Who Should Prepare my Company’s Employment Handbook?
Who writes your employee handbook will determine its quality and tone. You can get an employee handbook by downloading one online or cutting and pasting. But I don’t recommend it.
On the front end, it will save you money. On the back end, it’s likely to cost more. Many legal nuances depend on company size, location, and industry. If you cobble your handbook with cutting and pasting, you’ll likely include references to the wrong laws or irrelevant ones based on your company’s size and geography. You’ll probably have sections on irrelevant topics while unintentionally ignoring key issues.
Ideally, your attorney and your human resources team should collaborate in writing your handbook. They generally have different strengths. They have different blind spots, too. Together, they can complement one another.
Employment lawyers have the upper hand in understanding the law. But your head of human resources likely better understands the personal and relational dynamics at play, which are often even more critical for problem-solving.
For human resource professionals, when a company announces it wants to get an employment attorney involved, it can feel like a personal attack and a signal that the company doesn’t trust them. Because of this, consider giving your company’s head of human resources a seat at the table when picking your company’s employment attorney.
Your employment attorney must be someone your human resources team likes and trusts. You should also explain to your human resources team that getting an employment lawyer involved gives the company a significant advantage: attorney-client privilege.
This means the legal-related communication with the attorney, done correctly, should never be evidence in court. Attorney-client privilege facilitates more candid conversations on policies that might be problematic. That advantage doesn’t typically exist in an exchange with the CEO, CFO, Director of Human Resources, or an outside consultant. In other words, if the reasons for changes to your employee handbook ever become an issue in litigation, the attorney-client privilege can safeguard communication that might otherwise be used against you.
The attorney-client privilege encourages the honesty needed to realistically assess and limit risks. If your company has in-house counsel (a company-employed attorney), finding your attorney for your handbook review and update is easy. If you don’t, it’s time to start looking for counsel your human resource team can keep on retainer.
