A practical guide to building HR documents that improve compliance, strengthen culture, and support sustainable growth in private practices.
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Episode 10 | Watch on YouTube
Here is a humbling story: Brandon Seigel once discovered that his practice's employee handbook required all staff to make personal phone calls on a pay phone. A pay phone that had not existed in the building for years. The policy had been copy-pasted from an outdated template, and no one had noticed or enforced it. As the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) frequently emphasizes, an employee handbook is only as valuable as the intention, accuracy, and accountability behind it.
In this full-length episode, Brandon breaks down the real difference between an employee handbook and policies and procedures, explains why both are essential, and shares a compelling case for treating your HR documentation as a living, breathing foundation rather than a legal formality.
Your employee handbook is the master document that defines what it means to be an employee in your organization. It communicates employee rights and responsibilities, establishes legal compliance at the federal, state, and sometimes even city or county level, outlines benefits and performance management expectations, and serves as the onboarding guide for every new team member.
Brandon is emphatic: this document needs to be reviewed and updated at minimum annually, and ideally on a quarterly basis as labor laws shift. He recommends using a dedicated HR compliance platform like Mineral, which flags policy changes based on your employees' locations and helps ensure your handbook remains legally sound across multiple states.
The handbook should also go beyond compliance. It is your cultural onboarding document, the how-to guide for thriving in your organization. What are your values? How do promotions work? What does a great employee look like here? Make it something people actually want to read by making it relevant, engaging, and unmistakably yours.
While the handbook covers what it means to be an employee of your organization, policies and procedures cover how to operate within a specific role or department. They address legal compliance at the clinical level, including HIPAA guidelines and billing protocols, operational efficiency expectations, employee conduct standards specific to each department, safety and security procedures, and functional performance expectations for each role.
Brandon's advice: gather input from all stakeholders when building these documents, including clinical staff, administrative employees, and where appropriate, patients. Use specialists to ensure HIPAA and labor compliance. And benchmark against best practices from organizations like the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), which offers detailed benchmarking and policy frameworks specifically designed for medical practices.
Policies and procedures without enforcement are just paper. Brandon draws a clear analogy: if no one ever got a ticket for running a red light, everyone would run red lights. The same is true in your organization. Your handbook and P&P documents only create value when they are consistently enforced, regularly trained on, and used as the basis for performance conversations.
The payoff is significant. According to a 2024 healthcare workforce compliance study, practices with structured employee improvement programs report 52% fewer compliance violations and a 43% increase in employee performance scores. For practice owners looking to formalize their HR foundation, WWMP's HR services offer fractional HR support specifically designed for private practices, including handbook development, compliance monitoring, and ongoing HR guidance.
Your employee handbook and your policies and procedures are siblings. Together, they create the structure that makes accountability possible, trust sustainable, and growth inevitable.
