Ask HN: Employee Handbook for Startups? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Employee Handbook for Startups?

33 pointsbirdisthepass14 comments

We started off as a few friends working together, but we have been lucky to quickly grow to a consulting firm of 11 full-time employees.

For better or worse, we're at the point where we should probably (definitely) formalize some things for the team (still figuring out which, exactly). The first that comes to mind is an employee handbook.

Has anyone gone through the process of formalizing an employee handbook? Is there a template that YC companies or other startups use as a starting point?

I've seen a few super corporate-y templates online and I'd like to incorporate some level of personality/minimalism and also avoid overwhelming employees with legalese (if possible).

Many thanks in advance!

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The two that come to mind are gitlab’s https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ and valve’s https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications. I read valve’s a few years ago and actually enjoyed it. I haven’t read any of gitlab’s.

Thanks! These both look great.

gitlabs is amazing...

Especially for distributed companies

You can take a look at basecamp - https://basecamp.com/handbook

Too soon.

GitLab's handbook is public I think. Could be a good inspiration.

Thanks for mentioning GitLab. We're really proud of our handbook.

For folks that are exploring how to start building their own handbook, this page in might be a good place to start: https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/handbook...

Thanks! This bit is particularly helpful:

> Almanac is an excellent tool for organizations building their first handbook. It allows you to pull in expert guides from other companies (GitLab included) and modify to suit your company. This shortens the time between acknowledging that a handbook is necessary and having a minimum viable product available for your team to reference and iterate on.

My suggestion would be to also look at such material from very different sectors. So much of it is generally applicable that much will overlap, but maybe the bits that don't will offer insight to what you're missing for your niche.

I wrote a brief handbook about starting startups. While not an "employee handbook," it does contain some info about coordinating, getting team buy-in on ideas/movements, and making time to create and brainstorm as well as a no-penalties time to discuss and vent gripes. Some of the insights may be of interest to you, although it is aimed more directly at the aspiring founder or team of founders.

The first few sections you can read for free here https://satisologie.substack.com/p/rocketshipping-book-excer...

We maintain a completely open source handbook at PostHog: https://posthog.com/handbook. You can poke around it on GitHub too (linked at the bottom of the page), or even put out a PR. :)

Mobile Jazz Company Handbook: https://mobilejazz.com/company-handbook-pdf/

We just updated the public version two days ago to the latest internal version.

Creating our handbook ended up being one of the most worthwhile things we did early on. You can check it out at the bottom of https://www.guilded.gg/jobs

That handbook looks beautiful.

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