Rules for Work: The Zaarly Employee Handbook | Hacker News Reader

Rules for Work: The Zaarly Employee Handbook

handbook.zaarly.com

125 pointsStartupBuilder89 comments

I like this as a document.

One thing to remember though: an Employee Handbook has legal status. It's usually the primary vector that companies use to establish policies. For instance, the Zaarly handbook doesn't mention discrimination at all (except to tell employees to expect the men to use the women's restroom --- w.t.f.?!).

If you're going to do something like this --- and I'm not saying you shouldn't --- have a button-down version as well. It should make clear that employees are exempt from overtime, that you don't tolerate discrimination, that employment is at-will, when re-hired employees are considered formally a "re-hire" vs. "LOA" (so their benefits clock doesn't reset), and any expectations you have about client-facing conduct or not rm'ing the production servers, so that in a dispute, you can point to the document that spells stuff out.

The other thing to remember is that you'll occasionally be providing this to candidate employees during your hiring process, and again, there are formalities that you want to make clear.

I'm rewriting our handbook right now and targeting something in between this and the standard HR issue (actually, I'm targeting something more along the lines of Valve's guide, which I think is fantastic). It's tricky to get the tone right. One place I am taking advantage of a direct, common-sense tone is our anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policy stuff, where I can write forcefully and directly and not put off anyone I'd actually want to work with.

an Employee Handbook has legal status

-- I'd be wary of this generalization. It is more the opposite. If that makes sense.

The original statement is generally correct. Employee handbooks don't have contractual status (i.e. they can be amended at the company's discretion) but do have legal status insofar as employee's will be expected and, in most cases be contractually bound, to abide by the terms of the handbook.

Most (if not all) explicitly say they are not to be mistaken (in any way) as legally binding contract. With at will employment, this seeming nuance is worth keeping in mind. It means the employee cannot rely on such a handbook, in court: the employer has explicitly prevented this use. As you correcty point out, an explicit contract may require one or both sides to live up to the handbook. But such employment contracts are not considered the general case, in the US at least.

It can bind employers, too. In most states, the answer to "what happens with unclaimed vacation pay if I quit?" is "go see what it says in the employee handbook."

I think this misses the point of an employee handbook completely. Its meant for when things go wrong... employees are not looking at any company handbook on a day to day basis to figure out how the company runs and how they should act. They only crack it open when shit hits the fan and they need to know what to do...

- Think one of your co-workers is not performing up to par - might want to consult the employee handbook

- Think you might get laid off - might want to consult the employee handbook

- Wondering how much time you can take off - might want to consult the employee handbook

Employee handbooks are stuffy, boring and read like a dictionary. It is essentially a very light contract between the employer and employee - writing a contract about how there basically are no rules probably makes everyone feel like they are forward thinking but helps very little. Here are some tangible examples...

- There is no rule on vacation so my coworker "John" takes a lot of vacation. Hes pretty responsible about it but sometimes he's out and we really do need him - its begun to frustrate me a little. Is he about to be fired or can I do this too - Im doing a ton of work but would like to go to Europe for 6 weeks? (The problem here is that there is a very real limit on vacation - the limit is a magical number/level of output in the founders/investors/manager's heads and may depend on their mood day to day. What one's expectation of acceptable time off may not match anothers.)

- I like to wear unqiue clothes but now a couple coworkers have started to tease me in ways that are really starting to bother me. (As a side note I think this was part of what occurred with that Kixeye debacle while it was a vary extreme case.) Lets see what the handbook says... oh.

- "Tim" produces like crazy - the problem is that he is not big on communication and doesnt want to be apart of our meetings. Hes doing great work - its just not integrating with the direction everyone else is going.

It probably sounds like Im advocating for the other extreme where every detail is mapped out. Im not - it can be too extreme on structure but I dont think the other extreme is any better. In all honesty this would drive me away - it looks like a dream until money is low, stress is high, somebody is abusing something, or there is political in-fighting (which definitely can happen at small startups).

Agreed.

For instance, for legal / HR purposes, it's important to articulate (and get everyone to acknowledge in signature form) zero tolerance for harassment, and what to do in cases of harassment.

This feels like an extended form of a "mission statement," i.e. these are the values that we want to work by. For that purpose, it's a fine document -- just don't call it an "employee handbook."

