Your Employee Handbook Comes Back to Haunt You

Spooky DIY HB Episode
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Narrator: You’re about to listen to an episode of What the Hell Just Happened? Join Paul Edwards and his guests as they discuss interesting topics and solve some of our listeners submitted questions.
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Paul: And occasionally I’ll go off topic to talk about whatever I want. Think barbecue, space exploration, growing your business, and things that interest all of us. All right.
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CeCe: All right everybody, welcome to the show. This is What the Hell Just Happened. And I am Paul Edwards. I’m joined today by my amazing COO, CeCe Delgado.
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Paul: I have been waiting to do this the entire time. I gotta flip my hair out. Thank you for welcoming me to the show. I think if you’re not watching this on YouTube, none of this makes any sense right now. But it is a Halloween episode, and our team came up with the idea that I should dress like CeCe and that CeCe should be me. CeCe be me.
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CeCe: I have never felt so uncomfortable in my life.
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Paul: I don’t think my hair is that white.
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CeCe: I don’t think so either.
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Paul: I think it’s kind of blonde. But your mustache and your beard is excellent.
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CeCe: You’re pretty on point, right?
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Paul: Yeah, they’re pretty on point. You might not want to show your husband this. How do you live with all this hair?
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CeCe: I was going to ask you the same thing.
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Paul: I mean, this brings me back to my rock and roll days when I was, like, twenty.
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CeCe: You look straight out of the eighties.
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Paul: I am out of the eighties. Thank you. I’m straight out of the. Yeah, whatever. All right. It’s Halloween. It’s already scary in here. It’s a Halloween episode everybody. Do you know what the scariest thing to ever hear? I’m gonna make my own employee handbook.
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CeCe: Oh my gosh. That is one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard.
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Paul: This is going to be a terrible podcast. It’s going to be the worst. I don’t know if we can go. Okay. All right. So we agreed. We don’t have to stay in character, right? I’m going to go in and out of character every now and then. Why is it scary? Why is it scary when someone says, hey, I’m going to make my own employee handbook?
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CeCe: Oh my gosh, so many problems with that. Right. Most of the time what people do is they borrow somebody else’s handbook, right? And it’s like borrowing someone’s toothbrush. You don’t know where it’s been.
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Paul: What it’s carrying.
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CeCe: What sort of diseases it’s gonna expose you to.
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Paul: Right, right, right. Look, I am not an expert in writing a contract to buy a house. So when I look at the contract, I’m like, okay, this looks great. I mean, it looks official. The words are on the page. I can’t do this. It’s too hot.
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CeCe: I already lost my mustache.
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Paul: Who cares? But I could still wear my. Oh, now my shirt shows better. I’m wearing a blouse.
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CeCe: It’s very becoming of you.
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Paul: I think that we were going to send. We were going to give it back after I soiled it, but I think I may.
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CeCe: You may want to add that to your closet.
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Paul: I have to add it to the closet. Wear it on Thursdays. Wacky Thursdays here at CEDR. Oh my God, my hair’s all over everything. The other thing that’s scary about this. Oh, okay. First of all, the time, the amount of time that a person would spend creating an employee handbook is a lot of time. And so what’s scary to me is that I spent a bunch of time on something and then it’s not worth a darn like that time I tried to build a deck on the back of my house without asking some friends to come over who were actually people who are construction people. Because, you know, I’ve seen decks done and I’ve stood on decks and I know what a deck is.
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CeCe: You googled something.

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Paul: And I have pictures. I have pictures of decks. And I even had plans that I had downloaded of the deck. But, yeah, I really didn’t have expertise in that area. And so when I most needed my deck not to fall down, which is all of the time, had a little trouble with the rails and perhaps the steps were slightly off. And, um, yeah.
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CeCe: Even if you had made that deck perfectly. Did you actually save money or was it like a million dollar deck at this point?
