The employment paperwork most companies get wrong

Employment disputes rarely turn on an exotic point of law. They turn on an offer letter that contradicts the handbook, a policy nobody acknowledged receiving, or a termination carried out without the process the company's own documents required.

These are paperwork failures, and paperwork failures are cheap to fix in advance and expensive to fix afterwards.

The contradiction problem

The offer letter promises one notice period, the appointment letter another, and the handbook a third. Each was drafted separately, often years apart, frequently by different people using different templates, and nobody has read them side by side since. In a dispute the employee will fairly rely on whichever is most favourable to them, and a tribunal is unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument that your own documents were a drafting accident.

Read the documents together, as a set. The inconsistencies are usually obvious once you do, and cheap to fix before anyone is relying on them. Notice periods, probation, leave entitlement, confidentiality and the consequences of resignation are the usual offenders.

Policies nobody acknowledged

A policy the company cannot show the employee received is difficult to enforce. Keep dated acknowledgements — a signature, or an auditable record of electronic acceptance — and keep them somewhere you can retrieve them years later. Re-acknowledge when a policy changes materially.

This is administrative discipline rather than law, and it decides outcomes. The company that can produce a dated acknowledgement is in a materially better position than the company that is confident the policy was circulated.

Process, then decision

Where your documents set out a disciplinary process, follow it. Notice of the allegation, a genuine opportunity to respond, an unbiased decision-maker, a written outcome. A defensible decision reached through the wrong process is considerably weaker than the same decision reached properly, and the gap between them is where most claims live.

The temptation, when the facts seem obvious, is to compress the process. Resist it. The facts being obvious to you is not the same as the process having been followed, and it is the process that will be examined.

Get the statutory pieces in place

Certain obligations do not depend on what your handbook says. Sexual-harassment compliance, including the constitution of an internal committee where required, provident fund and gratuity treatment, and maternity provisions are set by statute and turn on factors like headcount and the nature of the workplace.

These are short conversations to scope and inexpensive to get right. They are considerably less short and less inexpensive once a complaint has been filed and the committee does not exist.

Fix it in the quiet period

This work is inexpensive when no dispute is live and expensive once one is. An audit of what you actually issue to staff — every template, in the versions currently in use — is a contained engagement with an unusually good return, and it tends to surface two or three things nobody knew were wrong.

Do it when nothing is on fire. That is the only time it is cheap.