Gold Business Tips - Turning your passion into pure gold!

When I first got involved in the food industry, the employee handbooks that we received were awful. They read like instruction manuals for Japanese DVD players, completely convoluted and unreadable even as they were trying to explain simple procedures. This employ safety handbook was basically designed to cover every possible contingency, making it so that, no matter what happened to us on the job, the company would not be at fault. I suppose that the company philosophy was that, if it was hard enough to decipher the employee rules and regulations, we would not bother to take legal action if something happened.

Now that I am working in a major food distribution company, I see how a proper employee handbook is supposed to read. The employee safety handbook is the first section of the document. It is about eight pages long, and outlines all the basic rules. Rather than giving every rule for every possible position, it simply gives you the rules for whatever job you have and directs you to where to find information on the other positions within the company. This ensures that everyone reads the employee handbook rules that are relevant to them.

Good employee handbooks go a step further than that, however. Ours goes beyond all the legalese to help us by answering commonly asked questions about the job. Not only does this make it easy for new workers to make the transition, but it also helps to ensure that proper procedures are always followed. Even management get sloppy from time to time, and people can get lax, taking short-cuts to save time and energy. By always having an employee handbook to come back do, however, the company make sure that that doesn’t happen. Every time we start to slip in safety procedures, there is always someone there to point it out in the book.

One of the most interesting things about this employee handbook is that it was not written from scratch. It seems so specific to the company and so well established, but apparently there are many companies that specialize in printing employee guides. Several years ago, the boss bought a template from one of these firms, and the handbook for employees is essentially based on minor modifications of that original template. Still, it works perfectly for the job. Everyone always knows what is expected of them, and that makes people feel secure in their positions. It also keeps us safe, which is always good to know!