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Paul: That’s a very good point. I would like to bring this up. When I first moved to Arizona, by the way, everybody, I have two stories about moving to Arizona. I keep them very short. The first one was I come from the East Coast and then we were in Colorado. I was in Colorado. I say we, me and my dog. And I decided that I wanted grass for my very old dog. And so I had grass installed in a part of my yard. I had someone come in and do it and had the whole, the irrigation and everything put in it. And of course, that grass died almost immediately. And the dog didn’t care about the grass. He walked right through it out onto the rocks. My old dog hobbled out back onto the rocks. But, the other thing that I did in Arizona, which plays back into how much it costs. I think the title of this story is all I Have to Say. It was the seven hundred and four dollars eggplant. Yeah I did, I raised garden. You know, I saw it on PBS or something. Did a raised garden. Planted it. Hauled in all that soil, built my box, did everything. Plants started growing. And then came home one day. And the more tomatoes you have, the more birds you have to eat the tomatoes. And so they were gorgeous. And so every living thing ate my garden. And I mean, did it so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to walk out and go. I have a problem. I need to get something to cover it up. The birds were just like, thank you. That was delicious. Burp, you know? So, same kind of thing. Spent a lot of time on the garden. If I had just maybe gotten someone here and said, hey, I’m going to do a garden and talk to them, they would have said, well, let me put the garden together for you. And they would have put a cover on it so the birds would need everything. I guess that’s a, I don’t know, a little bit of a metaphor for what happens when you put together your own employee handbook. You leave stuff out.
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CeCe: Absolutely.
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Paul: You know, we, when we do our employee handbook, we have like, you know, this, we do this customization process and we send you a rough draft of your employee handbook. It’s not a template, but, you know, all New York employee handbooks contain some provisions that are there for the state. You’re going to see those things in it, right? All of our employee handbooks contain the properly written provisions for things like addressing the EEOC sections. It’s all that that stuff is kind of the same if it’s written properly. Now we see improper versions of it. And you know, that’s a good point to make. Remember, you were talking about borrowing somebody else’s. So their handbook was made ten, eleven, twelve years ago. And they’re like, it’s been perfectly fine. Because it’s never been challenged. And so you use their handbook and you pull the EEOC provisions, which are not complete and may not even follow your own state laws, because a lot of things that concern the EEOC have changed over the last decade. So that’s the thing. You don’t know. You don’t know what you don’t know. We send out the handbook and then there’s a lot of work that we’re going to do on it with you, because there’s places in the employee handbook that you can have some say.
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CeCe: Yeah. And need to customize for what you’re actually doing in your practice.

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Paul: Yeah. Very, very important that you customize it for. And then when you make those changes again, another scary thing. When you make one change, it impacts other places in your employee handbook. And so that’s something that we know. So we have to make a change someplace. We know what other areas in that handbook that it’s impacting and whether or not we can do whatever it is that you want us to do. I guess the point I was going to make is the next thing is pretty scary. Maybe not often. We occasionally, but not not. It’s not rare. The first comments back on the first draft that we send is we want you to take all of these provisions out. They want the EEOC language. They want all that stuff out. And the idea in their mind is, well, why would I inform my employees of their rights? And the response to that, and for anybody who’s listening, the reason why you would do that is because that language is there for you, not for them. When you build your own employee handbook, you do not have the education in the concept behind that process that enables you to understand where you can shift burdens over to the other side, or where you can do the thing that I say in my talks all the time is help them help you. The EEOC comes in and sees that you have clearly communicated to an employee in the right ways, and you have all the policies that they love, and they do. They have given us information ad nauseam. Include this in your book. Put this in your book, put this in your book. If you have all those things in the employee handbook, then the governing body that comes to investigate you, says, oh, well, you kind of have your stuff together here. And so they look to the other party to prove their case more. They have to make more than just an accusation. They have to maybe, perhaps explain why in your handbook you told them they had to tell you. So in your handbook, you say one of the things you always want to say, which if you ask me to remove this is just insane. If you’re experiencing any of the things that I’m paraphrasing, if you’re experiencing any of the things listed in this section, tell us. You let us know because, you know, the implication here is I can’t do anything about something I don’t know is going on. And that is a very, very important provision. We just saw in California a case get kicked right the heck out. Because the, defendant, the employer argued we had a reporting procedure for this thing that this employee is accusing us of. She says that it was going on for a long time. She had multiple opportunities to report this to us, either in one on ones, with a supervisor, with a manager, or with an owner. And she decided not to tell us. And it got worse because you didn’t tell them.
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CeCe: You didn’t do anything.
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Paul: The judge is telling them you didn’t do anything to stop it. You raised the bar here.
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CeCe: Yeah. There was a case where the employee. It was a sexual harassment case. It was in the news. And the employee said everybody around me could see it was going on. Multiple people agreed with that statement. But still, she didn’t use the reporting process that was outlined.
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Paul: And in a way, it goes.