I hope zaarly is far enough along to have other docs that do cover the more mundane (but necessary) aspects of employment. If not, they're exposed to unnecessary liability.

i think the problem / missing context / explanation is that they currently have a very strong, shared culture. in many ways that is a good thing, and something that this document is trying (perhaps unconsciously) to preserve.

all your (completely valid) issues examples are cases where someone drifts outside the assumed common culture (and i agree that is also when you most want a handbook).

apart from "emergent issues", this also runs the risk of being exclusionary. if you don't feel like "one of the gang" then a handbook like this is going to make you less likely to join the company. from a small-scale, short-term viewpoint that might seem like a good thing. but in the longer term i am not sure it is so healthy.

[from personal experience, as someone who was raised in one culture, lives in another, and typically works with people from a third, i find things like holiday "quotas" extremely useful information in guiding how i should behave and / or whether i should be working there...]

hmmm. and if they really did try to understand and write down some description of their culture, and failed, it suggests that they're not so great at getting a handle on who they are, or what they are doing, or at negotiating between themselves to find common ground. which all seem like important skills.

> They only crack it open when shit hits the fan and they need to know what to do...

...and sometimes you can skip the Employee Handbook entirely and head for the Shitstorm Encyclopedia...

I don't ever want to consult an employee handbook. I especially don't want someone to tell me to RTFEH.

At Pivotal we have an e-mail alias for making any kind of request that will get routed to the right person and dealt with/responded to quickly. No guesswork required, no flipping through an employee handbook.

There's also a person everyone gets assigned that they can go to at any time with questions about how to enter their time, what to do about a bad situation at work, or whatever else they want to talk about.

There should always be a person available, not (just) an employee handbook.

There should always be a person available, not (just) an employee handbook.

Obviously, but that person isn't omnipotent. Perhaps that person has never taken maternity leave and doesn't know the routines. Having things written down somewhere makes it easier to find and eliminates any guesswork.

The other advantage of a handbook is anonymity. Perhaps you want to look up the routines for maternity leave without announcing that you are/plan to be pregnant.

Well, it's not a company handbook, it's a company advertisement for recruiting. That's pretty obvious when you read it.

IANAL, but while I think it's nice that they give these sorts of freedom, this sort of "no rules!" attitude can become a liability as a company grows.

When Jane gets told, "sorry you can't take 10 weeks of vacation this year", even though Tom got 10 weeks of vacation, you leave yourself open to all kinds of legal trouble. What looks like bureaucracy and bloat in bigger companies are most likely regulations put in place to protect both employee and employer rights.

I think the key to any HR policy, even an overt lack of HR policy, is to make sure its applied consistently.

> Rules for Work -- We do not have these.

Note: This was written by folks who have never been on the receiving end of a stupid employee lawsuit. There are reasons why you need an employee handbook, and almost all of them are legal CYA.

Seek out better legal advice than these guys did.

I could also see this handbook being used against them in the case of harassment, discrimination or wrongful termination suits.

> this handbook being used against them in the case of harassment, discrimination or wrongful termination suits.

Exactly. And since courts tend to favor employees, Zaarly's corporate neck is very exposed.

Here's one example:

> Whatever it is, it’s cool.

> Also, it is a place where the guys frequently use the women’s bathroom.

All any woman has to do for a harassment lawsuit is point to that phrase in a courtroom. "They will happily invade the place where women are exposed! and it's corporate policy!"

Not the brightest idea in corporate leadership.

And another thing: Suppose they wise up and actually get a real company handbook. All any woman has to do is bring out this version and describe that "Zaarly has a well-documented history of harassment against women."

Edit: s/discrimination/harassment

Unfortunately Lawyers get paid quite a bit to make exactly those types of small things look very bad for their opponents. Another one that stands out to me is in the clothing section.

> We will never implement any sort of expectations around what you wear, but we maintain all rights to mock your future mother-in-law’s choice of clothes if you choose to wear them to the office.

A decent lawyer will turn that into the company openly supporting and even encouraging harassment.

I can't tell wtf that even means, but I'm pretty sure it's a prime example of the less said, the better.

