Learn what to include in an effective employee handbook for your small business. A well-crafted handbook acts as a roadmap for your team—outlining how your business operates, what’s expected of employees, and what they can expect in return. It covers everything from company policies and workplace culture to benefits, resources, and how to handle concerns. This guide will help you protect your business and set clear expectations for your employees by walking you through the purpose of a handbook, the steps to create one, and the key policies to consider including.
Hiring employees is an important aspect of small business growth. There are many things to consider and doing it right from the start is essential. Use this resource to learn how to create an opportunity as you hire that helps both your business succeed and your employee thrive.
Too many jobs in the US simply do not provide what workers need to support their families and build stable lives. Workers often face low pay, unpredictable schedules, insufficient benefits, dangerous working conditions, and few opportunities to advance. Addressing these job quality challenges — fixing work — is essential to building a fairer and stronger economy that works for everyone and creates shared prosperity among businesses and workers. While organized labor has been and continues to be foundational to the work of improving job quality, over the last few decades, we have seen a variety of organizations join this effort.
To better understand this emerging field of job quality practice, the Aspen Institute’s Economic Opportunities Program interviewed 22 practitioners across sectors from around the country who are leading efforts to improve work. Their organizations ranged from worker centers and labor unions to community development financial institutions and workforce development organizations. Our interviews explored how they define job quality, the motivations behind their work, what strategies and tactics they use to improve jobs, how issues of equity appear in their work, and the challenges they face.
In this report, Fixing Work: Lesson from Job Quality Practitioners, we make the case for why job quality work is so important, present insights and lessons learned from the practitioners we interviewed, and offer recommendations to investors and practitioners about how to engage in and support job quality efforts. We hope this paper helps job quality practitioners improve upon their work and inspires others working to improve economic opportunity to find a way to contribute to building an economy where all jobs are good jobs.
As part of the Good Jobs, Good Business Toolkit this guide demonstrates the importance of stable scheduling and paid leave for business success and employee retention. It outlines the steps that small businesses can take to implement these practices.
As part of the Good Jobs, Good Business Toolkit, this tool guides small business owners to explore which healthcare options are right for their business, bottom line, and workers. It outlines what is needed for legal compliance along with an array of options to begin to offer health insurance coverage.
The Gender Decoder calculates the proportion of feminine-coded and masculine-coded words in job advertisements. Research has found that masculine- coded language in job postings can deter women job seekers from applying. This free tool can help HR professionals, recruiters, or managers who want to appeal to applicants of all gender identities. For more information on the tool and it’s creation, please refer to the FAQ page.
This guide was prepared as part of the Shared Success project, through which the Aspen Economic Opportunities Program has been working with a cohort of 11 community development financial institutions (CDFIs) on strategies to advance good jobs. Through this work, have consistently heard that small businesses are facing ongoing hurdles navigating and staying up to date on relevant compliance requirements at the local, state, and federal levels.
This resource guide is intended to help spur ideas for how small businesses can overcome compliance hurdles and navigate quickly evolving regulatory landscapes. The guide is also designed to help advisors or entities working with small business owners, such as CDFIs, facilitate access to potential partners to help their clients effectively address these matters in a more timely, high-quality, and consistent manner. This document is not meant to be legal advice or an exhaustive list of organizations, but rather a snapshot of potential regional and national resources where organizations could seek guidance and further partnership or support.
The passage of the 13th Amendment following the American Civil War abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, but it included a crucial exception: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This exception allowed southern governments to institute an early version of prison labor called convict leasing. Black Americans arrested for minor offenses, once imprisoned, were effectively purchased from state and local governments by individuals and companies looking to continue using cheap labor. This allowed individuals and companies to keep slavery in action. Though the practice of convict leasing ended in the mid-20th century, its infamous traits can still be seen in today’s incarceration system.
Today, the majority of incarcerated workers in the US, who are disproportionately Black and people of color, are often required to work or face retaliation such as solitary confinement, denial of opportunities to reduce their sentence, and loss of family visitation. They work jobs that might pay pennies on the hour, if they are paid at all, and are often not protected by labor laws. Many work in dangerous conditions. At the same time, some find deep purpose in their work behind bars, an opportunity to build skills, and support in making a successful transition to life after incarceration. In this recorded event, the first in a two part series, the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program explores the history and conditions of work for incarcerated people and ideas for creating more humane and dignified work for those behind bars.
Our second conversation, Re-Entry and Good Jobs: Building the Second Chances We All Believe In, explores the opportunities and challenges of work for returning citizens after they have been released from incarceration.
The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) was designed to help workers move “into high-quality jobs and careers and help employers hire and retain skilled workers.” A decade after its passage, however, it is clear that WIOA has often missed the mark in supporting workers’ success in accessing quality jobs or in effectively serving the high-road employers who provide good jobs. If legislators are serious about using WIOA to support quality jobs and good employers, then stronger efforts to support employee-owned companies would be a great place to start. This brief outlines the opportunity and the steps to achieve this goal.
The Job Accommodation Network’s publications include a resource series on Accommodation and Compliance, designed to support employers and employees in determining effective accommodations that comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Each publication in the series addresses a specific medical condition and potential accommodations and points toward resources for additional information. These publications can be used by practitioners assisting employers in accommodating disabilities as well as by individual employees as they discuss accommodations with their employer.