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CeCe: Yeah. She lost. Yeah.
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Paul: Yeah. So scary thing. I guess. Number two, first you’re trying to borrow and write your own employee handbook. You don’t. You’re like me with a deck. You just don’t, you don’t have that little, that little, that last thing where you’ve built decks on your own and you know exactly why it’s supposed to work the way it does. What are the three scariest things that we find in handbooks that everybody wants to put in their employee handbook. It’s like the three. Paul, could you tell us, since you’re me. Paul, could you tell I’m going to be both of us? Oh my God. I get to talk to myself on the podcast now? Oh, this is bad. CeCe you’re gonna have to wear that for all for me. All the time. All the time.
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CeCe: Eternity.
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Paul: It’s welcome to the Paul and Paul podcast.I like where this is going. CeCe I’m sorry, Paul. What are the three worst? What are three scary things?
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CeCe: The things that everybody wants in their handbook. The first one is no gossip. Everybody wants a no gossip policy. I get it. I totally understand why. Right. They want a way to be able to say, I’m not going to pay you if I didn’t tell you you can work that overtime. I’m not going to pay for it. Yep. And they want a three strike attendance rule. Or a point system or something. Some sort of, when once you’re late or absent this many times, you’re just automatically fired.
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Paul: The three strike rule. Yeah, something along those lines. Let’s go with the three strike rule. What are your thoughts on that?
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CeCe: There’s a lot of complicated reasons why you can’t do it. But so to simplify it, I mean it’s overly simplistic, right. It doesn’t leave room for human analysis for if somebody is late or absent because they’re pregnant or because they’re going through some sort of medical treatment or something like that.
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Paul: Amazon’s getting lit up for that right now. Yeah.
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CeCe: And there’s just no human element in it. Anytime you have a policy that’s overly restrictive. It doesn’t do great things for morale and the people working in your office. You end up sometimes in a situation where somebody that you love and is a great performer has now violated that rule.
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Paul: And you don’t and you don’t let them go. Yeah. But you’ll use it on someone else. And now this inconsistency, which is another scary thing in HR. Yeah, it’s hard enough to be consistent. Why put a rule in your book which forces you to be inconsistent? We talk about this even in drug testing. Sometimes where a doctor is like, I don’t want anybody using drugs that works with me. And I’m going to just drug test everybody randomly because I just don’t like this. And we’re like you’re going to find out that somebody that’s incredibly valuable to you who’s never impaired at work. Has extracurricular activity that you might not want to know about. Look, let me just make something clear here. No judgment. If that’s how you want to run your business. And I get it. I don’t want anybody impaired in my business, either. I’m not making fun of that at all. Okay, so three strikes is literally a problem. You know who three strikes is for me when I’m sixteen and I’m working at McDonald’s. I’m all because there’s only about four things you can do wrong there. Yeah, right. Right. And all of them should be strikes. But again, McDonald’s has to be careful. I mean, again, if you give someone a strike for something that’s covered underneath a medical exception, you really could get yourself in a lot of trouble.So let’s talk about the unauthorized overtime, which I love this policy. Unfortunately, it’s not enforceable. Well, you can’t enforce it and not pay it, but you’d be the one getting in trouble. I mean, I’ve talked til I’m blue in my face. It’s a Halloween or whatever. I was going to try and tie that together. That didn’t work. You’ve told him don’t work overtime or you’ve told him you’ve got to get it authorized. You have a clear policy that says everything that it says. And yet people continue to work overtime. Look, the best way to deal with people who continue to work overtime is see, when it about when it’s about to occur. And say something and, or when it does occur and it’s unauthorized. You’re not happy with it. Say something. This is one of the places where I will tell you. This is where you make someone uncomfortable. You make the employee uncomfortable. What part of. I told you don’t work overtime without authorization. And then you got to be careful about malicious compliance.
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Paul: Which is? You’ve got an employee standing there and it’s four thirty, and they go, oh, it’s time for me to clock out. And they walk away from the patient. Just leave. The other problem with having this policy in your handbook, even if you never enforce it. So that’s the other thing I get. Well, I’m never going to enforce it. I just want to scare them with it. If an attorney and or a government agency is looking at your policies, you want the policies to communicate one clear message overall. I know what the rules are. I have put them in writing and I have had my employees acknowledge them and they are all legal. I am in compliance. And when you say I don’t pay for unauthorized overtime, then what you’re saying is, is that I put in writing in evidence that I don’t comply with federal law. And that’s not a place you want to be. Because what if the complaint is a wage, an hour complaint, and the judge is on the fence and you’ve just given the judge a reason to rule, not in your favor? And then the no gossiping one. We’ve talked about it a lot, but it violates a big rule. It’s I think it’s a I think it’s stupid that we can’t put this in a handbook.
