Episode 237 - Employee Handbook: New Year Good Time to Audit/Update Policies

Welcome to the Workplace, a podcast by Cal Chamber. I'm Matthew Roberts, Associate General Counsel for Labor and Employment with the California Chamber of Commerce. Hello, listeners. Welcome to 2026 and what everyone here at Cal Chamber hopes is a wonderful new year for you and your organizations. Now that we are wrapping up our new laws coverage this month, it is time to put into practice the new rules. Of course, while we are also creating new rules based on the new laws, it is a great time to audit and evaluate our current policies for changes, as well as consider any new policies to account for our ever evolving workplace environments. This is where our handy dandy employee handbook always provides our best central resource for all of our workplace rules. Thank you for being here with me today, Vanessa.

Thanks, Matt. Always a pleasure to be here on the podcast with you.

All right, and as we've discussed ad nauseam throughout the years, we know there's no real law requiring an employee handbook, so to speak. But why don't we start with basic policy requirements? There are some certain required written policies that employers must have, right?

There sure are. So in California, employers need to have a written harassment, discrimination and retaliation prevention policy. They also need to have a written lactation accommodation policy. And then employers also should have family medical leave policies. So, for example, cfra, which is the California Family Rights act, and fmla, which is the Family Medical Leave Act. We have to have policies on those if we have other policies in our workplace that address personal leave or disability leave.

All right, so beyond the best way to kind of organize these workplace policies that are required, what other benefits do employers receive from having a well crafted employee handbook?

Well, there's a lot of benefits. I always say, if I was running a business in California, I would not be doing it without a handbook. So first, a handbook is going to really help demonstrate our legal compliance, especially, especially with regard to things like wage and hour laws and leave of absence and other required laws in California, which we have a lot of them. So having a well drafted handbook, it really acts as evidence that you told your employees what these rules are and that you've set up a compliant process for them. The other thing that handbooks do is they serve as a resource manual for your internal HR and managers who have to deal with issues. So, for example, things like military leave or other kind of types of leave that don't come up all that often. We may not even remember like what someone's rights or obligations are under those types of leave. So when we have a handbook, we have a reference manual that we can look at and say, oh, okay, well, what do we have to do here when someone's requesting, for example, military leave or other types of things in the workplace? The other thing that handbooks do that I really love is they support better performance management of employees because they clearly state what our expectations are, what our standards are. They give everybody kind of a fair opportunity. Right. We're not hiding the ball here. We're making things clear and transparent for folks, and it just makes it easier for us to coach our employees and then if we end up having to, you know, to discipline or our employees more consistently. And I think the last thing that's a real strong benefit for a handbook is that they can strengthen your defense against legal claims and employers. This is really important when you have policies that are well written and actually enforced. There have been courts who have cited favorably to these types of things. Right. And said, employer, good job, you have consistently applied policies like meal and rest break policies, for example, so those can actually help you defend against legal claims. And I think that's huge, particularly in a state like California.

All right, so with the benefits of an employee handbook really squared for everybody, let's talk about our new laws this year and what may have caused a change to your handbook just based on the new laws. Similarly, there's also new laws that have raised some concerns or questions about whether they are better served for the handbook or better served for some other means of communication. So why don't we go over a couple new laws that took place this year and how they should and shouldn't be in our handbooks.

Yep. So new laws for 2026. We always want to start by thinking about leave of absence changes, because that's something we need to update in our handbook, and this year is no exception. So we did have a couple things change with regard to California's page paid sick leave. Permissible use for California paid sick leave was expanded to include crime victims leave, jury duty leave, and witness duty. So we want to make sure and update our handbook for those permissible uses that got added. And because crime victims leave changed to allowed paid sick leave use if your handbook discusses that leave. So if it has a particular section on crime victims leave or. Or just paid time off more broadly, you should really look at updating those sections for consistency. Right. Same thing with jury duty and witness duty. We want to make sure we're updating all of these things within our handbook. But like you said, Matt, not every new law is going to create a handbook policy, especially when it comes to things like mandated notices. So we have this new required notice in California. It's the workplace know your rights notice. And that's something that should be provided to employees as a standalone document. We're not going to put that in our handbook. We generally wouldn't recommend putting things like notices and pamphlets in your handbook. It would be best to keep those separate from the handbook. We want to keep the handbook really focused on our workplace policies and handle those legal required notices. So separately.

