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, and closes with one section of starter wording, the at-will and not-a-contract section, so you can see where the answers end up.
Take it with you — free, no signup
Direct download. No email, no account — just the file.
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; whether sick time is separate from vacation or one combined pool; and payout of accrued unused time off.
- 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 Sample Street Bakery, an invented eighteen-person bakery with locations in two states — so "how specific is specific enough?" has an answer you can look at.
- Includes one section of the paid kit's starter handbook wording, free: Employment Basics & At-Will, with the at-will statement, the not-a-contract disclaimer, a choose-one block of three introductory-period options, every fill-in bracketed, and two check-locally boxes for the questions the law where your employees work decides. It is a draft to adapt and have reviewed by counsel, not finished policy.
- 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 and open it in Acrobat Reader, or print it and fill it in by hand.
Related reading
Own it, don't rent it
Ready to draft the sections, not just settle the decisions?
These twelve decisions are the part you can settle in a meeting, and the at-will section is one of sixteen. The full Employee Handbook Starter Kit adds an editable Word draft of all sixteen sections, with alternative clauses to choose between and every fill-in marked. Its Handbook Builder workbook, for Excel and Google Sheets, works out which federal employment-law thresholds your headcount has crossed and which sections that makes Required for you at the federal level, then searches the wording you paste in for twenty-four risky phrasings, including promises you did not mean to make, words that undercut at-will and procedures you would have to follow exactly. It also checks that it still includes five sentences a handbook should carry, such as the not-a-contract statement and a second complaint route. A counsel triage turns that into a short list of sections to take to a lawyer, and acknowledgment and review-date tracking keep the handbook from going stale unnoticed.
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 draft wording for counsel review, not finished 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 in your organization and to share as-is; please don't resell it.