12. Policies

When it comes to aspects of your job that make you jump out of bed in the morning, we bet that “communicating policies” doesn’t make the list. Yet you’re well aware of how important it is for employees to understand and follow HR policies such as paid time off and dress code. The challenge is that communicating about policies is always a balancing act. On one hand, policies have to be simple enough to be easily understood and acted on. On the other hand, policies have to be precise enough and complete enough (hello, Legal department!) to protect the company. It’s no wonder that you sometimes want to shut off your alarm and hide under the covers! But never fear. We’re here to help you tackle the policies challenge.

Here’s What I Expect from You and What You Can Expect from Me

Human Resources policies are “the formal rules and guidelines that businesses put in place to hire, train, assess, and reward the members of their workforce” according to USLegal, a company that provides legal templates and forms. We think of policies as an agreement: They give employees information about what the company expects of them and what they can expect from the company.

As a result, “when organized and disseminated in an easily used form...policies can preempt many misunderstandings between employees and employers about their rights and obligations in the business place.” Again, that’s from USLegal, and we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

Speaking of legal matters, you’ll want to get advice from experts in employment law when you communicate many topics to employees, including your policies. The language of the law is quite different from the conversational, easy-to-understand language that helps create effective HR communications, but it is possible to write about company policies and benefits in an interesting and readable way, and still meet legal requirements.

Policies: The Short Form

Remember the 1984 movie Gremlins? While on a business trip to New York City, a dad stops in Chinatown to buy his young son a furry little pet called a mogwai. The shop owner gives three rules for taking care of the pet: Don’t get him wet. Keep him away from bright light. And never feed him after midnight. When water is accidentally spilled on the mogwai, it causes him to multiply, producing a number of little brothers. And when the creatures find food after midnight, they turn into scaly monsters called gremlins, and all heck breaks loose.

Policies are a lot like that. You start with one. It’s kind of cute. It’s easy to take care of. Then you spill coffee on it and suddenly you have a pile of policies. They keep multiplying. And one night when you’re working late, you leave a bag of Doritos on your desk—and you can imagine the rest.

For example, when we helped a company create a guide for people managers, we got to spend a lot of time with the company’s policies—all 66 of them. Here’s a partial list:

• Holidays

• Jury duty

• Military leave

• Vacation

• Job requisitions

• Relocation

• Sending flowers to employees

• Sexual harassment

• Conflict of interest

• Bulletin boards

• Substance abuse

How can you articulate each policy so that it makes sense? How can you organize all these policies so that employees can find them when they need them? We suggest that you start by creating an employee handbook.

Here’s Your Friendly Handbook. Don’t Be Frightened. It Won’t Bite

Here’s our premise: Policies form an important part of the employment equation, so let’s make it easy (and enjoyable, even) for employees to learn more about them.

A handbook can do that for you. It helps new employees understand the rules of the road. It also serves as a reference for longer-term employees—a place to double-check how much time off they get or what to wear when visiting corporate headquarters. In short, a handbook provides information that helps employees succeed (so that the company does, too).

The handbook doesn’t need to be a huge document, or an expensive one. It doesn’t even have to be a printed document—it can be posted on your intranet or sent via e-mail.

But here’s the most important point about creating a handbook: It can’t be scary. Yes, a handbook must protect a company from legal problems, but it can’t seem like it’s written by lawyers. It needs to draw employees in and make them feel comfortable, not send them screaming into the night.

Do Your Homework Before Producing Your Handbook

If you’re beginning a project to create an employee handbook, here are some great ways to start.

First, do your homework. Conduct research with the following:

• Employees and managers. Find out what each isn’t hearing from the other. Ask, “What do you wish you knew on Day One but didn’t?”

• Plan providers, call centers, and so on. What do your employees not know, need to know, need to do better for themselves? What mistakes are employees making?

• Company programs and program and plan managers. Find out what is working well, what is not, what you wish every employee knew about your program.

• Employee surveys or questionnaires. What trends do you see in terms of misunderstood programs or procedures?

• Senior managers. What do they want every employee to know, do, and feel? What is driving them crazy right now?

