Free tool · for owners, managers & small HR teams
Handbook Decision Worksheet
Twelve decisions a small business can settle in one sitting, before a word of the employee handbook gets drafted — starting with your at-will wording, who approves overtime, and what happens to unused time off when someone leaves. A first handbook can stall long before the writing does, on a decision nobody made: the draft reaches the time-off section, nobody ever settled it, and the document waits on an answer that would have taken one short conversation. So this free worksheet asks all twelve plainly, with a line under each on what hangs on it — then answers the same twelve for an invented eighteen-person bakery, so you can see how specific an answer has to be.
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What it does
- Asks the first seven of the twelve decisions, on pay, status and time off: your at-will wording and where else it must be echoed; whether the handbook is disclaimed as a contract; how exempt versus nonexempt gets decided; who approves overtime; your pay frequency, pay date and weekend fallback; payout of accrued unused time off; and which protected leaves to check at your current size.
- Asks the last five decisions, on conduct and how it ends: how conduct connects to the harassment sections; your reporting routes, and the second route when the complaint is about the first; your stated protection against retaliation; discipline as flexible options or a fixed sequence; and whether the acknowledgment restates that the handbook is not a contract.
- Gives every decision a click-to-type answer box, so the sheet becomes the record of what you settled rather than a prompt you read once.
- Follows the twelve decisions with three worked pages — all twelve answered for an invented eighteen-person bakery with a second location in another state — so "how specific is specific enough?" has an answer you can look at.
- Says under each decision what hangs on it — what the wording can turn into if nobody settles it — in the paid kit's own words rather than a looser free rewrite of them.
- Flags where the answer depends on where your employees actually work rather than guessing at it — this worksheet states no state or local law anywhere.
- Opens in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader — click an amber field and type. Browser and phone viewers often show PDFs flat, so save the file first, or print it and fill it in by hand.
Related reading
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Ready to draft the sections, not just settle the decisions?
These twelve decisions are the part you can settle in a meeting. The full Employee Handbook Starter Kit adds the two things a decision list cannot do. An Applicability Engine computes, live in the PDF, which federal employment-law thresholds your headcount has crossed, and classifies each of sixteen handbook sections Required, Conditional or employer-choice against them. A Language Risk Screener scores your drafted wording against twenty-nine phrasings that can create an implied contract or undercut an at-will statement. With them come the sixteen fill-in section shells, a counsel-review triage that writes out the question to ask per section, and an update log of the fifteen events that make a handbook stale.
A one-time purchase you keep and re-run every time your headcount or your states change — the structured kit between a free template and a per-seat HR platform.
A structured starting point and general guidance, not adoptable policy and not legal advice, and downloading it does not create a lawyer-client relationship. Employment law differs by country, state and locality, and several rules reach an employer at a single employee. Have qualified counsel or an HR professional review your finished handbook before you issue it. The example business, its people and every figure shown are invented. Free to use within your own organization; please don't resell or redistribute.