in the first place. So there's no requirement that all of your policies be in a handbook or or anything like that. So it really comes down to, convenience and accessibility. If you're going to if you have a workforce that sits at their computer all day, you're going to distribute the handbook as a PDF that they will then have easy access to forever, then stick it all in the handbook by all means. If you do have parts of the workforce, that do maybe very manual labor, they don't sit at a computer hardly ever, then you might want those separate policies that they're using on a more regular daily basis to be somewhere else that's easier for them to access. So it it sometimes depends on the industry. It depends on your workforce. There's no rule one way or the other, so I would say do what's most reasonable to you. But if you do have, people sitting at computers and you can put it all in one place, I think that's that's a good idea. You did mention, of course, that the handbook would be very long and employees won't read it due to its length. So, yeah, that's key. I mean, the longer something is, the more daunting it is. You know, sometimes you pull something up and it's just like a wall of text. You're just immediately turned off. I'm like, I can't bother with that. The fact of the matter is you need to sit employees down and give them a few hours to read and say, look. Hey. I know this might be boring as dirt, but this is a job requirement that you read the handbook. So we're giving you the two hours to do it right now. You know, maybe here's here's lunch while you do that. We'll buy you a a bag lunch or give you snacks or mushrooms or whatever. Okay. Great question. Just came in. We have our employees acknowledge the handbook, that we provide a copy of prior to their start date. Are we out of compliance for following this process? Well, yes, if they spent any time reading the handbook, and we want them to read the handbook. So, really, they shouldn't be doing work before they start work. It's almost like their start date gets pushed up to whenever you give them the handbook and say, read this thing before your first day because they're working. Direction and control. They're doing something that is strictly for you. It's not at all for their own benefit. There's a concept of de minimis time where maybe we can have them fill out some health forms and, you know, their I nine and what night whatnot, because that literally takes a few minutes. But the handbook, we want them spending however long it takes to actually read the dang thing, and that's probably gonna be a couple of hours. So I would not stress about the fact that you've done this in the past, but I would strongly recommend that you change that practice going forward and start making time to read the handbook a part of your onboarding week or your first day of onboarding. And, again, set aside a couple of hours, for them to do this and then get their acknowledgment. If you're giving it to them before they even start, first of all, if they are reading it, you're arguably out of compliance because you should be paying for it. But they're probably not reading it. They're probably just signing, and then we lose the benefit of the employees understanding our expectations and being able to meet them. We really want people to read it as boring as it may be. Alright. So another one was related to if you have an international team, how do we address sharing the use The US handbook so the international managers, have the info, but they know that policies differ by state or sorry, by country. Basically, you just say that, right? You get your you send the email to your managers saying attached is The US handbook. FYI, this doesn't apply to you, but we want you to understand what does apply in The US. Now granted, if this thing is a 100 pages long, because maybe you operate in California, they're not gonna read it either. So maybe you summarize it. You know, this would be a great use of AI to summarize your handbook for an international team leader who doesn't really need to know the details of what's in there, but wants a high level overview. But I think it's just really important to, be clear with them one way or another, whether you say it, you know, on Slack or Teams and by email and maybe in team meetings. But, like, here, we're giving this to you so you have the information and the reference document, but things are different for you. So, you know, make sure that you're not actually applying these to international employees. Just be clear about it. Alright. Someone said, should we have an AI policy? It certainly doesn't hurt. If you've got employees using AI, which pretty much everybody is, then I would at least have a policy that says don't be putting confidential company information or employee information into these systems. Unless, of course, you are paying to have one of them, like, directly connected to your workforce so that everything is is walled off. And the information that the employees are putting into it is not getting fed into the broader Internet or all of the LLMs, the way that can happen. We don't want our confidential company information, our client lists, our employee Social Security numbers, our employee payroll. We don't want any of that out in the wild. Right? So at the very least, if we know we've got people using AI, we should have a policy that says, be extremely careful about what you're putting into the AI into any AI system, and and here are here are the parameters around that. So, yes, you probably should have an AI policy. Does it need to be super deep and complicated? Probably not. But, again, the very least, what shouldn't they be doing with it? Alright. We had a question on dress codes. So someone said, we're a child care provider. Our handbook includes a dress code policy section, but we also have a one pager that's very specific, spells everything out. It even has photos for for reference. And should that be in the handbook, which I thought was