The Employee Benefits and Rules You May Have Forgotten You Promised
Imagine finding out from one of your least impressive employees that you apparently promised him $3,000 a year for professional development.
That is roughly what happened to one of my clients.
The benefit had been sitting quietly in her employee handbook, apparently waiting for someone motivated enough to actually read it. Unfortunately for her, someone finally did.
She didn’t particularly want to give this employee $3,000 for professional development because his regular old-fashioned job performance wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire.
There was just one problem. Her handbook said he was eligible for it.
Welcome to today’s lesson: your employee handbook may remember things you’ve completely forgotten.
Your Employee Handbook Is Making Promises
Employers tend to think about handbooks as collections of rules for employees.
Here’s when you have to show up. Here’s how you request time off. Don’t harass people. Don’t steal things. Please wear shoes.
But handbooks also contain plenty of commitments from the employer: benefits, eligibility requirements, paid time off, leave provisions, disciplinary procedures, complaint-reporting processes, remote-work rules, expense reimbursement and dozens of other things the company says it will—or won’t—do.
And unlike you, the employee handbook doesn’t forget what you put in it five years ago.
That’s how a $3,000 professional-development benefit that nobody has thought about in years can suddenly reappear.
The problem wasn’t that the employee had done anything wrong by asking for it. He had read the handbook and discovered a benefit the company said was available to him.
Good for him. Inconvenient for everyone else … and a little stab in the heart for the well-meaning business owner.
“Unlimited” Is a Particularly Memorable Word
Another client once came to me because an employee was taking what the owner considered an unreasonable amount of time off.
He was understandably frustrated. The employee’s absences were becoming disruptive, and he was ready to address the problem.
Then we looked at his handbook.
Unlimited Paid Time Off.
Oh. Oops.
The owner had forgotten that language was even in there. The employee, unsurprisingly, had not.
Now, “unlimited PTO” does not mean employees can simply disappear whenever they feel like it while the company sends paychecks into the void. Employers can and should establish reasonable rules around requesting time off, business needs, attendance, availability and performance.
But if your policy proudly announces UNLIMITED PTO, you should probably remember that before disciplining someone primarily because you think they’ve taken too much PTO.
Words matter. Especially really aspirational ones that were intended to retain your very best employees without considering that you might have some “not very best” ones.
Then There Are the Policies Nobody Actually Follows
Forgotten benefits aren’t the only problem. Sometimes the handbook describes an entire employment practice that no longer resembles what actually happens inside the company.
Maybe the handbook says employees receive a verbal warning, written warning and final warning before termination—but managers routinely skip those steps.
Maybe employees are told to report complaints to a position that hasn’t existed for three years.
Maybe your handbook describes a remote-work arrangement you eliminated in 2024.
Maybe your PTO policy says requests require two weeks’ notice, but every manager handles requests differently.
Or perhaps you borrowed language from another company’s handbook years ago and nobody remembers why it’s there in the first place.
None of those automatically means disaster. But the bigger the gap becomes between what your handbook says and what your company actually does, the more explaining you may eventually have to do. And employment disputes are rarely improved by the sentence: “I know that’s what our policy says, but we don’t actually do that.”
Don’t Create Obligations You Don’t Need
This is also why I don’t believe employee handbooks should contain elaborate rules for every conceivable workplace situation.
Every unnecessary promise can become something you later have to explain.
If your policy says the company will take five specific steps before terminating an employee, you’ve potentially created expectations you didn’t need to create.
If it says employees will receive annual performance reviews every March, somebody may eventually notice when March comes and goes.
If you describe a benefit in great detail, make sure the company actually intends to provide it that way.
A good handbook should give employees useful information, establish important expectations and provide the company with appropriate protection and flexibility. It should not become a contractual-looking obstacle course the employer accidentally built for itself.
Read Your Own Handbook Occasionally
I realize this is not the most thrilling assignment I’ve ever given you.
Nobody except me is pouring a glass of wine on Friday night and saying, “You know what sounds fun? Let’s see what our bereavement policy says.”
But somebody responsible for HR should review the employee handbook periodically with two questions in mind:
Is this still legally current?
And just as importantly:
Is this still what we actually do?
Look especially closely at benefits, PTO, leave, discipline, attendance, remote work, complaint procedures and anything containing words like will, shall, guaranteed, unlimited or specific dollar amounts.
Those words have a funny way of becoming much more interesting when an employee points to them.
Your Employees May Know Your Handbook Better Than You Do
You don’t need to memorize your employee handbook. But somebody in your company should know what you’ve promised.
Because eventually, an employee will.
Before an Employee Finds the Next $3,000 Surprise
If nobody has carefully compared your employee handbook to your company’s actual practices lately, HR Allies can review and update it for legal changes, outdated policies, unnecessary commitments and those delightful little surprises that have been hiding on page 37 since 2019.
Finding them during a handbook review is considerably more pleasant than discovering them when an employee is already standing there asking for the money.
