Employee Manual

As businesses grow, employers often find that they need to write down employment policies and procedures to encourage better workplace communications and consistency. When you commit to preparing and distributing a written employee handbook it’s important to follow through and implement policies consistently. You must also plan to update the handbook on a regular basis, at least annually, to make sure it is accurate and compliant with law. Each policy should be dated so that employees can be assured that they are looking at the most recent version of the handbook. I’ve seen situations where an employer copied an old printed handbook for many years, unfortunately, legal changes in the course of time caused many of those written policies to be out of compliance with current law.

The Template Employee Manual can help you get started, but it’s always a good idea to have an employee handbook reviewed by appropriate legal counsel before putting it into effect. This is especially important because laws regarding farm employment in NYS have been changing recently.

During the onboarding process, as you review policies with your employees you can have them check off or initial policies that have been reviewed.