brilliant. So dress codes have have been one of my soap boxes for for literally ever. What on earth does business casual mean? I'm not kidding you. I Google that about once a year to be like, please explain to me again what business casual is supposed to be. Is it jeans? Is it ever tennis shoes? Is it a certain kind of tennis shoes? Do not understand that people will inherently understand, these terms. Sorry, I just confused myself because I think I said understand twice in a row. Anyhow, people do not inherently understand things like business casual or whatever your your terms might be. So first of all, I wanna applaud you, person who submitted this question, for being very specific because I think that's that's brilliant. I don't think it matters whether it's in the handbook or not, or as a separate item. Certainly, your handbook should at least say we have a more specific policy that you can see over here, but I don't know why you wouldn't put the specific policy directly into the handbook. I would. There's no rule one way or the other there. I would probably put the very specific policy in the handbook because I can't think of a reason why you'd need it to be separate or why you'd, you know, waste words being vague in the handbook when you already have a great, very specific policy. So, I'd go ahead and put it in there. If it's gonna be like a huge pain to put it in there and your current policy says, please see the one pager, and the one pager is easy to access, you could leave things as is. But I I would go ahead and be as specific as possible, in the handbook. Alright. Let me see if I got all of these before we move on. If, again, if you have questions, I'd love to answer them live. Go ahead and just put them in the chat. All right. I will move on to the next slide now. So one of you submitted a question, along the lines of, please explain why I need a handbook, with, like, specific state policies and say it in a way that senior leadership will will understand it or be convinced. Now I feel like I usually give an hour long handbook webinar that taken as a whole would probably be pretty convincing to senior leadership. So to answer this in a single question, was hard, but I did my best. So I gave an example, probably the best example we've got about why you really need state specific policies. And I, of course, went back to leave because they're the hardest thing to do right now. If you're a multi state employer, you've gotta have, you've gotta have state specific leave policies in there, unless of course you're in a couple of states that just don't have any. But let's say you're in California and Oregon and New York, you need that info in there. There are 22 states currently sick leave required by state law. There are 20 cities and counties. There are 20 with a state and family medical leave. Sorry. Yeah. They have family and medical leave at the state level. So these are, like, state level FMLA. Almost half the states have them at this point, and they come with job protection. Now some of those are paid. Some of those are unpaid. They used to all be unpaid, and then slowly more and more of them are becoming paid. Now the that's important. Because if they're unpaid, the employees can probably use their sick leave to pay for that time off or PTO or vacation, but it depends on state law as to whether they can use that time or not or whether you have to allow them to use that time, I should say. If you wanna allow them to use that time during an unpaid leave, you always can. Sometimes you can stop them. I don't know why you do that. Most employers want the liability off the books if people are sitting on a bunch of, paid time off. But you have options in some states, in some states you don't. It will also affect whether you want to like top up that leave, or potentially how their disability claims will work if they're also trying to get topped up from whatever the state pays. We also have three states with paid leave that doesn't offer job protection, but those are going to overlap with other leaves in that state that do offer job protection. So we've got states that offer literally unpaid, job protected leave and paid leave that isn't job protected. And so you have to combine them. And you might also have to layer sick leave on top of this. And none of these laws are the same. It's not like FMLA where it's the same in in all 50 states in DC. Right? This is they're different, and and the the city, and and county laws are different as well. So a lot of the basics are similar. Like a lot of these state laws offer twelve weeks for state and family medical. I keep saying state and family medical, but family and medical leave at the state level. The states in terms of sick leave, they used to all do forty hours. Okay. Not all of them, but most of them used to do forty hours. They are much less alike now than they used to be. So some are forty. Some are some may still be 24. Some are 72. Some are, like, unlimited, but with use caps. So you have to know what they are. You have to know each location unless unless you want to have just this massively generous program that encompasses every state law and every state protection. And you can do that. I mean, go for it. But even then, you'd still need to know each and every state law that applies to double check that the leave you created that's super generous still meets all of those requirements. So this stuff is just it's very, very complicated. And if if you get a handbook from us, it's going to have, basically, an appendix, an addendum for each state, and it's going to go into the sick leave if there's a sick leave. It's gonna get into the family and medical leave if that exists. There's also, of course, gonna be an FMLA policy in there for federally. If if you're if you've got the, plus handbook, you know, you're gonna get some local sick leaves in there as well if they apply to you, of course. So we cover that for you. And, of course, as those laws are updated or changed, we're