This is a forked and edited version of the Basecamp Employee Handbook because... what a great idea! Thank you Basecamp for making this available and John Casey for recommending it! Thank you Paige Poole for asking me about vacation days and making me realize that we probably needed this.
So, this is where we’ll try to share what’s worth knowing about Pangea Chat the company, our culture, our process, and our history. It’s a guide to understanding what people are talking about when they call for “judo” (redefining a hard problem into an easy one) or whether it’s okay to take your vacation when you’ve only been with us for a month (yes).
This handbook also offers us an opportunity to clarify who we actually are as a company. What do we stand for? How should we work? Codifying those beliefs into a handbook makes them tangible and, most importantly, editable. Making the company our best product is a guiding principle, but we can’t easily improve what we haven’t articulated. So whatever version of this handbook you’re reading, you can be sure it’s not the last. Please do help keep it up to date! And by up to date, we’re not just talking about misspellings and team changes. It’s just as much “we say we’re about X, but what we’re really doing is Y”. So many of these employee handbook projects turn out to be ideal-case prescriptions rather than real-world descriptions. They cover all the ways people should act, not the ways they actually do. That’s a sham. Let’s not write a handbook like that. Let’s keep it honest.