The Silent Power of the Well-Crafted Employee Handbook
On busy laundromat weekends – where washers hum, dryers tumble, and customers jockey for prized folding space – one essential tool quietly steers the course of business – the employee handbook.
Whether overseeing a cozy neighborhood laundromat or managing a high-capacity, full-service laundry facility, the significance of a well-crafted handbook cannot be overstated. So, let’s unravel the important role of the employee handbook – dissecting its components, sharing industry insights from seasoned veterans, and highlighting the practical strategies that ensure the handbook will remain a beacon of clarity and compliance for your laundry business.
Regardless of the size of your operation, an employee handbook serves as a valuable resource and communication tool for both you and your employees. Although the process of creating an employee handbook can seem overwhelming, its benefits far outweigh the challenges.
An employee handbook goes beyond merely detailing specific procedures. It also should serve as a repository for your company’s values, history, and mission. This comprehensive document should include HR forms, policies, information about company programs, and procedures for various work situations. Additionally, it should offer an easily understandable description of each policy, program, or procedure, avoiding any legal jargon and ensuring accessibility for all employees.
There are a few clear benefits that a properly prepared employee handbook should provide to both your business and your team members:
It sets clear expectations. An employee handbook establishes clear expectations for both employees and management, reducing the risk of confusion or disciplinary actions later on.
It reduces uncertainty. By outlining standards and procedures for various scenarios, an employee handbook minimizes the guesswork involved in managing staff, fostering a more organized and efficient work environment.
It welcomes new employees and affirms company values. Beyond policies and procedures, the handbook is an opportunity to welcome new employees; provide information about the company; and reinforce its mission, vision, and values.
Although an employee handbook can provide great value to a laundromat business, it’s important to understand at the outset that such a manual is no substitute for actual employee training.
“The employee handbook typically consists of summaries of policies and procedures,” explained Rich Cruz, who operates WorkBalance Consulting, a division of Greater Chicago Consulting Inc. “It does not serve to cover the entire scope of workplace expectations and behaviors. To fully communicate these to employees, business owners should properly onboard staff through training, including reviewing the handbook. However, while simply providing the handbook may suffice legally, it won’t adequately ensure adherence to the contents. New knowledge, skills, and abilities come from knowledge sharing across rich communication channels, such as face-to-face conversations to create a culture around policies.”
Given that, what exactly should you include in this employee handbook? Clearly, laundromat businesses differ greatly from one another – depending on size, location, demographics, the types of services provided, the number of employees on staff, and several other variables. However, there are a few key elements all handbooks should feature:
- Company Mission, Vision, and Values: Communicate the essence of your company, reinforcing its identity and purpose.
- Anti-Harassment and Non-Discrimination Policy: Ensure compliance with legal requirements and promote a respectful workplace.
- Code of Conduct: Summarize expectations for employee behavior, covering areas such as attendance, tardiness, and communication.
- Dress Code: If applicable, outline the company’s expectations regarding employee attire.
- Communications Policy: Address guidelines for communication on company-owned devices and social media platforms.
- Compensation and Benefits Information: Detail available benefits, compensation policies, and relevant employment terms.
- Reviews, Promotions, and Raises: Clearly outline the criteria and procedures for performance evaluations, promotions, and salary increases.
- PIP Plans: Provide information on performance improvement plans and procedures for addressing performance issues.
- New Hire and Separation Procedures: Communicate onboarding processes and off-boarding policies to prevent any disputes or confusion.
- Procedures for Complaints: Specify channels for employees to voice concerns or complaints.
- Employee Acknowledgment: Include a signed statement from employees confirming their receipt, review, and agreement to comply with the handbook’s policies.
“When developing your employee handbook, remember that you’re not looking for college graduates with degrees in English,” advised Christopher Boucher, a labor and employment law attorney based in California – as well as a laundromat owner. “You want to make sure the handbook is employee-friendly and easy to understand.
“Also, don’t overdo it,” he added. “We tend to help employers who come to us trim down their handbooks, rather than adding more content. The thicker the handbook, the less likely the employee is going to read it.”
Distribute printed copies during employee orientation and annual training, or email electronic copies. Ensure easy access to the handbook, whether through a physical copy in laundromat or an electronic version on a shared platform.
“You want your employees to read and sign off on it,” Boucher said. “Have them read the handbook on the clock, because if you send them home with it, you might get hit with a wage and hour claim. So, give them sufficient time to read it at work – a reasonable time period might be two weeks.”
In addition, don’t just create an employee handbook and then forget about it. This manual should be a living, evolving representation of your laundry business. As such, regularly review the handbook to ensure that its content aligns with company practices, as well as local laws and regulations – and promptly update as necessary. Of course, be sure to communicate any updates to your staff.
