Employee Handbook

"Hair styles and hair color should reflect your natural beauty."

— Abercrombie & Fitch: the Look Book (grooming policy)

Employee handbooks are, allegedly, documentation about workplace rules, regulations, and general information that is supposed to help employees integrate and behave. That's what they want you to believe, at least. In reality, most handbooks found in corporations are do none of those things. Instead, they are rambling manifestoes written by overly imaginative HR departments, or Corp-Speak heavy technical manuals, or both. They're thick with legalese, often contradicting themselves, or providing just enough information to be actively unhelpful.
Despite that, whenever questions come up, employees are always asked to "refer to the handbook". Something must be up, and employees have developed some theories about what's REALLY GOING ON with Employee Handbooks.
These conspiracy theories include but are not limited to (and vary in level of accuracy, too):

• The Trap: The rules only matter when they want them to. By making the Handbook an impenetrable maze of wordsallad and corporate slogan, they all but ensure that no one knows what's really in it... Which means they can technically get you on anything they want!

• Acclimation Protocol: Nothing in the handbook is a mistake, no matter how many years obsolete or how insane they sound. In fact, the more insane the guidelines are, the more it serves it's purpose. They'll get you used to it so you won't question the whole "We're Family Here" thing!

• Template-ing: Handbooks aren't meant for you... But for the Corporation, as a hive-mind entity. It instructs the various department and workers that form a grand neural network what a cog in its machine should look and act like. Corporations aren't just organizations, but entities, and they're out to get us, man!

• EULA: The entire thing is just one big EULA, and once you signed it, there's no way out. While your employment contract already does that, this might be redundancy (or just oversight)

• The Anchor: As we all know, Mondays are a memetic infohazard, the idea of the worst day that has spread like a virus. Maybe, just maybe, the handbooks function as a sort of reality-anchor that keeps Megacorpolis from kind of collapsing into all its various competing worldviews. If nothing is real, then maybe only what the handbook tells us is real!

• Linguistic Overwrite: Handbooks are full of Corp-Speak, so some think it's less a document of guidelines and rules, and more a language teaching tool that strips away all those dumb normie words and makes people speak like a proper employee.

• The Book Rules: On the far end of things, conspiracy theories think that documentation and AI have supplanted any sort of human guidance, and that CEOs are just figureheads. It is the handbook that rules, and it's watching you.

Human Resources

The culprit behind the Employee Handbooks are the HR departments across Megacorpolis. These wretches hives of scum and villainy supposedly help employees in work day disputes and difficulties, but they are in truth just not that into helping you.
Instead, HR departments manage people, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as herding cats. With most legal requirements that might once have made work for them gone, they can now make up their own work and that has not ended up going great for anyone.

by The Dark Knight Rises

How It All Fits Together

Unsurprisingly, the Employee Handbooks make many appearance in the Metaspiracy. There are entire parts of the Metaspiracy community that collect Handbooks and corrolate them against each other, looking for patterns and clues how it might all fit together. These brave souls spend countless days and nights pouring over some of the driest, most boring documentation ever produced by mankind in search of the Truth. It's not an easy job, but someone has to do it.