As your employees return from their holiday vacations, complete their performance reviews, and establish their budgets for the year ahead, your managers should also be setting goals and making resolutions. And while all of your teams set course and get ready for 2015, why not support their efforts by updating and revising your employee handbook?

Your official handbook sets the tone of your workplace culture and gives employees clear rules that help them manage their interactions and behavior in the office. Each copy of the handbook should also clarify an individual employee’s job description and cover basic HR issues like PTO policies and performance improvement plans. As you take a look at your current handbook and get ready to make some changes, keep these tips in mind.

Give employees access to hard copies and online versions.

Your website or intranet should provide access to an online version of the handbook that can be updated in real time by your HR team. But each employee should also have a binder with detachable pages that can be removed and replaced as necessary

Don’t forget to remove outdated policies.

As you add new policies and regulations, make sure you take the old ones off the books and out of the system. Don’t make simple issues (like dress codes) more complex than they need to be.

Establish job descriptions for new positions.

Review your staffing and hiring plan and evaluate the new positions that you’ll be adding or re-staffing this year. Make updates and revisions to these job descriptions long before you launch the sourcing and candidate selection process.

Obtain approval for major changes.

Too often, managers and HR teams implement policies that later turn out to be illegal or unenforceable for a variety of reasons. Before you make your new rules official, gain the support of your legal team and upper level executives. A few common problem areas include 1.) regulating attire and personal expression 2.) attempts to keep the workplace clean/maintained through teamwork, and 3.) rules that push employees to attend unpaid work-related events, like a mandatory happy hour or a “voluntary” team-building weekend.

For more on how to update your workplace policies and job descriptions for the year ahead, contact the staffing team at Expert.