Employee Handbook Services

Our employee handbook customization service involves several detailed steps to ensure compliance and fit for your organization.

Our employee handbook consultants will provide policy language, compliance updates, and expert advice on tailoring your handbook to your organizational needs.

We’ll then provide you with an up-to-date digital handbook and work with your internal team to determine and support the best rollout for all employees.

Every custom employee handbook starts with your HR pro conducting a thorough review of your organization: location, employee count, additional locations, remote or hybrid work environment, and future growth plans.

From there, we’ll determine what is required for compliance and what makes sense for your business in terms of tone and brand to help deliver the right voice for your culture and company practices.

HR Annie recommends including language that reflects compliance, your culture, and best practices unique to your business.

Depending on manager experience levels, HR Annie may recommend also tailoring your custom employee handbook to be a more detailed resource for managers to fall back on when explaining policies and benefits to employees—or creating a supplement for managers.

Not sure what level of customization you need? Reach out and our HR pros will take it from there!

We recommend having an annual review and collaborating with HR Annie as a resource for ongoing policy or legal updates. If you’re on one of our ongoing HR support service levels, our employee handbook consultants will provide alerts and updates along the way.

You should always plan to update your employee handbook when major laws, policies, or benefits change in your organization.

Your handbook should always be updated if you experience significant growth in the number of employees, new locations, mergers or acquisitions, or major changes in your company occur that outdate the current handbook language.

In many cases, no, it’s not legally required.

However, an up-to-date handbook is still considered best practice, and one that’s highly recommended by HR Annie, legal firms, insurance companies, and benefits consultants alike.

This is especially true for an employee handbook for small business owners still building out their HR foundation.

A handbook is a tool and resource that employees and managers, owners, HR team members, and more can fall back on to remind them of compliance, policies, benefits, employee need-to-know information, etc.

This saves time and keeps things consistent within the organization.

HR Annie’s employee handbook consultants will do a thorough review of what is required for your organization for federal, state, and local compliance.

We’ll also help recommend updates because we also see what might be around the next corner for compliance.

As an HR compliance handbook partner, our team of HR professionals utilizes a multitude of resources to ensure we provide expert advice, including enterprise legal support, local legal experts as needed, and our own internal expertise.

For clients in specific industries with unique, niche compliance requirements, we collaborate to ensure the HR compliance handbook includes them as well.

Typically, our custom employee handbook services take about 12 hours and about 30-45 days to complete.

We bill a flat rate for the first 12 hours, and an hourly rate if it goes beyond that. For special circumstances, we will provide a custom scope of work.

Things that end up taking more time can include:

• Having multiple people involved in the process
• Employers with many addenda (extra states or locales included)
• Enhancements to current policies that require a lot of discussion
• Transitioning from a current handbook that is overly complex
• If a client is not responsive during the process

Because contractors and volunteers are not entitled to employee rights, we recommend putting together different kinds of simple contractor and/or volunteer guides.

We’re happy to help put those together as part of our compliant employee handbook services.

Contact us to learn more!