Employee Handbook and other matters of national import

[charliesmum]

Well, I had been planning on posting an incredibly insightful and witty comment about communism, and how, when I was a gel, we were pretty much raised on the belief that the Communists were Teh EBIL because the government told the people how to think and what to believe, and shut down anyone who didn't think or believe the way they were supposed to, and I was going to question the fact that our government, to a lesser degree, is trying to do that now, but something for work came up that I'm hoping people can help me with.

I've been commissioned to create an employee handbook for my company. Up to now we haven't had one, being a small company, but it's grown enough that TPTB have decided they probably ought to conform to the rules that say a company must have one.

Now, during the course of my pathetic career, I have acquired about four million handbooks, but, life being what it is, I can no longer find any of them, since I probably threw them all away in my last bout of frenzied cleaning. I have tried to find templates on line, but most people want you to buy them, and I don't have any money to spend. I have a few things to work from, but I really need to make sure I comply with whatever information must legally be in there - sexual harassment and whatnot.

So, my request is this...does anyone out there have access to employee handbook info they could send me? Does anyone have any idea of what legally needs to be incorporated into the handbook?

It is very important to me that I do this right.

Thank you. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Comments

[cherydactyl.livejournal.com]

I hate to say this to you, but to do this correctly and not cause more problems than you are solving or preventing, there will almost certainly have to be legal counsel involved someway somehow. Because the freaking laws keep changing, vary from jurisdiciton to jurisdiction, yada, yada. I was very lucky to have a lawyer on retainer that I could talk to the one job I was in that I had to deal with updating (not creating whole cloth).

It's not your fault that you need something that costs money to do this right. There is a saying in Computer Science circles: Fast, Cheap, or Good: pick two. That is, if a solution's cheap and fast, it won't be good. If it's fast and good, it won't be cheap. If you pick cheap and good, it won't be fast. That saying applies to pretty much everything, IMO.