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You will have to decide if the benefits of harmonisation (unless you are simply harmonising upwards) and changing a few outdated things in the handbook are worth the considerable time and effort involved.

There are several threads on this topic but broadly

• Start communicating need and challenges
• Ideally get employees to help you work on solutions rather than just management
• Communicate
• Consult with colleagues meaningfully and with a view to reaching agreement 
• Communicate
• Be flexible and amend proposals etc
• If no collective agreements, then ultimately offer your new proposals to colleagues individually to accept / reject
• Consider introducing just for new colleagues or where there are promotions etc
• Final resort is fire and rehire, but you probably don't have the business case to do that

Ultimately it will depend on taking colleagues along with you rather than doing it to them and the nature of the changes you want to make

If the changes to the handbook are relatively minor. or driven by legislation you could just (after communicating) do them on basis no one if likely to object

Hi Molly,

I was in this situation when I joined my current organisation, inheriting a handbook that stated that all the policies were contractual. Those policies had been developed/evolved over a long period, were sometimes contradictory and certainly didn't match current legislation - so we needed to do a reasonably large piece of work anyway. I spent a bit of time planning before starting the process of changing it all up.

Firstly we have a consultative group, so I was able to talk through with them the issues and why we needed to change things. Consulting every member of staff every time we wanted to amend a document was clearly going to frustrate everyone, so I identified the policies that I felt would be most contentious (around pay/benefits mainly) and flagged them as contractual policies. When I'd worked through updating all the different policy areas (many of which were enhanced in the process) I then consulted on the whole lot - the changes suggested to all policies, and the move for all but five of those policies and procedures to become non-contractual. I communicated with the consultative group, but also to each member of staff individually, taking feedback and updating before publishing the lot.

It wasn't a quick process, and took about a year to complete - but I'm very glad I went through the pain of it then! I had almost no pushback by the end of the process, because everyone had the chance to input.

The takeaway for me was to identify the potential concerns and to try and head them off in advance - either by keeping certain policies contractual (and let's face it pay would always be considered contractual) or by speaking directly to some key influencers to get their thoughts in advance. If you're new to the charity, you may need to get some other senior managers on board to help with this.

Good luck!

Nina

In reply to Nina Waters:

Thanks Nina, really helpful!