Old Employee Handbooks - How Long do You have to Keep them

jmcaa

We have a number of old Employee Handbooks - how long do you have to keep a copy/original of these books?

Thanks for your help!

joannie

Ours are a part of our permanent records. Everytime we issue a new handbook, we pull one copy and file it.

Earl

I don't keep copies of old handbooks. I'm not sure of the value of keeping track of the way things used to be done. There's usually a reason why a change is made right - usually because you found it wasn't working? If I was new - not sure that I would plod through a bunch of old policies just to confirm, yep, those were mistakes and were not gonna do that again!

NeedCoffee

Before getting into HR, I worked at a law firm, and saw the BEST reason you should keep old handbooks, policies, etc.:

Without going into details: Defendant fires Plaintiff for violation of a rule in the company handbook.

Plaintiff says, "wrongful termination! I was never subject to this new handbook because I didn't receive one - I'm still under the old handbook!"

Defendant researches, and sure enough, they had neglected to have this EE sign off on new policy, and can't confirm that EE even received handbook. But they say, "never fear! even if he never received this new handbook, I'm pretty sure this was a rule left over from the old handbook, and he still would have been terminated."

So the Plaintiff asks the Defendant to produce the old handbook so that they can stand by their termination decision....but Defendant has destroyed the old handbook and can't prove their termination was justified by the old handbook.

Plaintiff wins wrongful termination suit.

Keep a copy. Even if it is just on a flash drive or CD, keep a copy.