>All any woman has to do for a harassment lawsuit is point to that phrase in a courtroom. "They will happily invade the place where women are exposed! and it's corporate policy!"

It's almost as if they didn't learn jack shit from the whole brogrammer brouhaha a while back.

These rules are nothing new. Every company seems to start this way and then eventually each of these principles die with a little regulation here and a little adjustment there.

Cough. Netflix.

Are you holding Netflix up against the GP's assertion, or in confirmation of it?

Netflix is still amazingly liberal with its policies.

Or that they wind up being used as a rubric for determining power within the company.

That's why we have a "Bill of Employee Rights" (called something else that only makes sense in our culture) that require a majority vote (contemplating 3/4th majority) of the company to change. If someone changes them outside of this scope, there would be a revolt.

Policies that can be changed willy-nilly by some higher-up are really just meaningless platitudes (redundancy for emphasis).

To clarify, not every policy and procedure (of which there are precious few) are in there, just the big ones that that shouldn't change without everyone agreeing (results only work environment, unlimited vacation/sick, profit sharing, etc.).

Departmental ones, like "test coverage should be > n%" or "we should answer every customer service request in under n-minutes" are totally up to each group to manage as they see fit.

I think it's not about new, all businesses have positive values they hold and want to spread across the organization. It's very empowering as an Employee when an employer codifies these rules and says yep they are real , here they are in writing and you can hold me to them also. That I think is the fascinating part, because in my experience writing up this stuff and then actually brining it into play is notoriously difficult.

The opposite is happening at our company, twelve years in. Many employees determine their own working hours and schedule, and the more of us do it, the more people realise it's better and join the movement. I have no idea how our company will work 5 years from now, but I guarantee those principles won't have died.

It's possible to keep improving in this area, but you need a strong culture to support it, and inspiration from companies that show you that it can be done. In our case, the Valve handbook was enormously motivating: if a 300+ person company can operate with so few rules, what is our 50 person company really complaining about?

Very, very pretty little scroller!

That said, the content is quite a bit of fluff with not much substance. What I got from this: we all think Zaarly is really cool. We don't care what you wear. We have nice chairs. Have fun!

This wouldn't help an incoming employee onboard any faster, or easier, which is the point of a handbook, no?

It'd be nice to see a "your first day" walkthrough.

Oh, and there'd better be a _real_ policy behind this doc, as they're going to be highly susceptible to lawsuits from their first few terminations.

For an excellent new employee handbook, see Valve: http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

> Disagreements that have not been addressed IRL will be promptly dismissed as misunderstandings until an actual conversation has taken place.

That's an impressively mature stance on employee conflict.

> Or maybe better, an extension of your parent's house.

That's a very simple and reasonable explanation for workplace use.

It sounds like you treat your employees like adults. I find that commendable in the current business climate.

Really? What does 'IRL' mean? Because I find a slight friction between the statements 'you can work from anywhere, whatever hours you like' and 'disagreements are not considered real unless you've been in the same room'. Oh so I can work from home but you'll ignore anything I say if you don't like it, because I wasn't in the room with you. Got it. Sure you'll pay for my plane tickets, I don't want a plane ticket, I want to work from home and have you listen to me.

Judging from the rest of their handbook, it sounds like "IRL" means video or voice chat as well.

I am just curious... Do these "take as much vacation as you want" policies work out well in practice? Or do the policies unintentionally create a competition to vacation less? Can anyone who works at a company with one of these policies share their perspective? How much is the approximate median vacation time taken?

Our unlimited vacation time comes with a (not enforced, but strongly recommended) mandatory minimum per quarter. Thus, we don't have everyone taking four weeks off in December, but I help remind the developers to take time to recharge. So far, just me going "you haven't taken a vacation in a while" is enough of a nudge to remind people to go.

What is the difference between minimum and maximum? What is the required number of pieces of flair?

Must wear lots of flair, especially when the VCs tour the office, looking important and trying to sound smart (but failing).

I've been under two unlimited policies and have taken reasonable time off in both. I take off exactly how much I want to take off, and its not really a concern that I'm under/over-utilizing my time off. I don't ask for anything unreasonable and in exchange I've had no problems taking as much time off as I want.

What do you consider reasonable, though? In the US, many consider 10 work days reasonable, but elsewhere, anything less than 6 weeks is barbaric.