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CeCe: I agree with you.
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Paul: I think it’s I think it’s I think it’s really, really stupid because it says what we mean for it to say.
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CeCe: The average person reasonably understands what gossip versus discussing my working conditions is. Right. But here we are anyway
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Paul: But here we are anyway. The National Labor Relations Board. Now that’s where we should insert something scary like a witch should be like ha! Right. Yeah, it should be something like that.
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CeCe: I’ve gotta take this off. I’m getting a rash.
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Paul: You getting a rash? I knew that’s how this was going to go, but I’m never taking this blouse off. The no gossiping thing. You just. You can’t have it. There are ways to address professional communication and what goes on in your office. But this is one of those things where you can’t use a policy to do it, I don’t think. Can’t do that. Handbook. Creating obligations. Yeah. Very common when you borrow the wrong policy and put it in your handbook. While this thing should not be a contract, you are still obligating yourself to follow your policies. Now you can deviate from your policies. I’m trying to figure out how to explain this. If you put a policy in place, you borrow it from someplace else. You subject yourself to that policy, at least in the interim. And so, my favorite one is the, my wife works at a hospital. And we got ahold of their handbook and their hospital. They’ve got a thousand lawyers. They must have written the best handbook ever. And so now I have the advantage of having a handbook where thousands of employees work or hundreds of employees work, and I get to apply it and point it at my nine employees. And I went in and I noticed they didn’t have a no gossiping policy. So I got that in there. And I, they blew their overtime policy. So I made sure I added that in. I put the, you know, if you work it, I ain’t paying it. And I have the advantage of all their lawyers putting all this legalese in here, I don’t know what any of it means, but, I have just saved myself some money. Right, Paul?
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CeCe: Absolutely. You got a bargain.
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Paul: You got a bargain on that? Yeah. You didn’t have to put anything in it.

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CeCe: One of the worst mistakes I have seen is a small employer, you know, under under fifty. And they’ve got an FMLA policy.
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Paul: Yeah. The Family Medical Leave Act. Well it’s an act as it says it’s underneath a set of laws. And all laws are written to apply to a certain number of employees when it comes to employment law. And so the markers are typically applies to all employers. There’s some laws there. We’ve talked about them all the time. Fifteen employees. And now we get to the federal level where we go fifteen and above in the EEOC laws kick in. And then for the one that we’re talking about with Medical Leave Act, it is fifty or more employees.
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CeCe: And people are often familiar with that term.
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Paul: And so they think it means they think it means maternity leave.
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CeCe: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
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Paul: Or the Federal Maternity Leave Act. That’s not what it is.
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CeCe: Yeah. And they just refer to any medically related leave as FMLA. And so it doesn’t raise those red flags to see that in the book. But guess what. There’s a lot of requirements with that act. And you’ve got it stated in your book that you follow it, and now your employees get to enjoy the benefits.
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Paul: The benefits of FMLA and that act. We’re not going to go into it, but there’s a lot of benefits and protections in that act that do not apply to you as a smaller employer. I don’t say this often, but legislators kind of understood, you know? If you’ve got fifty or more employees, you probably can meet these obligations. But if you’ve got fewer than that, it would be really difficult to meet some of the obligations that are contained within that law. So it’s very scary when you borrow something that should not apply to you and then you apply it yourself. I’ve seen people borrow the California Handbook from somebody else who’s not in California and obligate themselves to giving breaks and meal periods. Now, look, there’s no enforcement agency in your state. You know, we’ll just pick South Carolina where there’s no such thing. There’s or Florida, there’s no enforcement agency there. There’s no enforcement agency. So you’re not going to get hit with the penalties that exist over in California if those California employers don’t meet the requirements of breaks. But the point here is, is that you have set expectations with your employees that you are not going to be able to follow or you shouldn’t follow. And you’ve just shown an attorney or the EEOC. See, my handbook is it’s poo. It’s a pile of poo. Yeah, it’s a well formed pile of poo. It looks really good. It’s got a lot of little leaves in it. But I put it together myself, which would be the same as. I don’t know if you’re listening. If you’re cardiac, we have surgery centres.I’ve had surgery done on me. I’ve seen a lot of television shows with surgery. I know two surgeons personally have several of his clients. Would anyone? I’ve been to some classes for surgery, although that was. Those were dental classes. I have access to YouTube. I could artificial intelligence. It. Anybody in this room want me to do surgery on them?
