Benefits: An employer has the right to expect his or her employees to conform to a reasonable standard of conduct. Employees who act in an inappropriate or unreasonable manner can damage your business by creating unhappy coworkers or, even worse, unhappy customers or clients. While you might feel that it should be obvious what is appropriate and what is not, it is very risky to assume every employee will share your views. One of the best ways to make it clear what you expect is to have a set of general work rules.

Written work rules can go a long way in informing your employees what you expect of them and the consequences of not meeting expectations. A person who has been put on notice that some types of conduct are unacceptable cannot claim ignorance when he or she engages in the prohibited conduct. Also, written work rules serve to remind employees that you're serious about presenting the business to the public in the best possible light.

The attached file contains a set of general work rules that address many of the concerns that you might have about employee conduct. While you may have need of more extensive work rules that relate specifically to the conduct of your business, these general rules will form a solid basis for creating your own set of work rules.

File Description: The file is in rich text format (RTF) that is suitable for use with most word processing programs used in the Windows environment.

Download: Sample work rules