Employee Handbooks for Small Business

Employee Handbooks are extremely useful tools. They enable you to communicate your expectations to your team, so your team know where you are coming from, and how you expect things to be completed.

Employee Manuals Improve Your Business from the Ground Up

You are in a small business so it is crucial that you deliver your product or service to a high standard every time you deliver it. You simply cannot afford not to.

Small business is competitive and delivering quality products and services is important for the success of your business. Have you decided to use employee handbooks in your business? Employee Handbooks for Small Business will make a difference to the performance of your small business.

It might seem like a lot of work, and it really is, so if you are looking for employee handbooks for small business you should consider what you can by already created that is a generic handbook that you could adapt to suit your business.

If you have already utilized this type of tool, then how have you managed to make it a success?

Why Employee Handbooks Work So Well

Employee handbooks work so well because they are communication tools between you and your team. If everything is in your head, then your business isn’t really worth much.

You will never be able to get much money for your business if you try to sell it because the owner needs to be involved in the daily work.

If you spent time building your management manual and employee manual, you will find your business is worth a lot more than without these critical items. This is because employee handbooks are part of a system that operates your business.

Are you spending your time wisely building your business?

What should be in an Employee Handbook?

You could easily buy an employee handbook template for your business. It would allow you to get yours up and running really quickly.

However, it is likely to become something significant over time. Of course, you will need to add to it, change it and get your team to contribute to it as well. It should be a team effort.

So if you are just starting out building your systems, then an MS Word template is going to be enough to get started. Once you have developed this and are finding it is getting too large you may need to move to a separate IT platform or work out how you are going to develop it further.

If your business is relatively straight forward for tasks maybe like a coffee shop, you could probably use a range of checklists. This would be the easiest way to ensure new team members are performing their roles correctly and these checklists certainly give them something to refer to to help them in their jobs.

Below are 3 suggestions to kick things off in your manual. These are just some things you could include in your employee manual.

Essential	Content
Start off with a WELCOME to your business.	Describe the history of your company and provide some background explaining why your company was created. Importantly, you should include a Vision and Mission Statement and a Client Fulfillment statement. This will help inform your team members what the company stands for and the direction it is heading in.
Also extremely important are VALUES.	Values identify the standards of the company and communicate expectations. Things like Integrity, Respect, Client Service, Teamwork, Actions and Innovation and Progress.
You should also provide GENERAL INFORMATION	The company address, telephone numbers, email addresses etc. This may seem obvious, but how many new employees need to ask these basic questions when they start at any business.

What should be in an Employee Handbook?

If you provide this basic information in an Employee Handbook or Manual, then they will have the information readily available to them at anytime.