A great way to make sure that your business runs smoothly and successfully is through the relationship between employees and employers.

Having a solid trust enables staff members to work well and be productive. One way this can be made possible is by providing an employee handbook to your staff. This way, they’re aware of what’s expected of them and how they should conduct themselves. At the same time, you trust your employees to abide by the guidelines that are outlined in the document. There are several points that should be made in a handbook to make sure that your team works efficiently.

Here are some essentials that you should definitely have in your handbook.

Absences Due To Sickness

Applying a sickness absence policy means you’re able to record appropriately the absences of your members of staff. This will allow you to understand whether there are any frequent absences occurring, trends in sickness absences and how you wish your employee to contact you if they are to be absent.

Dress Code

This is completely optional for an employer. Providing a dress code can provide an employee with better guidelines of how they should represent themselves at work. There are also other reasons such as health and safety concerns, to help customers identify a member of staff or to reiterate a company’s brand and identity. Just be mindful of the rules you instil for both men and women to save discriminating anyone, otherwise legal action could be taken where employment solicitors are introduced which can cost valuable time and money.

Performance Management

If you find that a member of staff is performing poorly, this policy should outline how you’d go about improving and discussing this matter with them. Bad performance shouldn’t be instantly dealt with abruptly, but there should be support in place that can help to teach and understand why your member of staff is performing poorly and they should be made aware of how this would be played out.

Harassment

This is an extremely sensitive topic and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Any event of harassment can seriously damage a member of staff’s performance, confidence and health which can hinder other aspects of their lives too. The policy should be clear on how disciplinary issues would be dealt with and what the procedure would be if it were to be found out.

Disciplinary

Disciplinary policies aim to outline how employees should act in and around the workplace. Their conduct should remain professional at all times and at the same time it should show that you’d aim to deal with matters in a fair and consistent manner. If an incident were to occur where disciplinary action was needed to take place, the process should clearly explain the procedure.

Make sure that both staff and yourself know how to deal with the different policies and everyone is aware of what happens. The handbook provides a guide to workplace manner and training should be applied to make sure that each policy remains consistent. Make sure to regularly update them also.