What to include in an employee handbook

Open a handbook that has been in use for two years and you can see which pages were actually used. The leave section is dog eared, somebody has written a phone number next to the roster rules, and the four pages about values at the front are pristine. That is not a failure of the values pages. It is a clue about what a handbook is for.

Before anything else: what follows is general information about structuring a document, not legal or HR advice. What a handbook must contain, and whether any of it binds you, differs by country and by state, and by the award, agreement or contract that sits above it. Take advice on the content; this post is about the shape.

Three kinds of handbook content

Almost every section of a handbook is one of three things, and they behave differently.

Policy is what the organisation has decided, usually because a law, an insurer or a regulator made it decide. Pay cycles, leave, information security, health and safety. Policy is looked up under pressure, often by someone annoyed, so it wants tables, numbers and no hedging.

Procedure is what a person does next. How to request leave, how to swap a shift, what happens when you resign. Procedure is a sequence, and it should be written as one, with the actor named in every step.

Culture is what the organisation would like to be true. It is read once, in the first week, and then never again. That is fine, as long as you write it knowing that, which mostly means writing less of it.

Mixing the three inside one section is what makes handbooks unreadable. A leave section that opens with two paragraphs about trust before it tells you how many days you get is a culture page wearing a policy page’s title.

The checklist

The table below is every section of the finished handbook example on this site, an invented Australian clinic group called Northcote Health Collective with 61 staff across four sites. I counted the words in the published document rather than estimating them.

Two things stand out. The whole handbook is 1,276 words over six pages, which is far shorter than most real ones, and it still covers eight sections. And the longest section by a wide margin is leave, at 255 words, which is 20 per cent of the document for one topic. That is the right allocation, because leave is the thing people look up most.

The culture section, “How we behave”, is 175 words, and even that is not culture in the abstract. It is four rules that only make sense in a clinic: no disagreements at reception, what counts as bullying, gifts over fifty dollars declined and logged, and declaring a second clinical job.

Policies the law expects

This is the part where you should stop reading a blog and open your own jurisdiction’s guidance. Here is only what I checked in a primary source.

In the UK, an employer must give a written statement of employment particulars, with the principal statement on the first day. It covers names, job title, start date, pay, hours, holiday entitlement, work location, probation and obligatory training. Sick pay, other paid leave and notice periods may sit in a separate document as long as the worker has reasonable access to it. A wider statement covering pensions, collective agreements, non-compulsory training and disciplinary and grievance procedures follows within two months. Section 3 of the Employment Rights Act 1996 requires the statement to include a note about disciplinary rules or to refer the worker to a reasonably accessible document that specifies them.

That last clause is the reason handbooks exist in their current form. The handbook is the reasonably accessible document. Acas guidance likewise expects employers to follow a fair, written procedure in any discipline or grievance case, which means the procedure has to be written down somewhere a person can find it.

Australia and the United States both work differently, and both differ again by state. Do not copy a section list off a blog and assume it satisfies anything.

Procedures people search for

Procedures are the pages that earn the handbook its keep, and there are usually only five or six of them: requesting leave, reporting an absence, swapping or changing a shift, raising a concern about a person, reporting a safety incident, and leaving.

Write each as numbered steps with the actor named. The example’s leave request is four steps: check the roster, submit the request in the rostering system rather than by email, wait up to five business days, and what happens if it is declined. Ninety-one words for all four. A person who is about to book flights can read that in fifteen seconds, which is the entire design goal.

The other rule is to name the system, not the department. “Put it in the rostering system” is findable. “Contact People and Culture” is a dead end at 9pm.

Culture pages, kept short

Nielsen’s reading research found that 79 per cent of people scan rather than read, and that promotional language actively slows readers down: neutral wording tested 27 per cent better than the marketing version of the same page. A values page is the most promotional thing in a handbook, so it is the page that benefits most from being cut in half.

The test for a culture line is whether it could be false. “We treat each other with respect” could not be false anywhere, so it carries no information. “Disagreements about a roster or a diagnosis happen in the staff room, never at reception” could be false, and tells a new receptionist something they did not know.

Table of contents and versioning

A contents page is worth it once the document is long enough that people arrive looking for one section rather than reading it through. In practice that is around six pages. In the documents built here, a contents block is only used on long documents, and its titles have to match the headings exactly so the page numbers resolve.

They do in the example. The contents page lists eight sections with page numbers, and I checked each against where the section actually starts in the rendered document. All eight match. That sounds trivial and is the single most common defect in a handbook that has been edited by three people over two years.

Versioning belongs on the cover, not in a footer nobody reads. The example carries “Version 3.1, August 2026” on the front and says inside who owns the document and when it is rewritten. If you need a longer, more formal treatment of one topic, split it out as its own policy, the way the information security policy example does over fifteen pages.

Acknowledgement and signing

Most handbooks end with an acknowledgement page: I have received it, I have read it, I understand it applies to me. Keep it to receipt and understanding. The moment it says “I agree to the terms”, you have invited an argument about whether the handbook is contractual.

The example does something slightly different and worth stealing. Instead of an acknowledgement, its last block is a callout that repeats the statement from page one: entitlements come from the statutory standards, the award and the contract, and where the handbook and those disagree, the handbook loses. Saying that twice, at both ends, is cheap insurance.

If you do want a signature, a handbook built here can carry a signature block where each party is one named signer with an email address and a position in the signing order, and go out for electronic signature rather than being printed and scanned.

The example

Read the handbook end to end; it takes five minutes. The three things worth copying are the precedence statement at both ends, the leave table with its column for what evidence is needed, and the fact that no section runs longer than its job. For a document of this shape, start from the long document generator and add a contents page once it passes six pages. If your next job is minuting the meeting where the handbook gets approved, there is a companion post on how to write meeting minutes.