Rules of engagement

Your employee handbook is a museum of outliers

Most company handbooks don’t even start as handbooks.

They start as one bad incident.

Someone expensed something they shouldn’t have. A manager said something they shouldn’t have said. A deal got made without the right sign-off.

So a rule got written.

And then another incident. Another rule. Another incident. Another rule.

Read a bloated employee handbook the right way and you’re not reading a guide to how work gets done. You’re reading a timeline of every time an organisation decided it couldn’t trust someone.

Each clause is a monument to an outlier.

There’s a certain type of company where you need three approvals to order printer paper. Not because three people genuinely need to weigh in on toner cartridges. But because, at some point, someone ordered too much printer paper. Or the wrong printer paper. And rather than have a conversation, someone wrote a process.

There’s another type where the travel policy runs to fourteen pages. Preferred hotels, approved airlines, per diem breakdowns by city tier. A document that took someone considerable time to write, and that every travelling employee now navigates like a tax return. It exists because, once, someone booked a suite.

And then there’s the expense category that covers everything except the one thing you actually need to buy - because that category was removed after an incident nobody still at the company can fully remember, but which left a rule that outlived everyone involved.

The problem isn’t that rules exist. Some structure is genuinely useful. It reduces cognitive load. It lets people focus on the actual problem rather than reinventing how to handle every situation from scratch.

The problem is how most rules come to exist.

They’re not designed. They accumulate. Each one written in the aftermath of something going wrong, drafted to prevent that specific thing from happening again. The result is a document that optimises for preventing yesterday’s mistake, not for enabling tomorrow’s judgment.

And somewhere in the accumulation, something shifts.

The handbook stops being a tool for people who need guidance. It becomes a signal to everyone that they’re not quite trusted to think for themselves.

People read that signal. They act accordingly.

They stop making calls they’re not certain are covered. They escalate things that don't need escalating. They do the thing that will clearly pass review, rather than the thing that would clearly work.

This is what performative compliance looks like from the inside. Not malicious, not lazy. Just rational. When the system rewards people for following the ceremony, people follow the ceremony.

The organisations I watch thriving don’t have fewer rules. They have rules that were written for a different reason.

Not “this is what you must do so we don’t have another incident.” But “this is what we’ve learned works, so you don’t have to figure it out from scratch.”

Same surface. Different direction of trust.

One is a leash. The other is a head start.

The question worth asking of any rule in your organisation isn’t whether it’s technically necessary. It’s who it was written for. Was it written to protect the organisation from its own people? Or to help its people do better work?

The answer is usually obvious.

And usually, nobody has asked it before.