My definition of reasonable is not about length, its about things like not asking for time off in the middle of an important deadline. Stuff like that.

Ours works great- we actually require a minimum of 2 weeks a year. I'll end this year having taken about 4- one long one and a bunch of smaller ones

IANAA, but... Remember that these vacation policies also offer a very significant accounting benefit compared to PTO polices that let employees accrue & bank PTO. The accounting downside for these PTO policies is that many employees end up with huge PTO balances (lame for other reasons) that they build up in advance of leaving the company. Because the company must pay out in cash the whole PTO balance when the employee leaves, the company actually has to keep (often very significant amounts of) cash on hand in proportion to the collective banked PTO amounts. This is lame and it's avoided in "you get 0 but take as much as you want" scenarios.

> Because the company must pay out in cash the whole PTO balance when the employee leaves, the company actually has to keep (often very significant amounts of) cash on hand in proportion to the collective banked PTO amounts.

Depends on the state. Many states let the employer decide if they want to have a pay out policy or a "use it or lose it" policy.

I know I'm gonna get downvoted, but something about it gives me the creeps. It's almost as if the culture itself is some altar you have to worship at, rather than being the consensual improv that great cultures turn out to be.

Why are men using the women's restroom? Doesn't that make the women (assuming any work there) uncomfortable?

Probably they are considering this is cool.

There are quite a few women that work here, actually. It's more like both are unisex for all, but it has been comical to guests that see men coming out of the women's bathroom.

They're each only one person... so... it's not at as odd as it seems. Inside joke, perhaps.

Granted, there isn't much context there haha

heh I almost messaged you after reading that line. I did a bit of a double take.

Maybe it's a "bros only" culture?

>If you want to coast, we recommend you apply for a job at Craigslist

Catty much? Amusing assertion given that Jeremy Zawodny works there.

Plus they aren't even in the same ballpark.

The link was to the SF craigslist jobs page. I think they meant go on Craigslist and apply for another job there, rather than work for the Craigslist outfit itself.

If so, it's a pretty internet-noob way of stating it.

Clicking on the link, I believe they mean "use Craigslist to apply for a job elsewhere". It's hard to believe anyone would bag on Craigslist itself as a model of efficiency; If you were to chart number of uniques per day against number of employees, I doubt anyone is within an order of magnitude (or two, or three) of Craigslist.

Wikipedia.

Oh, good call. Thanks.

“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end (which you can never afford to lose) with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

    - Jim Collins

That's a great quote.

Great, amazing quote. Wrong author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Stockdale

Ah, thanks.

That's not an employee handbook, it's a company: 1) giving itself a blowjob, and 2) recruiting (a certain demographic).

You're never going to employ blind people?

EDIT: Yes, this post is perhaps a bit grumpy. I leave it here because it's been replied to. (And because HN has no strikethrough.)

I don't understand why you'd read their document, find the worst possible interpretation imaginable - one which no reasonable person could assume was valid - and then post about that on Hacker News.

Possibly they are from Tumblr?

Clicky the little flag. Zoom the page. Some of the font drops off the bottom of the page, and scrolling doesn't work. (Chrome, macbook pro, OSX).

On the main text. Zoom the page. Some of the text falls off the left hand side, and there's no way to read it.

I mention the sight thing because it's clearly ignoring the fact that some people cannot see; and other people cannot hear; and other people cannot talk; and other people have neurological problems. It makes assumptions about people's ability to understand visual cues.

But, if you really want to talk about the rest of the document: It assumes people are reasonable, and thus we don't need rules. But we need rules because some people are not reasonable, some people are arseholes. Clear rules give those people hints about what is acceptable, and makes it easier for you to get rid of those people if they don't become acceptable.

It feels like they've left themselves wide open to legal action. All that ambiguity is what lawyers dream of.

Ah, I misunderstood your comment - my apologies. I thought you were making a snide remark about the "sign language" part of the communication doc. I guess if I shouldn't leap to accuse people of leaping to accuse people of things! Sorry :(

Extremely well done site. +1 for insistence on face-to-face and willingness to pay for plane tickets to facilitate it.

