Internal work rules vs an employee handbook: what is the difference

What internal work rules are

Internal work rules are a written document an employer adopts to set out working conditions and workplace order: hours, schedule flexibility, pay dates, leave, equipment and the duties employees owe the company. In continental European labour systems the document has a name of its own, in Lithuanian darbo tvarkos taisyklės, and it sits below the labour code and any collective agreement but above an individual employment contract.

Under the Lithuanian Labour Code, an employer exercising its right to organise employees’ work may adopt local regulatory acts, internal work rules among them. Once adopted, the rules bind every covered employee automatically, without needing each person’s individual signature or agreement, and the employer must make them available at the workplace. That is the structural feature worth understanding before anything else: the document is closer to a small piece of enacted regulation than to a memo.

Most of the search traffic for "employee handbook" comes out of a different legal tradition, where the document carries no automatic legal force. The two documents answer a similar practical need, telling people how work here actually runs, but they are not interchangeable, and treating them as synonyms causes trouble the moment a customer, a bank or a tender asks for "your handbook" and a Lithuanian employer hands over an instrument that can ground a dismissal.

Why the name "employee handbook" does not mean the same thing everywhere

A US or UK employee handbook is typically a policy statement the employer issues for guidance. It explains house rules, benefits and expected conduct, but on its own it usually creates no enforceable obligation, and employers in those systems commonly include an express disclaimer that the handbook does not form part of the employment contract. It can still matter in practice, and a poorly worded handbook can create unintended contractual terms, but that is treated as a drafting risk to avoid, not the document’s intended function.

Internal work rules, adopted the continental way, work the opposite direction. Once the employer has adopted them, they carry real legal consequence: a Lithuanian employer’s list of what counts as a "gross violation of work duties," a ground for summary dismissal, can be extended by whatever the company’s own internal work rules define as a gross violation. The rules exist to bind rather than to guide, and a court or a labour inspector will read them that way.

Neither document is legally required by a headcount threshold in Lithuania. The Labour Code frames adoption as a power the employer may use, not a duty every employer must satisfy, and no surviving mandatory trigger was found in the current code. A company that has not adopted internal work rules is not automatically in breach of anything; it has simply left those working conditions to be set by individual contracts and the code itself.

The practical answer to "which one do we need" depends on where the company actually operates and who is asking. A company employing people under Lithuanian or another continental labour code should think in terms of internal work rules, because that is the instrument the local law recognises and gives legal weight. A company writing only for a US or UK audience, or describing informal, non-binding guidance, is more accurately writing a handbook, and calling it "internal work rules" without meeting the local adoption requirements would overstate its legal force.

What belongs in a set of internal work rules

A reader checking or drafting internal work rules should expect to find working time and schedule: the standard working norm, whether the schedule is fixed or flexible, and any core hours during which everyone must be reachable. Pay mechanics come next: how the rate is set, how often pay is issued, and how pay bands relate to role.

Leave terms are a required section: annual leave entitlement, how far in advance a request must be made, and how the leave schedule for the coming year gets set and by when. Equipment and remote work provisions matter for any company that is not fully office-based: who provides the laptop and software, how remote-work costs are reimbursed, and what workstation standard remote employees must meet.

A cross-reference to safety, data protection and complaints handling is expected rather than optional, since a company rarely writes one policy in isolation from the others that already govern the same relationship. Finally, the rules should state how they get reviewed and changed, and how an employee is expected to acknowledge them.

What to check when you are reading someone else’s

Read the scope clause first. It should say plainly who the document covers, director, employees, and whether it says anything at all about freelance partners or contractors, since those relationships are usually governed by separate contracts rather than by internal work rules.

Check whether the document names concrete numbers rather than vague language: a stated working-hours norm, a stated pay date or pay frequency, a stated annual leave entitlement in days. A document that only says pay and leave "follow company policy" without stating what that policy is has told the reader nothing verifiable.

Look for the review clause and the approval mechanism. A document with no stated review cadence and no named approver reads as a template nobody has actually adopted internally. And if the company operates under a labour code with a fallback rule, check that the document says what happens in a gap: whether it defers to that code, or is silent and therefore ambiguous.

What Ripe Leads’ DTT-1 commits to

UAB "Kofi Tech" trades as Ripe Leads and works entirely remotely, with no separate office. DTT-1, its internal work rules, covers the director and employees; relationships with freelance partners are governed separately by their own contracts, and any gap in DTT-1 falls back to the Labour Code of the Republic of Lithuania.

Full time is set at 40 hours a week, with a flexible schedule: an employee chooses their own start time provided they work at least 4 hours between 10:00 and 15:00. Because the company has no office, the rules build remote work in directly rather than treating it as an exception: a remote workstation must meet the standard in the company’s occupational safety and health policy (DSS-1), and the right to disconnect from that same policy applies, 19:00 to 08:00, weekends and leave, with no reply expected outside on-call arrangements agreed in advance.

Pay is set in the individual contract and paid twice a month, or once a month by the 10th of the following month with written consent; pay bands by role are approved by the director, and an employee may see their own band. Annual leave is 20 working days a year on a five-day week, requested at least 14 calendar days in advance except in unforeseen cases, with the leave schedule for the coming year set annually by 31 March.

The company provides equipment and software and reimburses agreed remote-work costs monthly. Training under the Educational Initiatives Programme (EIP-1) is free and runs during working hours, and the eye test required under DSS-1 is paid by the company. Employees are bound to follow the Business Ethics and Anti-Corruption Code (EK-1) and the data protection policy (IAP-1), to protect confidential information and equipment, and to disclose conflicts of interest before a transaction. Complaints and breach reports run through the Complaints and Reports Procedure (SKT-1); labour disputes follow the Labour Code.

DTT-1 does not state a bonus or commission scheme and does not set out probation-period terms; the document is silent on both, and a reader should not assume either exists from DTT-1 alone. The full text is one of all thirteen documents published at the sustainability page, DTT-1.

How we keep it current

The director reviews DTT-1 annually and approves any change by order. Employees acknowledge the rules in writing, which is the mechanism that makes the binding-once-adopted character of the document concrete rather than theoretical. The leave schedule for the coming year is drawn up annually by 31 March, and pay bands are approved and can be checked by the employee they apply to.

Every one of the thirteen documents in this set carries the same signature line: approved by order of the director, effective 22 September 2026, with the Lithuanian text prevailing in case of discrepancy between languages. DTT-1 is no exception, and the annual review cycle is the same mechanism that keeps every other document in the set current.

What this document does not prove

DTT-1 is self-authored and approved internally by UAB "Kofi Tech". It is not audited, certified or verified by any third party, and no sustainability or compliance label, badge or score is claimed for it. From 27 September 2026, the Empowering Consumers Directive (EU) 2024/825 bans a self-awarded sustainability label outright, which is one more reason to state the limits of a self-authored document plainly rather than let a reader assume more than the document actually supports.

That limit does not make the document useless to a reader doing due diligence. It means the honest question to ask is whether the document describes something the company actually does, and a reader can check that against the specific clauses above, the review cadence, and the cross-references to the company’s other governance documents, rather than against a seal it does not and should not claim.