Must a staff handbook be provided in hard copy or is it sufficient to refer employees to policies on your company’s intranet?

The Employment Rights (Northern Ireland) Order 1996 sections 33 – 35 deal with written particulars that employees are entitled to receive. Some specific matters are to be contained in a written statement of particulars (i.e. the employee’s contract of employment). Other matters can be included in other documents (i.e. the employee handbook) as long as it is reasonably accessible to the employee.

It is therefore not strictly necessary to give each employee a hard copy of the handbook, and certainly in large organisations, it is now fairly common to have the handbook on the intranet or a hard copy is available in each shop or branch.

However, one of the practical issues arising from each