So when a startup business hires their first employee or as they start to grow their workforce. We often get the question of do we need an employee handbook or an employee manual or could we just sort of set a bunch of policies in an email?

There are a variety of laws in New York State and in every state which apply to employees’ rights and employer obligations. When clients first come to us, they may employ one person, two people. We certainly say at the bare minimum you should have a memorandum which goes out on an annual basis, which sort of sets forth the vacation policy, sick leave as required by law and other things that you think are important to articulate to employees.

So everyone is essentially on the same page as a workforce grows. And as laws change with respect to anti-harassment and other policies and benefits, it is a good idea to start reducing those to writing in an employee handbook that is distributed to all current employees and all new employees as they join an organization.

And employee handbook does not need to be 100 pages. It does not need to be 50 pages, but it does need to contain everything that’s required by law, but also all the things that are important for you as an employer or the owners of the business to communicate to your employees. So everybody is on the same page and there’s a document that is in place that can be referenced when an issue arises or when a need arises.