Pay Close Attention to Your Employee Handbook (Part 2)
We last discussed the unintended impact employee handbooks can have on at-will employment. There are also innumerable examples where seemingly boilerplate statements in a handbook dramatically defeated the intent.
In one instance, an employee handbook provided that employees could be asked to submit to a drug test if the employer had reasonable cause to expect drug use. This is really just a recitation of the law on drug testing, which is tolerant of random drug tests, but requires a higher standard for 
targeted testing. What the employer meant was that it would follow the law, utilizing random tests, but only using testing an individual with cause. However, the court interpreted the provision to mean that employees could only be tested with reasonable cause. Kraslawsky v. Upper Deck Co. (1997) 56 Cal.App.4th 1142.
And the changes do not end there. In another case, an employee at a car dealership drove one of the cars to lunch, and rear-ended another driver, causing injury. The dealership tried to avoid liability by claiming that the lunch run was outside the employee’s course and scope of employment. As evidence, the employer pointed to the employee handbook, which prohibited the "unauthorized" use of cars from the lot, and claimed that it had never authorized such use. However, the same handbook provided a list of what was prohibited, and did not include using the cars for trips to lunch. The court held that there was therefore nothing in the handbook that prohibited what the employee had done. Taylor v. Roseville Toyota, Inc. (2006) 138 Cal.App.4th 994. Thus, a poorly written handbook actually reached out beyond the company’s own employees and created liability as to third parties.
Employee handbooks are useful tools, but they require close inspection from all angles to make certain they are not having an unintended result.
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These are great examples of what can go wrong. Time and again I see documents that are poorly drafted, or just cut and paste jobs that are quick, cheap to produce and totally ineffective in accomplishing the goal. If people would just use plain English, and have a professional either write or review the documents, they would save themselves a lot of potential trouble.
I like the story of the employee handbook that was the cause of some liability for an employer, and the employer scraped the whole handbook, replacing it with one sentence that said (I am paraphrasing) "Do the right thing."