Making Our Employee Handbook Public

Here at Drupalize.Me we spend a lot of time looking at our company, poking at our policies and processes, and deliberately working to be a better company in the world. For the last 2 years, since we became our own company, we've talked about wanting to make our employee handbook public but hadn't taken the time get it done. We review our handbook at least annually and as part of the 2017 review and update process, we decided to also make sure it was in shape for sharing it with anyone who wants to take a look. We've finally gotten the review and editing complete and we have made the handbook available on GitHub. (Note that our company name is actually Lullabot Education; Drupalize.Me is just the well-known brand of our main offering.) Anyone can read the handbook, in addition to being able to fork it for your own use, or provide comments and suggestions through issues and pull requests.

Why make it public?

We certainly aren't the first company to share our employee handbook. There are examples from many other companies out there, like Basecamp and GitLab. We decided to share our handbook for 2 main reasons. The first is so that people who interact with us--customers, partners, communities, and potential employees--can have a more complete picture of who we are and what we are working towards. The values and culture that we cultivate are important to every aspect of the company, not just the internal employee processes. We feel our handbook reflects the things we care about and bring to our work every day and it makes sense to allow everyone that is a part of our work to see where we're coming from.

The second reason is simply that we love to share. Our main job is to share as we learn in the web tech world. We're also learning as we grow in the business world, and see no reason to not share our experience there as well. We hope that others may find something useful in our handbook as they work on their own company and we'd love to have conversations with other people who think about these things.

Please check out the handbook, let us know your thoughts, and feel free to ask questions, either in a GitHub issue or here in this blog's comments.