If you follow me on Twitter, you know that I have been tolling on creating an employee handbook for Half Off Depot. Mostly on Saturday mornings. And I told some people that I would publish it when I finished. Well I can't do that.

As it turns out section 6.2 of the Half Off Depot Employee Handbook addresses the issue of confidenitality. And it states restricted documents can not be given to a person outside of the company. The Half Off Depot Employee Handbook is marked confidential. I can not share it without violating the provisions of a handbook I wrote. Go figure. I guess the next best thing would be to tell you how I went about creating the 30 page beast.

So when I started at Half Off Depot I was employee number 21. We had an employee handbook. It was designed for a company with about 20 employees. The big driver of the project was that we were quickly going to be approaching 70 or so employees. They needed some rules. I started with that designed for 20 people handbook. But I needed more, much more. So our corporate counsel provided a very legal cover every base handbook that was just way too serious. Way.

But it was a good outline. I just had to move all the super legal cover your bases to the back. Employees don't care about EEOC BS (and BTW I guess at this point I should state that I am a big believer in acceptance and diversity). Employees want to know work hours, vacation, and holidays.

So started asking folks that I know at similar sized companies about their handbooks. Three people that know and trust me quite well offered to provide me with copies of their handbooks as long as I never ever shared them with anyone else. While I would like to publicly thank them I fear that might even break a confidence. Thanks boys and girls. You know who you are.

Well it took me a little while to realize this but it just so happens one of the folks that provided me with their company handbook share the same corporate counsel that we use at Half Off Depot. It was way less stuffy and boring but covered the important topics. I took those two handbooks and combined them in a way that Half Off Depot actually operates on a day to day basis. When I was finished with that I compared the result with the other three I had at my disposal. Filled in a few potholes. Thing of beauty. All in it took me about 40 hours to get it together.

So the way to create an employee handbook is to get your hands on some and adapt them to the way you operate your business. It really is as easy as that.