The Employee Handbook – Your Ally in Controlling UI Costs

Frustrated at losing Unemployment Protests? So are most employers across the U.S. On average US employers only win about half of the UI protests that they file. Why do employers lose so many protests? Well, there are a number of reasons for it, but one of the biggest reasons that employers lose unemployment protests is that their handbooks do nothing to help them.

An employee handbook is a list of policies and processes setting the expectation of employee performance and behavior. Many of these policies are guided by state and federal employment laws, and others are guided by the employer’s expectations and needs, and some are there to spell out employee benefits/perks.

Employers can get into trouble when they…

do not have an employee handbook,
have one that has not been updated every 18 to 24 months,
or when they make the decision to follow their own wants and needs instead of the laws.

So how can a handbook hurt your ability to win unemployment protests? The answer lies in whether an employer’s policies follow the rules of unemployment. Unemployment examiners look for patterns of offense and patterns of disciplinary documentation. So, if your policies are overly strict and you terminate employees without building your case through progressive discipline (and there are many employers who fall in this category), you are unlikely to win your protest.

Attendance policies tend to be an area where employers lose many of their protests. Some important questions to ask about your attendance policy include:

Is your attendance policy helping you or hurting you?
Do you properly track and document violations of this policy?
Is your policy too strict or too lax?
Do you have a policy regarding “no call/no show” absences” and “does that policy consider those absences to be job abandonment or does your policy use the word termination or discharge in regard to these types of absences – if your policy uses that language then the agency will consider those no call/no shows to be terminations instead of voluntary quits – and you will lose your protest.

You should also ask the following questions about your handbook:

Do you have policies for…
- employee behavior,
- progressive discipline, attendance,
- drug and alcohol-free workplace,
- workplace violence, etc.?

These are the types of policies that help you win UI protests.

Do your employees sign off on the employee handbook?
Do you keep these acknowledgments on file?

The answers to these questions have a critical impact on your ability to win claim protests.

There is much to consider in evaluating your employee handbook and how it affects your ability to win Unemployment Protests. You should also consider that a poor or out of date employee handbook can also get you in trouble with a variety of state and federal agencies as well so be certain to seek help in building and maintaining a strong handbook and you will keep out of trouble and win more UI protests.

For more information or to learn more about our company, visit us on the web at unemploymenttracker.com.