When designing an effective and powerful employee experience for your organisation, a oft-overlooked but crucial element is the use of an employee handbook. This document plays an important part in ensuring that employers, employees, and the HR department are completely aligned on the company's employment policies and guidelines, helping to provide guidance and set expectations for employees.
While not legally mandatory in Malaysia, you should certainly have an employee handbook for your organisation no act as a reference for employees whenever they have any questions about company policies and guidelines. Ultimately, this saves time for both employers and employees (along with HR managers, too). But if you're an employer or HR manager in a smaller or newer organisation, you might wonder: where do you even begin?
We understand — an employee handbook can, and should be a very comprehensive document, one that can be challenging to create from scratch. With that in mind, we've compiled some tips to help you get started; if you still need help, scroll onto the bottom for a link to a free sample handbook template!
One of the most commonly-asked questions that employees have is, of course, leave entitlements. This includes various allowances, including annual leave, compassionate leave, hospitalisation & medical leave, and a whole range of entitlements.
Be sure to be as comprehensive as you can, with the help of the following articles we've provided below:
Include the necessary disclaimers, and provide for consequences and changes that might occur in the future.
It's easy to overlook the basics, but remember that an employee handbook should be seen as a single source of truth and reference for employees. As such, don't forget to include the basic (but important) information such as working hours, overtime pay if applicable, information on the probation period, what happens if termination of employment happens, and so on. If relevant, include information on dress code, expected conduct in the workplace, and even salary payout dates.
Here are some useful resources to cover some core HR matters:
Plus, you always head to altHR's Resource centre for the end to end of HR guides and help articles here.
It's also important that you include a page covering definitions. This is usually located at the beginning or the end of the handbook, and will serve as a useful reference to cover various terminologies throughout the document. For example, define what "Company" or "Employee" covers and so on.
While this may seem rather tedious, it's good practice to dot your i's and cross your t's with this — particularly from a legal point of view.
Be sure to include the following definitions:
If you're still unclear, scroll down to the next section, because.
