3 LinkedIn directives your company handbook should include

Are LinkedIn guidelines provided in your employee handbook?

A company handbook is an important and effective communication tool between an employer and employees, and it sets forth the company’s expectations.

Even though its content might vary from business to business, it often includes a welcome/mission statement, company overview, policies and procedures, holidays, dress code, benefits, legal obligations as an employer and employees’ rights.

More recently, social media policies have become part of employee handbooks, detailing acceptable and unacceptable work behavior or Internet use. Unfortunately, the social media policies too often contain a long list of things that employees should avoid doing and don’t provide clear direction on how employees should represent themselves or the brand online.

The professional network

Nowadays, what’s one of the first things people do when they start a new job? They update their LinkedIn profile. If we give five new employees an employee handbook with no clear direction on how to approach updating LinkedIn, we could end up with five different company name variations, five different company descriptions and roles that are in paragraph form, when the employer actually prefers them in bullet point form.