Don't join a company unless you know how it actually runs.

At Glitch, we've open-sourced the employee handbook that we use to run our company each day, so anyone who joins our team will know what to expect, and to get feedback on how we can do better. We're hoping that other companies will remix and reuse this handbook to open up their cultures, too.

We don’t need to recite all the ways that tech companies are making people nervous these days. From privacy to security to inclusion, every hot-button issue in society seems to be something tech companies are screwing up. That means it's pretty damn hard for people to decide who they want to work for, and what to expect if they're considering betting their careers on any particular company.

At Glitch, we want to do better, and so we’re taking another big step toward being more thoughtful and more accountable for how we run our company. We're sharing a tool that helps us do a better job, with the hope that it helps other companies do better, too.

An Open Handbook

Simply put, we are opening up our company handbook, the set of rules and guidelines and policies that we use to run our company. Some of this stuff will hopefully be obvious, some of it may seem a little unusual (we barely send any email!) and some of it is almost certainly imperfect and needs to be fixed. But we believe deeply that transparency is the first step toward accountability, and by showing how we work, we make it possible to improve that process over time. Since we run a community of people who create with code, we know the power and value of the open source philosophy, and how it lets us learn from, and collaborate with, people all over the world. We want to bring that power and potential of open source to how we run our company day to day.

An Immediate Lesson

As a CEO, this process of encouraging transparency and documenting process has already had positive effects, by forcing me to face my own shortcomings and to reflect on ways I need to improve how I work.

For example, while we were in the process of putting together this handbook to get it ready for the public to see, my colleague Meg pointed out there was a gap in how we talk about running meetings. We had set a goal of sharing the responsibility for note-taking during meetings so that administrative work doesn't fall solely on underrepresented people in the workplace, and is shared equally by all. But while that was our stated policy, Meg pointed out that she'd ended up taking notes almost every time during a regular meeting that we both participate in. Even though we sit just a few feet from each other in our office, I hadn't noticed that we'd put that subtle burden on her, and worse, I hadn't noticed the gap between the ideals that we espouse and the daily behaviors that we actually practice while working.

It's a relatively small example, and one that wasn't too hard to fix — Meg quickly created a small Glitch app that randomly designates one person as note-taker for each meeting — but it was a meaningful flaw in the way that things work, and we were able to catch it and fix it. Due to having a transparent, documented process, each of us has the permission to point out where we're falling short as a company from the goals that we want to achieve in our workplace. The fact that the rest of the world can see our goals only helps to increase that accountability.

So it's not about being perfect, and we're certainly not pretending that our company always gets these things right. I'm definitely not saying that I as a leader always get these things right — I'm still learning a lot each day about how to follow through on our values, as well as how our values need to evolve to accommodate new people on the team, and new circumstances in the world.

Being A Better Place To Work

We firmly believe that one of the best tools that we can give ourselves, and other companies, to help do better is a clear and transparent handbook listing the processes by which we make our organization a little smarter, a little kinder, a little healthier, a little more thoughtful each day. We hope many people will take this handbook to their own organizations and improve it, and share what they learn. We've already found a huge value to sharing this handbook — our newest employees get up to speed faster because they already know how key functions in our company operate, even before their first day on the job.

But most of all, we hope that seeing a public, documented, accountable version of how our company runs makes the closed, unaccountable processes at other organizations seem archaic in comparison. We believe that creating innovative and inclusive products is only possible if we're innovative and inclusive in the way that we run our company. If you agree, then perhaps you should consider joining us at Glitch, too.