How does an employee handbook interact with an employment contract?

The LegalVision Employment Contracts have been drafted as stand-alone documents. This is to ensure that our customers only need to use one document, an Employment Contract, when hiring an employee.

LegalVision also provides a stand-alone Employee Handbook. The Employee Handbook sets out all the standards of behaviour expected of a company’s employees and the policies that apply to the company’s employees. They are designed to cover the needs of the vast majority of Australian businesses. An employer should provide a prospective employee with the Employee Handbook as part of their induction pack upon commencement of employment.

The LegalVision Employment Contracts and Employee Handbook link seamlessly together, as each Employment Contract has a clause whereby the employee agrees to obey and comply with all the policies, rules, regulations, procedures and practices of the company. If you use a LegalVision Employment Contract and provide your employees with an Employee Handbook, obeying the policies in the Employee Handbook will therefore form part of their employment terms and conditions. It works both ways. As an employer, this means that you need to ensure that you comply with the policies in the Employee Handbook, otherwise you may risk breaching an employee’s Employment Contract. It also means that your employees must also comply with the policies in the Employee Handbook, otherwise they may risk breaching their Employment Contract.

As an employer, if you do not want your policies to form part of the terms and conditions of employment of your employees then you will need to ensure that the employment contracts of your employees do not incorporate any policies of your business in those employment contracts.