Learn the three most common employee handbook mistakes private practices make and how to fix them to improve compliance, accountability, and team performance.
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Episode 11 | Watch on YouTube
If you do an HR audit of most private practices, you will find the same three failures showing up again and again. Brandon Seigel has seen it firsthand: practices that have a handbook sitting on a shelf, unread, unsigned, and years out of date. According to BambooHR, only 35% of employees have read their company handbook in full, and 10% do not even know one exists. That is not a documentation problem. It is a culture and accountability problem.
Labor laws change every year at federal and state levels, sometimes multiple times. If your handbook has not been reviewed in the past 12 months, it is already out of compliance somewhere. But updates go beyond legal obligation. They are an opportunity to improve expectations, refine policies, and reflect the growth your practice has undergone.
Brandon tells of a practice that had not changed their medical billing approach or internal policies in 17 years. When they finally updated, the shift was so dramatic it felt like going from caveman to artificial intelligence overnight. Use tools like Mineral or work with your payroll provider to flag regulatory changes and trigger annual handbook reviews.
Every time your handbook is updated, every employee, including ownership, must read it, acknowledge it, and sign it. Without that signature, you have no proof they were informed of changes. Brandon is emphatic: even he signs the updated handbook every year as a W2 employee of his own company.
Consider a brief quiz after each update to confirm true comprehension rather than a rubber-stamp signature. SHRM recommends treating handbook acknowledgment as a formal onboarding and ongoing compliance event, not a formality.
If your handbook does not define what happens when a policy is broken, or what a performance improvement process looks like, you have no enforcement mechanism. That leaves you legally exposed and operationally inconsistent. Define what constitutes immediate grounds for termination. Define the steps of progressive discipline. Separate disciplinary performance improvement from developmental performance reviews, because they serve different purposes.
Brandon draws a clear line: how well you perform your job is how well you keep your job. How much you earn is tied to the financial value you generate. Conflating the two creates confusion. Separate them, define both, and your employees will always know exactly where they stand and what they are working toward.
