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Employee manuals are something that most businesses who have more than one employee need to have. The trouble is often they sit on a shelf (next to the Strategic Plan) and gather dust. The only time the cobwebs are removed from them is when there is a disaster and you need to work out what to do.

Employee Manuals need to be living breathing documents, full of enough useful information that you and your team refer to them whenever they need to do something out of the ordinary (like hire someone new, run a performance review or work out how to deal with the employee who has BO). Of course they also need to deal with crisis situations such as dismissing someone, dealing with sexual harassment or what to do when an employee goes off the rails.

Good employee manuals also need to keep pace with emerging technology with policies covering blogging, social media use including Twitter and instant messaging.

Finally, they need to be regularly reviewed in light of new industrial relations legislation to ensure that your business still complies.

After 20 odd years as a Human Resource Manager with companies ranging from less than a hundred employees to a few thousand, I put together all the best policies that I had written, implemented and used in each of the organisations into our Instant HR Policies & Procedures Manual for Australian businesses.

I designed it to be a super simple to use template HR manual – just insert your company name, check out the fit of the policies for your business (for example – not every business offers staff discount so you may not need that particular policy), do a quick check with your legal team to make sure your particular business structure is taken into account and then you are on your way. You don’t need a huge HR team to make it work.

Over the past few years, our employee manual has been successfully used by hundreds of Australian businesses from small start-up IT companies through to large mining organisations. From Opera companies to plumbers – the essentials of good HR are still the same. We even have discovered our manual appearing in some of the Pacific Islands, the UK and the USA. Even though the legal contexts vary, good HR transcends geographic boundaries.

Yesterday, after many months review, we released our latest version 3.1 which takes into account all of the changes from the Fair Work Act. And late last night, everyone who had purchased the manual in the past 2 and a bit years was sent a new free download link to the new edition – just to make sure they were current with their policies (we like surprising people with that little bit extra!)

So … if you have been meaning to create an employee manual for your team, perhaps you may want to check out our Instant HR Policies & Procedure Manual. It will make your life a whole lot easier!

Until next time

Ingrid Cliff

We put your business into words

Heart Harmony – HR Writer