This is a great start to finding out what is working, and what’s not, in your organization. What’s really great about this process is that you might be the person to change what’s not working at your company into what is working, simply by doing your job and communicating well.

Establish Your Objectives

Based on what you learned in your research, set up three overall objectives for your employee handbook, and determine how you will measure the success of each. For example:

Gather Content

Now it’s time to gather content. An employee handbook typically covers topics that Human Resources manages: policies, benefits, and programs to help the business attract and keep talented performers.

Ideally, your employee handbook also includes information from staff areas throughout the company: Information Technology, Facilities, Legal, Human Resources, Marketing, Public Affairs, Investor or Shareholder Relations, Training, Community Relations. All these functional areas have information to contribute to help employees know what to do in a variety of situations and how to use the services or resources that each area offers.

Employees don’t think about company programs and services coming from a variety of internal functions; it’s all “from the company” to them. It’s silly for each staff function to produce its own version of a handbook, because that weighs heavily on the arms of employees. That’s why it’s good to have descriptions of all the services and programs offered by all the staff functions in one resource in print and online.

Organize Your Handbook in a Way That Makes Sense for Your Company and Your Employees

After you’ve gathered all the background material, you need to organize it. You can use a number of different criteria to do so:

• Timeline of the employment relationship (from joining the company through leaving)

• Alphabetical order by policy

• Order of importance or order of value to your employees (most to least)

• Order of cost (most expensive to least)

• Life events (see more in the sidebar “The Truth About Killing Trees,” in Chapter 3, “Plan and Manage Communication”)

Once you have identified all your content and have organized it in some fashion, look for even bigger labels to put on the content so it will appeal to your readers. Here is an example of what we mean.

Other Ways to Organize

In another employee handbook we created, we organized information into the following section headings, starting with the basics and then following a more-or-less sequential organization:

• Our work environment

• Getting started

• On the job

• Compensation

• Employee benefits, programs, and services

• Time off

• Problem solving

• Leaving

• Resources

And for still another handbook, here’s how we organized the content:

• How we work

• On the job

• Money matters

• Time off

• Benefits for you

• Solving problems

• Leaving the company

Desperately Seeking Information

Whichever structure you use to organize your handbook, keep this in mind: Employees will need help finding just the information they want. Even if you conducted research with managers and employees and put your handbook together accordingly, some employees will look for the topic of “life insurance” in the “pay” section instead of “benefits.” Or perhaps they don’t consider “sick days” time off, so they’d never think to look for that topic in that section.

You need to do three things to make it easier for employees to find what they need:

• Create a detailed list of contents at the front of the handbook (or on the homepage, if it’s online). Don’t just list “benefits”; list specifics such as “vision care” or “tuition reimbursement” with a page number (if your handbook is in print) or link.

• If your handbook is in print, include an index. Book publishers tell us that roughly 50% of all people go to the table of contents to find a topic, and 50% head for the index. That’s why it’s important to have both in your handbook: You make it easy for 100% of your audience to find what they’re looking for.

• If your handbook is online, make sure the search function works well. Work with your Information Technology department or vendor to ensure that content is tagged properly. That way, employees can, for example, type “corporate credit card” in the search box and go right to the page they need.

Keep the Language Conversational—Please, No Legalese

As you write your handbook, read it aloud to hear if it sounds like one employee talking with another. As we said previously, you do not want the handbook to sound like a lawyer writing to employees (even if you work in a law firm).

Although it’s true that more employees today sue their current or former employers, the employees who sue represent an extremely small percentage of your total employee handbook readership. You’re preparing the handbook for the majority of employees—those wonderful folks who will never sue you. Nothing you say in the employee handbook will ever prevent someone from suing your company. What you say should encourage most employees to do a good job.

Including quotes from real employees (along with their photos) is a great way to share the unwritten secrets of success in your environment. For example, in one of the employee handbooks we produced, an employee was quoted as follows: “We never have problems here; we only have opportunities.” (Emphasis is as the employee stated.) When you include quotes from employees, giving advice about how to succeed in the organization, you’re not only sharing great advice; you’re also recognizing those employees featured as being successful.

