Summary
Nonprofit employee handbooks are an essential resource for onboarding new recruits, strengthening your culture, and complying with regulations. But they’re only useful if your employees can actually access and understand them. In this blog, we share 7 tips that will help you create an effective nonprofit handbook. One that boosts engagement, alignment, and compliance.
It’s your latest recruit’s first day at work. They shake a few hands, log into your company intranet, attempt to figure out how the office coffee machine works… And then it’s all systems go.
In amongst the social pleasantries and technical setups, they’ll need to familiarize themselves with your organization and their role within it.
This is where your trusty nonprofit employee handbook comes into play.
This document contains every piece of information your new recruits need to hit the ground running on day one, from your organization’s mission and purpose to your workplace policies, benefits, and codes of conduct.
That’s why it’s crucial you get it right.
Why is it so important to get the employee handbook right?
A great employee handbook doesn’t just streamline the onboarding process. It can directly influence compliance, cultural alignment, and conduct across your nonprofit and its locations.
That is, providing your employees actually read the document. Around two thirds of organizations say many of their employees don’t.
Without absorbing crucial company and policy information, staff and volunteers are more likely to breach their contract. If you’re not careful, these instances of non-compliance could negatively impact your funding, reputation, and services.
The question is: how can you create a handbook that satisfies your employees and serves your nonprofit?
The following tips will help you design a resource that’s accessible, engaging, and compliant.
7 tips for creating an effective nonprofit employee handbook
1. Give the content a refresh
First thing’s first, assess the current state of your organization. Have there been any changes to your services or mission in the past few months? Have you introduced new perks, roles, or policies?
Collaborate with staff across your locations and departments — including your IT and legal teams — to cover all bases. Then, comb through your existing handbook and pinpoint any content that’s out of date or inconsistent.
Remember, your handbook should contain an up-to-date overview of:
- Your nonprofit’s purpose, mission, and values.
- Employment details, such as working hours and contract terms.
- Benefits, including paid time off, pension contributions, and healthcare cover.
- Any other perks (e.g. training days, yearly bonuses, gym memberships).
- Your code of conduct, including dress codes, health and safety protocols, and equal opportunity commitments.
- Company policies and regulatory commitments.
2. Accommodate any regulatory changes
Your duties as an employer are always subject to change.
Take the upcoming Employee Rights Bill in the UK as an example. This proposal contains a series of changes to employee rights, including the ability to file an unfair dismissal claim from day one of employment, as well as receive guaranteed hours (for workers on zero-hour contracts).
It’s your responsibility to monitor any regulatory changes across your locations, adjust your HR procedures, and update your handbook accordingly.
3. Write clearly and engagingly
There’s no getting around it: your handbook is going to be crammed full of content. Particularly if you’re a multi-site nonprofit with a greater scope of regulations and policies to adhere to.
It may be difficult to cut this content down, but there are ways to enhance its readability:
- Ensure sentences contain the appropriate level of detail (and no waffle!).
- Omit any complex jargon or difficult terminology.
- Format the text using concise bullet points, headings, and paragraph breaks.
- Bold important clauses.
- Use a clear and readable font.
- Break up text with relevant, high resolution images or illustrations (without cluttering pages).
4. Store your handbook in the right tool
Once the content of your handbook has more or less taken shape, you’ll need to consider its format.
Paper handouts are easy to misplace and frustrating to update. Equally, PDF documents can be difficult to find — especially if you distribute them via email.
To make your handbooks easier for employees to access and read, store them in a searchable nonprofit management software. With the right solution, you can:
- Build bespoke onboarding pages for every employee, which can include links to your handbook and any other relevant resources.
- Monitor read rates with built-in audit logs.
- Provide remote access to your field and on-the-go workers with a branded mobile app.
- Upload multi-lingual handbooks and share them with the right teams using granular user permissions.
By storing the document in a centralized location, you can ensure employees can access the information they need, whenever they need it.
5. Ensure policy acceptance and understanding
Your nonprofit employee handbook contains a multitude of internal and external policies.
Some of these policies may be very complex, and therefore difficult for employees to read and comprehend. This leaves you open to the possibility of non-compliance — and all the legal ramifications that come with it.
To mitigate this, we’d recommend adopting a solution that tracks acceptance and improves understanding.
At Claromentis, our nonprofit software contains an AI-powered policy management application. In addition to managing the complete policy lifecycle, this tool:
- Notifies employees of new or updated policies.
- Enforces acceptance with mandatory check boxes.
- Contains a powerful AI chatbot that ingests each policy, generates relevant questions, and provides accurate, digestible answers.
- Collates data surrounding acceptance and read rates.
For convenience, link to these policies within your digital handbook. Alternatively, you can use our intuitive drag-and-drop widgets to build a bespoke page that contains the relevant PDFs, procedural documents, policies, and related news updates.
6. Support your handbook with additional resources
Your handbook shouldn’t be the only home for your policies, values, and procedures.
To truly align your employees and embed compliance in your culture, you need to follow a more holistic approach. How? By creating engaging e-learning courses, company news updates, and knowledge base articles that sit alongside your handbook and support its contents.
By giving your employees a range of resources to fall back on, you can ensure they comply with your expectations and policies.
7. Update regularly
Regulations change, messaging and branding guidelines shift, benefit packages alter… Change is a natural part of any organization, nonprofit or otherwise.
Despite this, only 47% of organizations review and update their employee handbooks annually.
To ensure you keep this resource fresh and compliant, schedule a review every year and keep a historical backlog of previous versions for posterity. We’d also recommend capturing employee feedback before any updates to ensure you accommodate any accessibility or formatting requests.
Modernize your nonprofit’s HR and compliance efforts
Your employee handbook is a living embodiment of your nonprofit organization. It’s a reflection of your vision and mission, and a written commitment to your employees.
It’s also an essential point of reference; a document that guides your workers through your pivotal processes, policies, and best practices.
Get it right, and you’ll foster a stronger, more high performing workforce. Get it wrong, and your teams may fall apart at the seams.
If you’re tired of paper-based, disengaging handbooks that do nothing for your culture or compliance efforts, it may be time to find a modern alternative.
Our feature-rich nonprofit management software is the perfect home for storing, updating, and distributing your handbook. With impressive AI functionality, built-in audit logs and analytics, and convenient internal communications features, you can ensure employees read, understand, and embody your handbook — from their very first day until their last.
To find out more about our powerful solution and exclusive nonprofit discounts, book a 10-minute discussion call with one of our experts.
