Employment Documents in Plain English – A Primer

The other day I made my case for why employment documents should all be written in Plain English, omitting the legalese and other stuff employees don’t really read.

In part 2 of this 2-part series, we’re going to talk a little about what a Plain English document is, mostly by talking about what it’s not.

1. “Plain English” Is Not Code for “Short”. Or “Cute”.

What most people think of when I mention “plain English” and “employment document” in the same sentence is the now-famous Nordstrom Employee Handbook, which consisted entirely of a single card handed out to an employee on their first day. The card read:

Welcome to Nordstrom

We’re glad to have you with our Company. Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service. Set both your personal and professional goals high. We have great confidence in your ability to achieve them.

Nordstrom Rules: Rule #1: Use best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.

Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time.

That was it. Sounds good, right? Yeeaah, not going to cut it.

The card is great – a little gimmicky maybe – but definitely written in plain English. Still, it’s not what I have in mind when I recommend an employer’s documents be revised. 99% of employers will need all the regular EEO, wage-and-hour and leave policies in place in order to securely protect their businesses.

Nor does writing in plain English mean your handbook has to read or look like the Ropes at Disney’s. While that document is super-fun (albeit very, very outdated), your documents don’t have to be. They do have to be legible to your workforce.

For some reason, everyone seems to think that you either get all the gobbledygook in the standard form versions of employment documents, or you get the Nordstrom treatment. Not true. The concept behind the plain English movement is that the documents out there right now – the ones you are currently using – can keep all the information they currently contain, but be more understandable and more specific at the same time. You don’t have to talk in vague generalities in order to be understood. You just have to use modern words and sentence structure.

2. Plain English is Not An Excuse to Do It Yourself

A lot of employers hear “no legalese” and think

Great! This lawyer is telling me I can write this stuff myself! I just saved myself a ton in legal fees! What an idiot! Haha! Sucker!

Please don’t do this. Number one, it’s mean. Number two, it’s wrong.

On second thought, go for it. Write them all yourself! You can do it! Just remember: we said that Plain English takes all the information in the documents you currently have and makes it easier to understand. So, analyze what it is your agreement or handbook actually guarantees, protects, explains, etc., and rewrite the document clause-by-clause in a way that makes sense. Have at it. Just make sure your language doesn’t water down the original purpose. Oh, and avoid any terms of art that might get you in trouble if the contract has to be interpreted.

And how, exactly, does “Upon termination of this Agreement, pursuant to the terms of section 4(e), neither party shall have any further obligations under this Agreement, except for the obligations which by their terms survive this termination as noted in Section 16 hereof ” sound when you write it in your native tongue? Well, don’t worry about it. Just delete that part, then. And when you get sued and your contract gets thrown out, you can pay me to tell you you’re going to lose your case.

You get that I’m being sarcastic, right? Believe it or not, your policies or contracts are harder to write in conversational language than in legalese. Legalese is easy. Talking is hard. Call a lawyer.

Ok, so if that’s what plainly-written employment documents aren’t, what are they?

3. Plain English Employment Documents Are. . . Whatever You Want Them to Be.

The point I’m trying to make is that writing something in Plain English is the means, not the end. You can have good or bad policies written in either legalese or conversational English. What plain writing opens you up to is thinking about your HR documents as more than just legal cover-your-behind paperwork. These are the papers that will communicate who you are as an organization to your employees. That is not something to take so lightly.

Think about the Disney handbook from the 40′s. Obviously, you don’t want to replicate the actual policies in there, but the way it’s written? Phenomenal. And – like I said before – it’s not because of the novelty. It’s because that style is perfect for Disney. If you’re running a 15-person storefront CPA, you probably won’t have pictures of guys sliding down stairway railings. You may want something more cut-and-dry, like a two-column “If…then” sheet for common problems, or to draft your employee handbook as an FAQ with bullet points. A lot of forward-thinking tech-based companies are creating wiki pages or other intranet sections to store their employment documents as searchable files. The idea is to write in a way that makes it click with your workforce.

If you’re looking for a place to start – sort-of a test balloon to see if this is worth the time and money – I would suggest redoing (or doing-in-the-first-place, as the case may be) your social media policy. More than any other HR policy, the SM guidelines should really bear the stamp of your particular organization. Most employment attorneys will tell you that a good social media document will not only tell the employee what the rules are, but tell them why, and why it matters to both your company and them. That’s a perfect diving board for practicing some plain writing.

But don’t stop there. Look at that handbook, or, if you’re really feeling frisky, your contracts. How can the language in those documents convey the same attitude as your new SM policy?

Oh – I told you I’d reveal what all that ridiculous legalese from the confidentiality agreement in the first post turned into:

NOTHING.

We deleted it – all of it. No recitals at all. No introductory sentence full of fill-in-the-blanks. We replaced the whole first page with a highly personalized “Introduction” that explained why it was vital to the Company to protect its secrets from competitors, and why it was equally vital to the protection of the employee’s new job. By writing it this way, we completely turned the tone of the agreement around; now, instead of having to drop “grounds for termination” on every new hire, the document reads like a collaborative effort to turn the company in the market leader in its industry. All by changing the document into something the employees might actually read before signing.

My, How Times Have Changed

My son is 3.

While he watches waaaaay less television than I did growing up, he does catch an episode of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse most mornings.

It’s nice that he is getting to know the same characters I knew as a kid, but when I finally sat down and watched the show the other day, I noticed an unusual change in the attitude of a couple of the characters. The Clubhouse was visited at separate points in the episode by the old Mickey-and-the-Beanstalk Giant and by Pete, Mickey Mouse’s foil from the old cartoons. Unlike the dastardly or dopey bad guys of my youth, though, the characters were both generally helpful and nice, if unwittingly causing a problem or two.

Things change.

And, just like the differences between the cartoons I grew up with and those my son is watching, Disney offers a great example of how things change in HR, as well. Over labor day, the Walt Disney Family Museum posted a link to “The Ropes at Disney’s” – a superbly-detailed employee handbook for the men and women (but mostly men) at Disney’s animation studio in 1943. It doesn’t take many pages of drawings to realize there’s not going to be any sexual harassment section to this doc.

I can only imagine the current handbook is even more unrecognizable to its predecessor than those bad guys I grew up with are to my boy.

Still, it would be great to see more handbooks as tailored to their audience as Disney’s was back then.

Friday Diversion #7 – And You Thought Your Job Was Dangerous

Note: Today’s Friday Diversion is not funny. It’s not dire or anything – then it wouldn’t be a diversion, really – but I didn’t want to get your hopes up for comedy and then drop a public radio story on you.

I am always drawn to stories of how people work. Maybe its a Chicago thing, I don’t know. Well, here in Chicago, the local NPR affiliate has a little mini-show about science called Clever Apes, and the other day, they ran this story that I found fascinating, where the host got to see “how people work with deadly bugs like anthrax, plague, MRSA and others” in a Federally-chartered research laboratory set up after the 2001 Anthrax scare.

The story spends a lot of time discussing the intricacies of donning and doffing workwear and other precautionary measures that the researchers take before and after they handle things like the plague. In one of those bizarre life-twists, another story broke this week that a researcher at the facility’s sister-lab was infected with Bacillus cereus, the same pathogen the researchers are working on in the story. Clever Apes’s host, Gabriel Spitzer, interviewed the lab’s director about the infection.

The two stories paint a fascinating picture of what these scientists go through every day just to get to work. Definitely worth a listen.

Personally, I don’t think I’ll ever say my job’s making me sick ever again.