Encourage Employees to Use the Handbook as a Resource

The ideal place to distribute the employee handbook is during the orientation process. If you can pull it off, one of the best ways to make employees familiar with the handbook’s contents is to hold a competition during an orientation program. You would ask teams of employees to find answers to some of the questions in the handbook. The first team with all the right answers wins.

Education professionals will tell you that if you give a person a resource, and the person actually uses that resource within the first hour of receiving it, the chances increase exponentially that the person will use that resource again.

Put a Title on Your Work

“Working Together” works well as a title for an employee handbook. It indicates that we’re all in this together, and having some common understandings about how we’ll work together makes sense.

Here are some additional thoughts about good titles for employee handbooks:

• “How to Succeed at [Your Company Name]”

• “73 Reasons Why [Your Company Name] Is a Great Place to Work”

• “How You Bring Good Things to Light at GE” (tie in with advertising slogans)

• “The Benefits of a Career with [Your Company Name]”

Measure Results

Include a one-page survey in the employee handbook or on the web page that offers some incentive to employees to complete it and turn it in. This could be a free lunch at a nearby restaurant or the company cafeteria. Also track before-and-after data regarding usage of company programs. Pick a few key goals you set up as a result of your research, and then check back with program managers, call centers, and so on to see what improvements have occurred since you produced the employee handbook.

Hold focus group sessions about six months after distributing the employee handbook. Determine what questions employees still have, what sections confuse them, and what information they want included that isn’t there.

Use what you learn to improve the intranet version of your handbook immediately, and update the print version at least every two years.

Bring Policies to Life

Of course, even the best-written policy may need support to encourage employees to learn about it and take action on it. For example, a financial services company created a flexible work arrangements policy to allow employees to work on a different schedule or from home. But the company learned that many employees didn’t know about the policy, and many managers were skeptical. They believed that the terms “flexibility” and “work” were mutually exclusive.

We helped the company communicate with both employees and managers about two aspects of the policy: the benefits of working flexibly, and how employees (and managers) start and successfully manage such an arrangement.

Sharing the policy itself was certainly the beginning of our communication efforts. But even more important was bringing the policy to life by doing the following:

• Using research to demonstrate the value of flexible work arrangements to show how they can improve productivity and job satisfaction

• Giving examples of different aspects of flexible work arrangements, such as flextime (starting and ending times), flexplace (telecommuting), compressed workweek (full-time work completed in fewer than five days), and job sharing (two employees share the responsibilities of one full-time job)

• Providing all the paperwork needed to set up an arrangement, with clear instructions on how to fill it out

• Helping managers and employees deal with potential pitfalls by communicating scenarios and how to resolve them

• Giving managers and employees a chance to get their questions answered by including FAQs in the print and written communication and by holding learning sessions they can attend in person or via web meeting

Communicate Life Events When Policies, Programs, and Benefits Intersect

If you think about the various life events that an employee can experience while working at your company, you may find you need to take extra steps in communicating what happens when various programs, policies, and benefits intersect.

Life events can include getting married, having a baby, moving into a new home, being sick or injured, caring for an older or younger relative, and more. Sometimes, a simple chart can illustrate what happens when.

For more-complex subjects, we like to take a visual approach. For example, having a baby is a life event where provisions from your medical plan combine with policies about parental leave, vacation, and other time-off policies. Having a baby might even require changes in other benefit plans. We found we needed more space than a simple chart to show a timeline with color coding to show which plans or policies kicked in at which point. Our resulting communication was a horizontal placemat-sized document that quickly showed a parent-to-be when he or she was eligible for which time-off provision and how this could be extended with vacation time. It also noted places where the parent needed to take action (to include the new baby in health coverage, for example) as well as information and resources the parent could receive.

Checklist for Making the Most of All That Your Company Offers

To make sure your employees take advantage of everything your company offers, you’ll want to do the following:

Articulate your policies in a clear, simple way, using nonlegal language.

Create a handbook that’s geared toward helping employees find policy information quickly and easily.

Use employee quotes and examples to make policies more vivid.

Bring policies such as flexible work arrangements to life.

Create clear visuals that show how your programs, policies, and benefits intersect during important life events such as getting married and having a baby.