I once watched a new hire get pulled into HR on her second week because she wore open-toed sandals. Nobody got hurt. No client complained. The handbook said "closed-toe shoes required," and someone, somewhere, years earlier, had written down this exact line after one incident nobody even remembered anymore.
Here's the thing about handbooks. They don't grow. They accumulate.
Every Rule Was Once a Reaction
Kelly Swingler, an HR consultant who's spent years pushing companies to rethink their people practices, has an idea I love: Burn Your Handbook Day. Not a real bonfire, please, it's a fire hazard and also a legal document. The point is the exercise. Take every policy in your handbook and ask: what happened, specifically, made someone write this down?
Most of the time, you'll find a story. Someone submitted a wildly inappropriate expense report, so now there's a three-page travel policy for a company of twelve people. Someone showed up impaired once, a decade ago, under a completely different management team, so now there's a rigid policy applied to everyone forever, regardless of role, regardless of context.
I've seen this pattern from both sides of the desk. At Santander, I ran an Android team inside a bank, where every process existed because of some regulatory requirement, some audit finding, some incident from years before I arrived. Structure made sense there. Banking is regulated for good reasons, and much of it protects customers, not the company's convenience.
I've also run smaller, faster teams, like the mobile team I led at Crowdlab, where we built two custom DSLs and shipped to five new regions with a fraction of this structure. We didn't need a three-page travel policy. We needed people who understood the mission and were trusted to use judgment. The rules built for the bank would have strangled this team on day one.
Same job title, same discipline, wildly different amount of rulebook required. Context decides more than most handbooks admit.
Companies Built on Trust, Not Rules
Netflix's culture memo is famous for a reason. Their vacation policy is two words: "Take vacation." Their expense policy is five: "Act in Netflix's best interests." No approval chains, no per diem tables, no forms in triplicate. A clear expectation of adults acting like adults, with consequences if they don't.
I'm not suggesting every company copy Netflix wholesale. Most companies aren't Netflix, and total trust with zero structure at all carries its own risk. But the underlying move is worth stealing: replace a rule built for the worst-case employee with a principle built for the best one, and deal with the rare violation directly instead of punishing everyone in advance.
This is the real cost of an overgrown handbook. Not the wasted paper or the HR hours spent maintaining it. It's what it tells your best people about how much they're trusted to think for themselves. Every rule existing to catch the 2% who'll abuse it insults the 98% who never would have.
I saw the flip side of this at Curve, where I led seven teams and roughly 43 engineers. We built a 24/7 on-call rota where engineers managed their own swaps and coverage instead of routing every change through a manager for sign-off. Engagement scores rose faster there than anywhere else in the company this year. People don't feel engaged when they're managed like suspects. They feel engaged when treated like professionals.
Not Every Rule Deserves the Fire
Here's where I'll push back a little on the "burn it all" instinct, because it's tempting to overcorrect. Some policies exist because they should. Anti-harassment policies. Safety procedures. Anything protecting a legally protected class or keeping someone from getting physically hurt. Those aren't bureaucratic scar tissue. Those are the floor, not the ceiling.
Even zero-tolerance drug policies, which carry a bad reputation, aren't automatically wrong. SHRM has pointed out these policies create real legal risk as marijuana laws shift state by state, and some employers are better served moving to a no-impairment standard instead of a blanket ban. This isn't "throw out the policy." This is "make sure the policy still matches the world it operates in." Which is exactly the audit Burn Your Handbook Day is asking for.
The test isn't "is this a rule." The test is "does this rule still protect someone, or is it protecting the company from having to trust its own people."
What To Do About It
If you run a team, small or large, here's the exercise. Pull out your handbook, your onboarding doc, whatever collection of "how we do things" has piled up over the years. For every rule, ask two questions.
First: what specific incident caused this rule to exist? If you don't have an answer, or the answer traces back to a completely different team, a completely different set of people, or a completely different era of the company, this rule belongs on the burn pile.
Second: if this rule disappeared today, what happens? Sometimes the honest answer is "someone gets hurt" or "we get sued," and the rule stays. Often the honest answer is "someone might make a call I wouldn't have made," which isn't a risk at all. This is what trusting people looks like in practice.
I run a version of this exercise in the Step Up Your Greatness workshops I lead now. I ask leadership teams to bring their handbook to the room, print it out, page by page, and go through it line by line as a group. Nobody ever finishes in one sitting. What always surprises people isn't how many outdated rules turn up. It's how few people in the room are able to defend the ones still standing. A rule nobody in leadership is able to explain out loud is a rule running the company on autopilot, and autopilot is exactly how good teams drift into bad culture without anyone deciding it should happen.
I've built and led teams under heavy regulation and teams with almost none. The best ones I've been part of carried exactly as many rules as needed and not one more. The handbook wasn't a wall protecting the company from its own employees. It was a floor, thin and clear, under people mostly trusted to build the rest themselves.
My book, Bad Bosses Ruin Lives: The Building Blocks for Being a Great Boss, digs into this same idea from a different angle: the gap between a boss who manages people and a boss who manages suspicion. My research found 99.5% of survey respondents said they've had one or more types of bad boss. A handbook fat with rules written for the worst version of your team is one of the quieter ways this gap gets built, one clause at a time.
So find the rule in your handbook nobody has ever explained. The one sitting there so long nobody remembers why. Ask what it's protecting. If the honest answer is "nothing, it only feels safer than trusting people," you already know what to do with it.