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CeCe: Maybe. Yeah.

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Paul: No. Really. Paul, what kind of surgery? Could you be more specific? I think the do it yourself handbook comes from, you know, how your business runs and you know, what needs to get done and you know what the problems are. And a lot of handbooks that are self made reflect what those problems are. You can see the policies come along. You could see that people were working a bunch of unauthorized overtime and you just got frustrated. And you could see that gossiping was going back. You know, all that kind of negative gossiping was going on. You needed it to stop. So you wanted to put something in place where you didn’t have to try to work through it with every single person. And so in comes the policy. So you do know how your business runs. It’s that you may not have the legal or the HR knowledge and expertise to be able to put things together. We offer evaluations of people’s current handbooks. On occasion, I will get a handbook sent to us. It’s updated, it’s well written and it’s been done by a professional. And really, what the doctor’s asking me to do is would you check this other professionals work? And I’m happy to run through it real quick. We’ve got tools. We run through it and say, yeah, your book’s good for the most part. I get the self made handbooks and I get to go, hey, you’ve got about ten problems in here and you’re missing about forty policies. Yeah, I got one the other a couple of weeks ago where the guy clearly had AI writing for his state a little bit for a state. It was ten pages. And his thing was I wanted to be concise and I wanted it to be. And look, we want to be concise and to have very clear non-legalese language as well. However, the problem with concise is that it may not contain the policies that actually protect you. And so the book that I got had none of the protective policies, none of the burden shifting. There were some laws in the state that they’re in that kick in when you have six or more employees and they have five employees. So the AI didn’t say, hey, do you plan on having more than five employees anytime soon? Yes, because if it had, it would I think it would have included these three or four other things. And so what I did is I finished the evaluation and they sent back to me, oh, I’m sorry I sent you the wrong thing. CeCe, this has happened more than once. Just, I mean, this scenario is I send you the wrong thing. And what they want to do is they’re trying to put something together with AI, and they’re going to send it back to me. So I’m just going to tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to send back to them because they’re trying to use my evaluation to better their handbook and get something for free. I’m going to send back a analysis of whatever it is that the AI writes, and I’m going to include a few wrong things. And they’re going to go back to the AI and they’re going to put them in. And now my point is made.
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CeCe: Yes. Right. Yeah.
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Paul: You people are probably out there going, you son of a why would you. Look, I’m not actually going to do that. But if I did that, I would never do that to somebody. By the way, I would never intentionally give anyone the wrong advice. I guess my point being, if I sent back the wrong advice, maybe I make a mistake.Maybe I just get something wrong. No matter what, if I send it back and you don’t know, you don’t know. And if you think the AI is going to catch it, it might. But that’s a big gamble for you to be in. What I’m finding is they’ve scraped a lot of data out there. They’ve, I think people have heard it. The scary thing is, is they’ve reached the brink of data scraping. They’ve grabbed, they’ve stolen it all. The expertise to get this right is not sitting on the internet for free. Right. And so that’s why the models are having a little bit of trouble with it. If it’s an internal model to us, that’s a different story. We have all the expertise to point it at, and we don’t let it get outside of the system and go anywhere. If we’re using something that, by the way, it’s still not working well for us yet. It’s still, you know, a few issues. Okay. CeCe I mean, Paul, we’re still at this, right? We’re not breaking the rule. I think we kind of messed this up pretty bad, which is typical for me anyway. I think the next scary thing is to start the segment with the air conditioner still running in the podcast room. And I want to keep that, by the way. It’s because I didn’t yell action before we went into this segment. I think the next scary thing is who’s supposed to actually use the thing that you made?
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CeCe: Yes.

