A guide to writing the perfect manual for employees you care about.
About This Handbook
Welcome to Inc.'s handbook on handbooks!
Other than maybe your tax returns, you can't prepare a more important document than your employee manual. Here you can create chapter and verse on your company. You can say exactly who you are and what you do. (One handbook we've seen refers to itself as a "sort of yearly corporate manifesto.") Most important, your handbook tells employees why they should work for your company; it should detail your expectations of them and answer their expectations of you.
In the next few pages we'll let you in on some of the whys and wherefores of producing a handbook, along with some ideas of what such a booklet should look (and sound) like, who ought to write it, how long it should be, what it must contain, and what it can leave out. We hope that you find them useful and that you'll feel free to respond with comments.
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Mission Statement
A great handbook should, well...let's try this. Because the point of this exercise is to help you write a handbook -- which ideally contains a mission statement -- let's put the mission of handbooks into just such a proclamation:
An employee handbook's mission is to
communicate indispensable company policies and practices;
make explicit the mutual agreements between employee and employer without being an actual contract;
state and express a company's philosophy;
excite and motivate the employee about his or her job;
convey a broader sense of the company mission.
And what does an actual mission statement look like? Well, the best ones tread the tightrope between the world of ideas and the world of reality. They do more than simply give a sense of what the company aspires to do in the world; they also say exactly how it intends to do it. There's a good example in the employee guide at Seattle-based Starbucks Coffee Co., which states the company's charter as follows:
"To establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles as we grow.
"The following five principles will help us measure the appropriateness of our decisions:
" -- Provide a great work environment and treat each other with respect and dignity.
" -- Apply the highest standards of excellence to the purchasing, roasting, and fresh delivery of our coffee.
" -- Develop enthusiastically satisfied customers all of the time.
" -- Contribute positively to our communities and our environment.
" -- Recognize that profitability is essential to our future success."
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History
Handbooks are more popular today than ever, for both formal and informal reasons. First of all, the creeping hand of regulation is forcing companies to publish them simply to cover legal requirements and avoid lawsuits. But more than that, says Wendy Rhodes, a partner with Hewitt Associates, a benefits and compensation consulting firm based in Lincolnshire, Ill., many cash-tight companies are choosing to write down relevant policies and practices and package them in one document as a convenient and cost-effective way of orienting and motivating employees, and explaining company terminology.
One informal gauge of the burgeoning interest in handbooks comes from Whole Foods Market Inc., headquartered in Austin, Tex. Four years ago Inc. published an article that billed the company's handbook as a paradigm of excellence. ( See "The Best Little Handbook in Texas," Managing People, February 1989.) The natural-foods retailer subsequently received 500 requests for copies from companies eager to get a benchmark for their own handbook ideas. A sign of the sorry state of the nation's employee manuals: Whole Foods asked the recipients of its booklet for theirs in return, but the blizzard of handbooks Whole Foods received yielded no ideas that Whole Foods staffers believed they could borrow.
But enough handbook history. As for your story: when you set about writing your company's saga, go beyond reciting SIC code, company address, and founder's birthplace. Try to personalize the place; bring the primary characters to life. Here's a terrific for-instance: In its staff handbook, Wild Oats Markets Inc., based in Boulder, Colo., kicks off with a history titled "A Long, Strange Trip." In it president Mike Gilliland recounts (in what sounds like a letter to a friend) the haphazard process by which he and his partners grew the company into today's multimillion-dollar natural-foods retailing venture.
Interestingly, Gilliland candidly includes a description of the company's greatest failure:
"In 1986, thinking we were infallible, we opened a gourmet/natural foods/convenience store called The French Market (after the New Orleans market of the same name) in the Basemar Center in Boulder. The store lacked any focus, was terribly mismanaged (by me), and was a disaster for two years. Fortunately, Stella's and Lolita's [the company's first two stores] were profitable enough to keep us afloat."
And in another display of openness, Gilliland specifies who holds Wild Oats' equity: "Libby and I each own 32.3% of the stock. Randy [a friend] owns 31.3%, Bennett Bertoli, the company's legal counsel, owns 3% and David Wilkinson [a private investor] owns the remaining 1%."