This month, five laundry owners, each with different types of operations, shared some tips and revealed the strategies they’ve used to develop employee handbooks for their businesses:
Ross Dodds
Luxe Laundries
Los Angeles
We all know that most people will not read documents to their fullest, and that’s no different for a handbook. However, a handbook is an excellent piece that can add layers of protection to your business.
We modeled ours off of a large corporate handbook, so it’s definitely overkill for a company of our size, but it doesn’t miss anything. It lists everything, including schedules, clothing, shoes, hair, smell, food, guests, and family.
Many payroll companies today can provide you with one, or you can find drafts online and then tailor it to your business, changing the essential items like company name and the date it was put in place.
We also have added single documents to our large overall “handbook,” and these cover such topics as a meal break waiver and timekeeping and payroll information. We’ve also added a one-pager that basically restates the absolutely most important items like attendance rules, our free laundry program, sick time, and so on; these are covered in the big book, but we wanted to ensure our employees are reading and understanding the key points.
Many of our training protocols are handled in separate documents outside of the handbook during probation periods or “test shifts.” We require potential new hires to complete at least three test shifts before even hiring them to probation and doing any paperwork.
If you have to, print these and have a signature page that is numbered coinciding to the handbook, as well as copies of any additional pages that are not in the main handbook yet need to be signed. Be sure it all matches up and that your employees have the opportunity to read and sign.
And, if possible, have your team members electronically sign these documents. Several payroll companies now offer this service, as well as document storage, as part of an employee’s file.
John Cooper
WaveMAX Laundry
Miami
An employee handbook is important for any laundromat business. Clearly communicating the structure, process, protocols, and requirements for operating the laundry and helping customers is critical. Also, if properly used, it provides legal protection, which keeps store owners safe.
Most employees of small businesses probably have never even seen one, so it can help make your laundry operation stand out. Our handbook clearly communicates the WaveMAX concept and philosophy – and we document exactly how we want them to handle our customers.
Among the essential items we include in our employee handbook are information about:
- Operations
- Customer processes
- Daily, weekly, and monthly tasks
- Machine operations and troubleshooting
- Job descriptions
- Benefits
- Vacation and time-off policies
- Performance management
- Discipline
- Emergency contacts, as well as situational contacts, such AC, plumbing, and electrical maintenance
We also include information about the business’ alarm system, the opening/closing processes, material safety data sheets for chemical handling, and instructions on how to deal with violent situations. Additional, our manual features guidance for all of the systems and error handling, along with scripts for how to navigate certain customer situations.
I’d recommend reviewing your employee handbook at least annually and definitely whenever some aspect of your business or factors impacting your operation change. Be sure that your payroll/HR provider is updating you on any law changes affecting your business, and pay attention to minimum wage laws and other local regulations and ordinances.
Above all, if you don’t have any experience developing and maintaining an employee manual, get professional help with it.
Brian Riseland
Laundry Genius
Everett, Wash.
An employee handbook is critical to ensuring that expectations and policies are clear to all staff members. If they aren’t clear, it’s difficult to hold team members accountable when you find that expectations haven’t been met.
At our business, we allocate time during the onboarding process for new employees to read the handbook and ask any questions. We also focus on including any industry-specific policies and information in our operating handbook, as well as at the point of usage – such as chemical safety guidelines being posted where cleaning supplies are filled.
The employee handbook should be reviewed every six months at a minimum. However, we also ensure that our manager reviews it whenever hiring a new employee, to see if there’s anything in that manual that requires updating.
Our operating procedures are reviewed even more frequently. It’s amazing how often things change or a new “best practice” develops when you have a long-tenured team. So, it’s important to be proactive in ensuring all handbooks reflect the latest and greatest so that everyone at the company is on the same page.
Some common mistakes laundry owners should avoid with regard to their employee handbooks include:
- Not allocating paid time during onboarding for new hires to read the handbook
- Not having new employees sign a document confirming that they have read and understand the company’s policies.
- Putting too much about your operating procedures into the employee handbook. That book should focus more on the bigger picture, as well as company-level and legal requirements. Create separate documents for operating procedures, and place the relevant sections of those where those activities occur. For instance, cleaning supply usage information should be where the cleaning supplies are stored, wash-dry-fold procedures should be posted where WDF laundry is processed, etc.
Ed Ellis
1 Clean Laundry
St Cloud, Fla.
It’s crucial for any business that employs people legally to have a handbook. It protects both the employee and the business. It does so by providing the employees with a basic structure of what is expected of them to succeed – and, when the employees succeed, so should the business.