25:52 -> 27:13
Paul: So you’ve created this little zombie of a handbook? Possibly a doctor created it, by the way. Another scary thing is to ask your office manager or expect your office manager to be able to update your employee handbook. We work with a lot of office managers. Used to work with the American Dental. Uh, what is it called? The American Association of Dental Office Managers used to work with them a lot, provide a ton of education to them. Love me some office managers, they are charged with doing this sort of thing. And they, this is not a comment about office managers. It’s a comment about people in general who don’t do employment law and policies in HR for a living full time. They can’t do it. They’re are no more capable of doing it than, anyone would be who doesn’t have that education. And so, you know, the other, the other part of it is that the doctor just puts it together and it sits on a shelf, or it maybe it gets signed and it gets pulled out every now and then, and the office manager takes that book and starts to work with it. And they don’t, they only know what they’ve been told that they’re supposed to enforce. And so they’re enforcing the no gossiping thing, and they’re using a three strikes rule because you put it in there. They’re changing hours because they interpreted your no working overtime thing as I can move hours around if I, if I’m supposed they expect it. That’s what we’ve put in our employee handbook.
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CeCe: Right. Dress code policies get made by people’s personal preferences. And the language isn’t right.
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Paul: Yeah. Or have something that’s actually illegal because we’ve had a lot of states pass laws about this that apply. There’s this exercise. You can you can do CeCe where you stand and you drop a quarter on the floor. And then and then you have someone pick up that quarter and you have them drop it. And then you just have one more person pick it up and drop it. And what that represents is the pillar of knowledge. So the first person who dropped it is the position of authority. The next person who picked it up is that much further away from the position of authority. When you drop that quarter one more time, you’re a third of the way more away from that position of authority and understanding. And so by the time an office manager picks up an employee handbook that wasn’t written properly and starts enforcing these rules. They’re actually going to get you in trouble. I mean, you got you in trouble because you gave them the handbook and said, do this.
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CeCe: But then they didn’t get training on how to use it. They didn’t get training, how to update it.
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Paul: Yeah. None of that stuff. Yeah. And so, you know, I think that’s one of the important points to be made. The office manager’s role is oftentimes in most medical health care related practices, most, you know, unless you’re large enough that you have a bit of an HR department, the office manager role is a lot of primary HR dealing with the ongoing things. The doctor’s like, I don’t want to hear about it.
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CeCe: You know that people stuff.

28:44 -> 30:46
Paul: Yeah. All that people stuff. That’s what I hired you for. And rightfully so. But you can’t cobble them by giving them your self-made employee handbook. I think one of the other points that I would make about that goes back to the amount that you spend. So we talked about the time and everything, but I didn’t make this point. It’s scary. Let me tell you, your office manager’s time is important. There’s never enough. There’s always more for them to do. Right. I mean, so when they’re spending it working on something that they can’t accomplish. That’s a huge waste of resources for you. And it’s very frustrating for them, for you doctors who are out there working on the employee handbook. I consider your time worth whether or not you’re in your practice or your home. I consider your time to be worth somewhere between five hundred and five thousand dollars an hour. It depends on different factors, but your time is certainly not free. And for me, time I spend on something outside of work, even if it’s work related. But I’m working on it on my like, we’ll just say I’m, working on the weekend. That’s five thousand dollars an hour because I’m not spending with my family, my dogs. I’m not going out to, you know, I’m not having fun. I’m not cooking. I’m not doing, I’m not practicing drums. I’m not, I’m getting all my hobbies in here. I’m not out riding my motorcycle. I’m not out skydiving. It takes time away from my side job of modeling. So anyway, as the owner doctor, you working on your own employee handbook? I call that like the twenty to twenty five thousand dollars handbook. And that’s just like me building that garden. I mean, I put, if we put my time in that garden, that was like a ninety thousand dollars eggplant because I worked hard on that. There was no way to get the truck in the backyard. So I had a whole, a whole of the dirt in myself. That’s scary. Gosh, time is money.
30:47 -> 31:22
CeCe: Yeah. And how many times have we had people come to us and be like, I finally give in. I’ve been working on this book for five years or two years or even six months. And I need help because it’s not finished and I need a book. And all, all of that time, that work is just money down the drain. And especially when you do start getting into the years. Almost in every setting I can think of, probably something’s outdated. Maybe you researched it then and maybe it was good but it’s not anymore. So, yeah, that cost just continues to rack up.
31:22 -> 31:56
Paul: That’s the problem I have with handbook builders and that kind of stuff that we see, like at some payroll companies and stuff. They give you a, they give you, they give you a tool and say, well, there’s nothing in there that can get you in trouble. Meaning we haven’t put some, we have not put a no gossiping policy in there. You’re not, we’re not going to give you something like that. They get that part right. But then they tell you to build your handbook and they give it to you in Microsoft Word. Which implies to me, when you give me an editable document, is I should be editing. You know what the bank does when they send me paperwork to sign. They don’t.