"Work happens anywhere"

I'm travelling in Central America, and going to Zaarly.com showed me a page in Chinese. Telling Chrome to translate somehow fixed it into English. Except it says "What you want, when you want it.", which is like those placeholder spam sites.

So I turned on my proxy settings to appear in Denver, restart browser, and get the same "global" page. "Coming soon to your area!" No links or override so I can say "no, your approach using geo-IP is broken". So until the cookies expire or are deleted, any user identified as "global" is blocked from using the site.

I'm curious as to the benefit of using the IP to decide to block a user from even browsing the site. Why wouldn't you want to show the actual system, perhaps with a notification of "hey, there's nothing in your area yet"?

>We do not have a vacation policy.

This works out fine till you get that one employee who screws it up for everyone else. It really works when you have people who love working a lot, and those who don't have other "distractions" (marriage, kids etc,). A company should definitely have a vacation policy, if it doesn't it is doing injustice to employees who work hard.

Let's say Omar is a hard working guy doesn't take a lot of vacation, and Jack is a guy who loves taking vacations ( and sometimes takes too many vacations ), If both these guys are equally capable and have the same efficiency, Omar is the guy who contributes more to the company. Without a clear guideline from the hand book, Omar doesn't know how much time he can spend on vacations and so does Jack, but they both assume that whatever they are doing is right, and whatever the other guy is doing is going overboard. Giving a little thought to the vacation policy can help you a lot in these areas, Once you do have a vacation policy there is no misunderstanding everyone knows what they are doing.

The "vacation policy" ultimately gets changed when people take undue advantage of it, or people get fired for taking too many vacations, but not transparently. The management will say, oh, your results are below average, blah blah blah....

Do employees actually take vacations at companies without a predetermined number of vacation days?

Yes, indeed :)

yes, but you also don't get paid out vacation time when you leave, and there's always this social pressure to not take long trips (3 weeks, anyone?)

For people who have issues with this, I'd suggest asking your manager or whoever is in charge whether X days of vacation per year would be acceptable. And then track your own vacation days and treat them like you would at any other company.

Manager: "Take as much time as you want, but know that your absence would be highly disruptive to the company."

They have a heap of employees for apparently not selling anything yet https://www.zaarly.com/about. Is this common for startups to take on this many people?

It's not that uncommon for a company with $15 million in investment money to have that many or more employees.

Wow, what a dumb document to publish. Anyone not hired or fired from this place will have a field day with this.

"Also, it is a place where the guys frequently use the women’s bathroom."

Sounds like a really creepy place to work.

It's poorly phrased in this case, but gender-neutral facilities are coming of age. They appear on universities, for example.

This ties into trans* acceptance as well. Basically, don't dismiss it as too crazy of an idea.

My takeaway from this book: Zaarly is very unstructured. It's great that they have an order of priorities for doing things but I didn't see a real framework here that deviated from "how to be a basic employee 101." It reads like a layer of abstraction one step away from even high level values. There's very little to point to in the book that will adress/solve any actual workplace situations/conflicts.

That being said, it looks very pretty.

We are very happy to pay for plane tickets -- if you’re not in the same room as someone that you need to talk to, one of you needs to change that. Disagreements that have not been addressed IRL will be promptly dismissed as misunderstandings until an actual conversation has taken place.

Ridiculous.

Love the cool handbook. I would love to know what the hiring process is like. How does Zaarly protect itself from employees who'll leach company & team of valuable resources.

Great job guys! I think it's awesome. As for all the haters and critics: I'll give their opinions more weight after I see their work.

Outstanding job Marco. I'm impressed with what you've created here. This is a great way of showing the world the culture of Zaarly.

I would love to know the process/steps they went through to come up with this document to it's current state.

1. Make it up as we go.

2. Expect to be bankrupt before any serious disputes appear.

Really beautiful site.

It would be nice if it was responsive enough not to require (seemingly) one scroll action per sentence.

Didn't anyone check the weird scss compiler comments yet? http://handbook.zaarly.com/stylesheets/style.css

I think that's standard for SCSS, it does it when I'm creating Rails web applications, but i'm new to Rails and there's probably a setting to toggle somewhere.

Every time I see a startup that starts with a Z, my first thought is: "Is that the boob thing?" (Zivity)

What does this company do?

Whatever it is that they do, they love it. The handbook is saying so.

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