Company Policy Template

What is a Company Policy?

A company policy sets out what your organisation requires, who it applies to, and what happens when someone does not follow it. It works as a policy only if a person can read it and know what to do differently on Monday. Without one written down, every decision about leave, expenses or conduct is made from scratch by a different manager, and that inconsistency is what turns a small dispute into a claim.

Small businesses writing their first handbook, HR teams standardising rules across sites, and managers who have just had the same argument twice all reach for a policy template. The common set is leave and absence, expenses, IT and acceptable use, code of conduct, disciplinary and grievance, health and safety, data protection, and remote or hybrid work. New policies also appear reactively — after an incident, an audit finding, a client security questionnaire, or a regulator asking what your procedure actually is.

Some policies are effectively required and some are yours to design. Data protection policies sit under the UK and EU GDPR, India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act and the state privacy statutes in the US; health and safety policies are mandatory above a headcount threshold in several jurisdictions; anti-harassment policies are required for some employers and some sizes, including specific committee requirements in India. Handbook status also varies: in parts of the US a handbook can be argued to be contractual unless it says otherwise. Check what your jurisdiction requires and what it makes binding.

A policy is not a contract, and most employers deliberately keep policies non-contractual so they can be updated without individual agreement — say so in the document rather than assuming it. It does not override the employment contract, a collective agreement or the law, and a clause conflicting with any of those is unenforceable rather than clever. It also does not implement itself: an unpublished policy, or one nobody has been trained on, is worse than none, because it evidences a standard the organisation was not actually meeting.

What to put in a Company Policy

These are the details this template asks for. Anything left blank is marked in red on the preview so you can see what is still missing.

How to write a Company Policy

1. Define scope before you write rules

   Open by naming who it covers — employees, contractors, agency staff, volunteers, interns, and whether it applies at client sites or off-site events — and what it covers. Most policy arguments are scope arguments: whether the expenses policy reaches a contractor, whether the conduct policy reaches a team night out. Settling that in the first paragraph stops the rest of the document being read selectively.

2. Write rules as actions, not principles

   ‘Submit expense claims within thirty days of the spend, with a receipt for anything over £25’ is a rule. ‘Employees should be mindful of company resources’ is a sentiment nobody can breach or comply with. Every clause should let a manager tell whether it was followed. Where you genuinely want judgement rather than a rule, say so, and name the person who exercises it.

3. Name the owner and the decision-maker

   State which role owns the policy, who approves exceptions, and who to ask when it is unclear — by job title, not by personal name, so it survives someone leaving. Policies without an owner drift out of date and are quietly ignored. Put the approval date and the review date on the front page, and a version number if you have more than a handful of documents in circulation.

4. Say what happens when it is breached

   Link to the disciplinary procedure rather than inventing sanctions inside each policy, and be clear about which breaches are treated as serious. If a breach could lead to dismissal — falsifying an expense claim, sharing credentials — say so plainly in that policy. A rule with no stated consequence is routinely treated as guidance, and is hard to enforce against someone who ignored it.

5. Publish it and record the acknowledgement

   Put it somewhere every employee can reach without asking, tell people when it changes, and keep a record of who has acknowledged the current version and when. That record is the first thing anyone will ask for if the policy is ever relied on. Where a policy is new or changes something significant, brief managers before it lands rather than after.

Common mistakes

• Copying a policy from another country's handbook, so it references statutory rights, notice periods or agencies that do not exist where your people actually work.
• Writing aspirational language instead of rules, leaving managers to invent the standard themselves and apply it differently to two people in the same situation.
• Omitting a statement that the policy is non-contractual, which in some jurisdictions lets an employee argue that handbook terms bind the employer.
• Publishing a policy nobody is trained on, so the organisation is measured against a standard it has documented but never actually implemented.
• Leaving no review date, so a policy still cites a repealed statute or a system the business stopped using two years ago.

Frequently asked questions

This page explains general practice and is not legal advice. Requirements differ between countries and, in some cases, between states — check what applies where the document will be used.

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