Employee handbooks don't have to suck

An employee handbook. The first thing that went through your head is some big manual from some big company right?

That's not what I'm talking about, though. Sure, that's what their employee handbook is, but it's not what it has to be.

We wrote an employee handbook about a year ago. At that time we were doing a ton of hiring. It was a time of employee churn and we were starting to make big changes. The biggest pain of this was training...

It was taking almost 45 days to train a new staff member. Our training process was simple -- start working and shadow someone. The problem was:

We had to double pay for staff during training.
It took forever before they saw every scenario, like handling group bookings (after all, group bookings don't happen near enough).

Our solution? Write down a simple, step-by-step checklist for every role and process.

We have one for:

Cleaning rooms (check outs, stay overs, and check ins)
Ringing up an employee discount in rezStream
Group booking discounts
Cheat sheet for the rooms and their amenities

We have everything written down.

Now, when a new staff member comes in the first thing they do is to read the handbook. We even have them sign a copy so we know they read it.

The beauty is that every time someone says "how do I do X?" We can say "it's in the handbook". We train them to look there first. It's amazing!

The other great thing is that we have all our rules in there.

This one time we had an employee that felt like smoking on the balcony during a room clean (I told you it was a rough time right?).

Well, we couldn't do much, because we didn't ever share a smoking policy. We assumed everyone had common sense. Whoops.

Now, we don't have to assume. They read the rules. They agree to the rules. That's it.

The last headache of the employee handbook was always "where do we keep it?".

It always seemed like there wasn't a great place to store this so everyone had easy access. So...like everything else in Comfortly, we built it.

That's where the Employee Handbook feature came from. We hope you find it as useful as we do.