31:55 -> 13:56
CeCe: It is not editable.
13:57 -> 32:36
Paul: It is not editable. I don’t get to go in there and make changes. And so, yeah, I mean, yeah, do we wrap it up with you built your own employee handbook and, and now you need it like you’ve, you’ve fired somebody over what’s in your employee handbook and now you have it. And they have it. And an attorney is about, sends you a letter, a demand and mentions, by the way, need a copy of all the employees records. That handbook is part of those records. Any policies that you have. And now, what does the handbook become at that point?
32:36 -> 32:26
CeCe: Evidence.
32:37 -> 32:41
Paul: Yeah. And there’s good and bad evidence. And what kind of evidence is the self-made handbook?
32:42 -> 32:43
CeCe: Typically not good that’s for sure
32:44 -> 33:08
Paul: That’s typically not the good. It’s not the good kind of evidence. Yeah. So, you know, if we kind of go through this line by line, you first thoughts are this is this looks great. You know what could go wrong?It looks very official. Yeah. You got rules in it. That sound reasonable? You’ve got lots of legal words. Lots of legal words you don’t actually understand.
33:08 -> 33:15
CeCe: That sound official. Don’t know what they mean. But I saw somebody have this one time. Yeah, it sounds real.
33:15 -> 33:35
Paul: It’s got a bunch of good acronyms in it. I love it. Making the point that what’s missing can be the worst thing for you. Because it could be the thing that saved your bacon like that. You must report issues and you can do that in many places in your employee handbook. You know, the other thing that I think is kind of weird, not weird. Yeah. Kind of, kind of, well, who’s going to manage the damn thing?
33:35 -> 33:36
CeCe: Who’s going to keep it up?
33:37 -> 34:15
Paul: Who’s going to keep it up? As the laws change, as your practice grows, as your business grows, as you see new challenges. I mean, when we first started, there was no Facebook policy. There was no social media policy.. Now we have Meta glasses and we’re having to put damn glasses in the policy. You know, we’re having to shift and change things. And when we were saying we just did a podcast on this and I think I think it’s out, and did an article on what do I do? People are recording social media stuff in my practice. TikTok, their glasses on. And you can’t just say you can’t record at all, but you can say you can’t record for your own. I’m not going to go into it.
33:37 -> 34:31
CeCe: But that’s I think that’s just a really important thing to highlight is you get the benefit of the things that haven’t had happened in your practice yet, right? Like you don’t have to have had a meta glasses problem to come get our book and have a meta glasses policy.
34:31 -> 34:35
Paul: Yes. And then when the meta glasses show up in your practice, you’re like, hey.
34:35 -> 34:44
CeCe: Ding ding ding, I got this covered. Yeah. Because we we’ve seen it already many times cause problems for people who didn’t have a policy.
34:44 -> 34:47
Paul: Is this. Was this really a scary episode or was it just.
34:47 -> 34:51
CeCe: It was really scary to sit across from you in that shirt.

34:54 -> 36:06
Paul: Y’all. CeCe tends to wear black as I do. She’s always got these lace arms. And if you’re not watching on YouTube, which I hope you aren’t, I got the lace, I found the, I found the perfect shirt. I spent a lot of time shopping for this by the way. I still got the tags in it. I look good today. That’s all I gotta say. I’m gonna race from the podcasting room back to my office and change into my t-shirt as fast as possible because it’s today. Wednesday. We should check the internal chat because I had to walk across the way. All it would take is for one of them to spot me. Do we have anything else to add? Boo! Yeah. Good job Paul. I really do like this thing where I get to start just having me on the show. This is going to make my life so much better, because CeCe can be a pain in the ass every now and then. Okay. Thanks, everybody. Hope you got something out of the show today. And, What the Hell Just Happened is, you created your own employee handbook, and we made fun of you on the podcast. Sorry about that.
36:07 -> 36:35
Narrator: Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode of What the Hell Just Happened? Do Paul and yourself a favor and please share the podcast with your network. If you have an HR issue question or just want to add a comment about something, Paul said, please record it on your phone and send it to podcast at wthjusthappened.com. You might even ask if we can play it on the show. You can also visit wthjusthappened.com to learn more about the show and join our HR community. Don’t forget to like and subscribe and join us again next week.