Also, if an employee is not measuring up, the manual will provide an avenue for the employer to take corrective action, up to dismissal.
A number of years ago, before we had the employee handbook, we had an issue with our employees wearing headphones at work. For obvious reasons, this was causing customer service and communication issues. At that point, I reached out to our payroll provider for advice, and that’s how our employee handbook was established.
Once we had the code of conduct in place, it made dealing with those types of issues easier. If employees continue to disregard our policy, there is now a pathway to termination without being accused of wrongful discharge.
Some of the other information we consider essential for a handbook is:
- All of the Equal Opportunity information and legalese to protect your business.
- An opening statement about your business philosophy and how the business works
- Benefits offered
- Pay and progress
- What is expected of the employee – dress code, conduct, policies, and procedures
In addition, we have a separate safety manual, which goes over accident reporting forms and procedures. In the employee handbook, we cover employee responsibility for ensuring a safe work environment, blood-borne pathogens, workplace violence, weapons policy, and what to do in an emergency
We have a section in our handbook that specifically details attendant responsibilities, opening and closing procedures, wash-dry-fold procedures, and handling common customer complaints and issues.
For industry-related information, it’s a good idea to include how to care for the store’s laundry equipment, along with common machine error codes, and how to fix the machine or who to notify.
If you’re working with a major payroll provider, they will have tools and resources to help you stay in compliance with any legal issues involved with having employees. After all, we can’t know everything, so getting the right help from the right people will protect you, your business, and your employees.
Don’t do it alone. Use legal and human resources professionals, who will keep you from making costly mistakes.
Joe Jepsen
O-Town Laundry Services
Ogden, Utah
I believe an employee handbook is vital to any company’s standard operating procedures. Look at McDonald’s as an example; I can walk into a McDonald’s in Georgia and expect the same food and service I get in Utah. They achieve that by having great SOPs and, of course, an employee handbook as part of those SOPs.
I feel it’s important to ensure that our brand is the same no matter what city it’s in. We want our customers who move from Ogden, Utah, to know that the O-Town in downtown Salt Lake City is just as nice and will offer the same great service as the one they’ve been using.
For our handbook, we found an incredible resource online. It was a former laundromat owner who was selling his employee handbook and all sorts of laundromat-related documents. We purchased them and made them our own. Today, those documents look nothing like the originals. After we put together our first draft, we sent it to our attorney who spent some time with it. After that, it was just a matter of adding a clause or a section here and there.
We like to make sure that everything we do comes back to our mission statement that nothing matters more than clean. Our clean and presentable store is just as important as making sure our machines clean our customer clothing. Again, it all goes back to how we can clean better. If it doesn’t help us clean better, we don’t spend time with it.
Given that, there’s no doubt so much that should be part of an employee handbook. We like to make sure we cover pay structures, bonus structures, how that works, and when it will happen. We also have a section on consequences of actions that aren’t in line with our brand. Additionally, we spell out what’s expected of each position – who does what, when, and where. We also discuss extensively how to perform certain tasks.
For example, we have power mops for our floors. But we’ve found that – if we don’t provide instructions on how to use it, clean it, and handle it with care – the employees won’t use it, or it will break.
We also have a section on chemicals and what solutions employees are allowed to use on machines, floors, and so on. We cover how to diagnose simple fixes, such as when a machine eats a customer’s money or the credit card acceptor isn’t working. Essentially, we’ve created a list of items that can go wrong, and how to fix them.
We find it incredibly important to talk about labor and wages. For instance, we understand that life can hit our employees, so sometimes they need to bring a friend or child to work for an hour or so. We’re family-friendly and want to accommodate. However, more often than not, they will put that visitor to work – maybe to help them or thinking they’re helping us. Clearly, this is a huge legal no-no – that person hasn’t signed waivers, disclosures, or any tax documents. In some cases, we may not even know who they are.
So, our handbook addresses such issues, which could lead to termination, because of the trouble it could cause for us with the labor commission. It’s important to have situations like that covered.
We do our best to note any new situations that arise and need to be added to the handbook. If you do so, over time you’ll discover that your handbook will cover 99.9 percent of everything that could possibly come up at your laundromat. And don’t forget to include all of your machine information, such as serial numbers of every machine, make, model, and purchase date.
Also, be sure to have an attorney review it. There are so many pitfalls when it comes to employing others that writing, saying, or following policies that are contrary to employment law can sink a small business fast. Sometimes, you simply don’t know what you don’t know.
Above all, the best advice I can give is to never think that you don’t need an employee handbook – even single-store operators absolutely should have one.
