Creating an employee handbook can really help a business to operate better on a day-to-day basis. A handbook can clarify a lot of the questions about what should and shouldn’t be happening on-site, and what people should and shouldn’t be doing to maintain smooth sailing.

That said, a good employee handbook isn’t a rule book. It’s a map — a map to positivity and success for the business.

Here are some ways that we’ve found an employee handbook helps an HR department to work smarter, not harder, in a challenging business world.

Clarifying Dress Code, Behavior, Etc.

Although we’ve said that an employee handbook isn’t just a rule book, it does help to make sure everyone at a company is on the right page. There are certain things that business owners and business leaders are entitled to as the primary investors in the company. For example, many businesses have reasonable dress codes that set some basic expectations.

A good employee handbook does not single out a certain class of workers, but provides a consistent and comprehensive guideline for everyone.

Solving Conflicts

Sometimes a manager or someone in HR feels a lot like Solomon watching two women struggle over a baby. Conflict is something that can and will come up in the workplace. Sometimes, judging these types of personal grievances gets really thorny. An employee handbook can help lay out the rules that will cover who is in the right and who is in the wrong when there is a serious disagreement over processes, jurisdictions, or anything else that causes people to make waves in their offices, down to and including those awful lunch thieves who should have seen that your chicken salad was clearly labeled.

Addressing Performance Issues

Another really challenging job of someone HR is the review process, and addressing issues around performance. Without an employee handbook or other orienting guide, HR representatives may be asked to ‘speak from their guts’ or simply come up with reasons why someone’s performance isn’t up to par. This can cause all kinds of dissatisfaction and might even leave the business open to discrimination challenges. By contrast, when there is a written guideline in a handbook, this can be used to support a performance review or other type of oversight.

Creating a Corporate Culture

The businesses that tend to have the most success, in our opinion, are businesses where positivity reigns, and where creativity is prized. They are places where there is a prevailing corporate culture that encourages not only productivity, but job satisfaction, too.

A good employee handbook does not go about setting up a corporate culture in a punitive way. It doesn’t require employees to have “37 pieces of flair” or smile at every customer. Instead, it recognizes the inherent talent and expertise of every single worker, and simply asks people to contribute based on their abilities. The best work cultures work on an egalitarian, altruistic model, and they make people want to work harder and do better.

For more on hiring and everything else that businesses do each day, keep an eye on our Full Steam Staffing blog, where we detail some of the best business philosophies that we’ve seen at work among our client businesses in the Ontario, California community.