updating and changing the handbook. We're notifying you to go ahead and just accept the change so you don't actually have to keep track of the stuff yourself because it is a lot. Alright. Your question came in. Can we add not to work for another company while it work for the exempt employee? Okay. So I think you're asking if you can prevent exempt employees from working for another company. And it sounds like you've got someone who's basically working two jobs at once, and you're not loving that, which is understandable. So it depends on what state you're in. A couple states will not allow you to just outright say no working for another company. What you can do in every state is say no working for another company if it's a conflict of interest or no working for another company during your hours at our company. So if they're supposed to be working for you from eight to five, you can definitely say no working for another company between eight and five. You're all ours during those hours. That that's allowed. You don't have to allow people to have multiple jobs at the exact same time, like between eight and five. Right? You can't prevent them from having a job at night. In in most states, you wouldn't wanna do that. In some states, you absolutely can't do that. But you can you can definitely say no working for us and them, at the exact same moment. Alright. Let's see if I've missed any other questions. Alright. Best practices around making changes throughout the year to the handbook. So if you're doing it on your own, hopefully, you have a source for keeping up with what's changing in the law. If something has changed immediately or retroactively, obviously, you're gonna wanna get that into the handbook ASAP, if it's even covered in the handbook. Sometimes laws are changing, and they're not even in the handbook. They don't need to be in the handbook, so that's fine. Right? Don't worry about it. But if there were, for instance, an immediately effective change to the stick leave policy in your handbook, you'd wanna update it right then and then get it distributed to employees, ASAP. Generally, you have a three to six month lead time on those type of changes. We track that stuff. We're gonna let you know about the law on the platform, Then we're gonna send you an email two to three weeks before the law actually takes effect. And that will coincide with the approximate time when we will update our handbook tool and push that change to you so you can just hit accept. If you're doing this on your own, I would suggest a similar approach. Try to make sure you're keeping track of the laws when they change so you have some foresight into what you need to update. Then a couple weeks ahead of the effective date of the new law, make sure you're getting your handbook updated, and then make sure you're getting it distributed to employees by the time the law has changed, if it affects their rights, your responsibilities, any of those things. So, it's it's really hard to do on your own, especially if you're in multiple states or states with a lot of regulations because they they get very busy. Alright. Do handbook changes require employee signatures? I would recommend having employees sign off if it's something really important. So if it has to do with how they're paid, generally, we don't have a lot of policies in the handbook related to pay did for whatever reason. If it's related to, like, a a family and medical leave and there's a notice requirement that the state has that maybe you're meeting through the handbook, then I would want an acknowledgment. Usually, you can sort of, like, stockpile your changes for either July 1 or January 1. Or if you're in a couple of states, they like October 1. And so you could make a bunch of changes to the to the handbook all at once and then redistribute it yearly and get a new signature. That's how we do it. We're getting a new signature at least once a year or when something super important happens. Alright. Let's go ahead and take a poll right now. We would love to know what you want to hear about in a future webinar like this one, a future AMA. So if you've got, got an opinion, we'd love to hear it. We've got that poll open. So we've just got a couple selections on here. How to manage a distributed or remote workforce, would that interest you? Managing leaves, I I think everybody knows that leaves are hard to do. I've probably convinced you more that they're hard to do. Pay equity and pay transparency, that's my favorite thing to talk about. I think the pay range posting requirements are so interesting. And or workplace harassment, that might be one that you would you'd like to know more about. All of these are things we have full length webinars on in Mitratech Mineral, because they do there's a lot to say. Some Some of them, we have multiple full full length, by which I mean an hour long webinar in mineral. So okay. We will go ahead and close that poll and move on to takeaways real quick. So know what your handbook says. Right? Read it, ensure consistent application. I talked about that. It could, it can create more problems for us if we're not being consistent. When laws are changing, you wanna make sure you get your update, your handbook updated if needed and by the effective date of of the new law. And then also that requires having a way to stay on top of legal changes. Now we've got one more poll for you. We'd love to know if you are interested in hearing about our handbook tool. I think that will, has probably popped up right now. So do you want to learn more about Mitratech Mineral employee handbooks? This is an easy one. Yes, possibly, or not at this time. Alright. Well, thank you all so much for joining us. We are gonna make these AMAs a regular thing, so we would love to see you at the next one. We will be advertising that soon. So for where we found out about this one, you'll you can also find out about the next one. Thank you so much for joining us today, and have a wonderful rest of the week.