When we're brought in to help a Nigerian SME sort out an HR mess, the root cause is almost never a bad employee or a bad manager. It's an undocumented policy — a rule everyone assumed existed, applied inconsistently, with nothing in writing to fall back on when it mattered. These eight are the ones no growing company should be without — each one protects your business, supports your employees, and keeps you compliant with the law.
Employee Handbook
Your foundation document — company values, expectations, and the practical logistics of working there (hours, dress code, communication norms). Without it, every new hire learns "how things work" by word of mouth, which means every manager enforces a slightly different version.
Code of Conduct
Defines acceptable and unacceptable workplace behaviour explicitly, including conflicts of interest, use of company property, and professional conduct. This is what you point to — calmly and specifically — when a conduct issue arises, rather than relying on "everyone knows that's not okay."
Leave Policy
Covers annual, sick, and maternity/paternity leave in specific, written terms — how it's requested, how it accrues, and what happens to unused leave. The Labour Act sets a floor here; most competitive Nigerian employers offer more than the statutory minimum, but whatever you offer needs to be written down, not "handled case by case."
Performance Management
A defined review cycle, clear criteria, and a documented process connect pay and promotion decisions to something other than manager discretion alone. This is also your best protection if a performance-based termination is ever challenged — a documented history matters far more than a single bad review.
Disciplinary Procedure
A fair, staged process — verbal warning, written warning, final warning, then action — protects the company as much as the employee. Skipping stages, or applying them inconsistently across staff, is one of the most common reasons disciplinary decisions get successfully challenged.
Termination Policy
Notice periods, required documentation, and the exact procedure for both voluntary and involuntary exits, aligned with the Labour Act. We go deeper on this specific area in what the Labour Act says about termination.
Data Privacy Policy
Covers how employee and customer personal data is collected, stored, and protected — increasingly relevant under Nigeria's data protection framework, and something we see very few SMEs have addressed in writing at all.
Health & Safety Policy
Even for office-based businesses, a basic health and safety policy — emergency procedures, incident reporting, workplace conditions — is both a legal expectation and a real duty of care. Policies go stale fast, too: the 2026 PAYE changes alone made several standard payroll-adjacent policy templates technically incorrect overnight. Review your full policy set at least annually. If you'd rather have this handled for you than manage it in-house, this is exactly the kind of support our HR Assistant platform and consulting team provide.