Okay, so while these new laws do drive a lot of our handbook updates annually, they're not the sole driver. What are some things, Vanessa, you see out there that employers should consider adding or changing in the new year?

Oh, goodness. Well, technology right now is rapidly evolving, and I think we want to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to things like technology in the workplace. So this is going to mean thinking about policies that address things like wearable hardware, tech. So like smart watches, smart glasses are kind of the new emerging trend in technology right now. We want to think about how are those going to impact things like workplace safety, workplace privacy, and workplace productivity and be looking at developing policies around that. And similarly, we have to think about software technology because, you know, automated tools and AI, they're becoming mainstream now, whether we want them to or not. And I think while they can provide great efficiency for some things, they also come with concerns if their use isn't addressed up front, especially their use in the workplace. So these automated tool policies, those are some things that employers should really be prioritizing for, for this year and going forward, because this stuff is just. It's all over our workplaces nowadays.

All right. Additionally, beyond new laws, as well as new emerging workplace issues, we have a lot of long term policies that have been developed over the years in our employee handbook. And it's possible that as we develop those policies, if we haven't been keeping track of them, they may no longer align with our organizational practices or initiatives or even just how we do business anymore. So can you provide some traditional policy examples that might fall out of date over time if we're not staying up to date with them?

Absolutely. Yeah. There's definitely a few policies that tend to sort of drift out of sync or out of date with how employers actually operate. So the first one is performance management and discipline policies, especially when we have something like a progressive discipline process. So a very rigid sort of step by step process that explains what we're doing for discipline, but that isn't actually being consistently followed in our workplace. Right. We really want to look at things like that and make sure our practices in our workplace actually match what our policy says. Another one that I see often kind of drifting out of sync is remote work policies. Sometimes, you know, having issues with either language that's not missing and doesn't really reflect the current work environment or the actual practices. So, like, let's say if the majority of employees have actually returned to working in an office instead of remotely, we're going to want to look at and update our remote work policy to make sure, again, that it actually reflects what's happening in practice. And another one is meal and rest break waiver policies. So sometimes companies will decide to no longer allow meal and rest break waivers. So. But then they forget to update their policy to reflect this change. So that's another one that you want to take a look at. And then one more thing to add here. I think it's important just to remember, as an HR professional or a manager or a business owner, whenever we have an issue come up in the workplace, we want to check our handbook or written policies, and we want to see what does our policy say about this issue. It seems so basic, but a lot of times we're dealing with all this stuff and we kind of forget that step. So really reading and looking at what our policy says is kind of step number one where we're thinking about, like, how to address issues in the workplace.

Great. So now we've kind of developed good practices about building the handbook itself, but these things can be lengthy documents. I think all of us are kind of nodding our heads. Man, these things get huge over time because of all the things that you've suggested we should be including in here, Vanessa. So that can make an effective handbook rollout to the employees, getting the information to the employees difficult. Do you have some tips on how employers can make the review and acknowledgement part more effective to help better ensure compliance with the policies?

Definitely. So first, employers remember that the process matters as much as the substance here. So simply sending the handbook around and collecting a signed acknowledgment that that isn't going to be proactive enough to drive compliance in your workplace. We're thinking about rolling our handbook. We really want to do something like a short meeting with our employees or maybe even sending a memo. And we want to clearly call out, you know, what has changed, what we expect employees to do differently, and really making sure that employees understand what is in the handbook.

The.

The other thing we want to do is highlight our top priorities. So if we've had issues in the past years, like maybe we've had issues with meal and rest breaks or remote work practices or misuse of company systems or things like that. We want to make sure that we're addressing those policies explicitly with our employees and then reinforcing them. So those are all really important steps in rolling out your handbook. I think the last thing that's also critical is to do not skip supervisor training. Supervisors are your eyes and ears. They're your first enforcers of these policies. So if they don't understand the policies, if they haven't actually even read the handbook, or if they're applying your policies inconsistently, that can create real liability in your workplace. So we really want to make sure our supervisors are trained before we're rolling out our handbook.

Well, thank you, Vanessa. I think you've provided a lot of insight on best practices for handbook, and this discussion in particular has provided a lot of helpful tips for us as we work on auditing and elevating our handbooks here in 2026. So thank you very much for joining me today.

It's my pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me on.

And thank you listeners for joining this discussion on the workplace. Please share and subscribe to Cal Chambers podcast by visiting calchamber.com.