Do I Have To Give My Employees A Copy Of The Employee Handbook?

Steven Cesare, Ph.D.

A business owner from Iowa called me the other day to talk about an administrative issue, tinged with legal caution. Recently, an employee, with a questionable work ethic, confronted the business owner and asked to receive a copy of the company’s Employee Handbook for his personal possession. The owner called me to share some of his thoughts, and seek professional guidance, eventuating in the ultimate purpose for the telephone call: “Steve, do I have to give my employees a copy of the company Employee Handbook?”

The short answer is “no.”

I do not know of any law requiring a company to have an Employee Handbook or mandating its distribution to employees. That statement elucidates the critical nexus between what is legal and what constitutes a “best practice”; a distinction between “must” and “should,” differentiated by coercion or capitalism.

Companies routinely conduct myriad best practices, not required by law, to improve performance, support the organizational culture, and enhance results. Case in point, performance evaluations, staff meetings, rewards and recognition ceremonies, refreshing the website, vendor price comparisons, tool inventories, EPLI coverage, and daily huddles, are all common events in most green industry companies.

Oh, by the way, highly successful companies do more “best practices” than less successful companies. Funny, how capitalism works…

To that end, it is a routine best practice to distribute an Employee Handbook to all employees. While most companies provide an actual hard copy document to all employees de facto, other companies motivated by cost containment, offer the Employee Handbook to employees upon individual request, with some companies posting the Employee Handbook as a PDF on their website or on their password-protected corporate intranet.

The origin of the business owner’s hesitancy to give the Employee Handbook to the employee was predicated on the hunch the problematic employee may review the document, uncover some inaccurate content, and file a legal claim against the company, or simply share the Employee Handbook with a local competitor. The former concern can be controlled by the company; the latter can only be minimized.

The primary purpose of an Employee Handbook is communication, specifying policies, procedures, and expectations that employees are held accountable for completing. Without that content being shared with the employees, employee accountability becomes extremely difficult. Picture yourself on the witness stand explaining to the prosecution attorney that you terminated his client on a policy the employee did not know was in place, because the employee was never given a copy of the Employee Handbook that communicated the policy in question to the employee. I can hear the sound of the gavel from here.

While state law frequently prevails, a common tenet is that an employee may review all documents found in his/her personnel file, that was signed by the employee. It naturally follows then, that if the employee signed the Employee Handbook Acknowledgment, the employee should receive a copy of that document.

My advice to the business owner was to give the document to the employee. Furthermore, I naturally recommended an annual review and revision of the Employee Handbook. And finally, I suggested that if he had significant doubts about the process, he should discuss the matter with his external legal counsel to verify that Iowa state law did not contain any arcane restriction that would impede that distribution.

Aside from that specific scenario, it is well known that employees often sue their employers. Trust me: We all know that story. Yet, a key defense against that inevitability, is to implement more “best practices” throughout the company culture across administrative, financial, and operational systems.

That’s why they are called “best” practices.

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