MBA1044 How to Create a Team Handbook For Your Company

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show Bite Sized Business Goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons. The Real World. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the hundred dollar MBA, a complete business training and community online over at 100mba.net and in today's lesson you will learn how to create a team handbook for your company. A few weeks ago I attended the Running Remote Conference in Bali. Had the pleasure and the honor of sharing the stage with some great speakers. I spoke about how to motivate your remote team. But at that conference I learned a ton from other founders from other companies. I got a lot of takeaways and one of the takeaways I want to share with you is from GitLab's co founder Dmitry Zaborajicets. I've been practicing that last name, but Dmitri is a great guy. Got to know him at the conference and his speech was all about Get Lab's team Handbook. And I want to share with you how you can create your own team handbook even if you have a small team. How you can do it with minimal work, get your team involved and how it can be a great recruitment tool for future hires for those who are thinking about working for you. A handbook can be extremely useful for somebody who's joining your team right from the start. They could basically search any term for any question they have and get answers immediately rather than asking somebody. They might be embarrassed or maybe they don't want to waste somebody's time. But sometimes they will ask somebody and I'll tell you how the handbook comes into play when they ask teammates. So instead of just going to conferences learning and keeping all the learnings to myself, I want to share it with you because because we're going to be creating our own team handbook at our team. So I'm super pumped about doing that for us and Sharing with you the process on today's episode. So let's get into it, let's get down to business. So at the Running Remote conference, Dimitri from Getlab, the co founder of Getlab, shared the story behind how they built their team handbook. And he talked about how, you know, sharing information about how a company does something, whether it's how many leave days you have, do you have maternity leave, what's the process? If I want to go on vacation, if there is an emergency I have to attend to, who do I speak to? All that kind of procedural stuff is quite easy to discuss and share with others when your team is small, when you have 1, 2, 3, 5 people on your team. But as you start growing from five to 10 people, it starts to get harder and harder. And in his case, GitLab is growing. They have 300 team members and counting. So when somebody joins, they need a central place for them to go. If they have questions somewhere they can find answers. Enter the team handbook. So they started creating this handbook, but instead of having somebody in charge or a team of in charge creating a handbook and then disseminating it to the team, they made it a collaborative effort. They created a simple site, a wiki. Actually, if you're not familiar with the term wiki, it's basically a site that other people can edit, not just the admin, just like Wikipedia. So they created this wiki and they gave access to everybody on the team to edit it. So it became a running document. It's always in draft. He even said that at the speech. You know, our team handbook, even though it's established and it's well known still in draft, things change. What you see in the handbook today may not be there tomorrow. And it's not the responsibility of one person or the CEO to write this handbook. The whole team writes the handbook. And what happens is when somebody asks a question, say for example, a new hire asks a question, how many days do I have for maternity leave? Somebody on the team might have that answer because they went on maternity leave. And they will write that answer. They will actually add it to the handbook and then refer that answer that's in the handbook that they just wrote to the person that just asked it in Slack or in their communication tool. So that way there's a record of that answer and a reference to the answer. And as the days went on, as the years went on, that handbook got bigger and bigger and bigger. In fact, if you printed out this handbook, it would be over a thousand pages. But what's so great about it is that there's a search bar and you could just search for, for anything and find your answers. And if it's not there, you can add it. If you are part of GitLab, this handbook has made a lot of waves and a lot of people know GitLab for this handbook. In fact, when you type GitLab in Google, the first thing that comes up as a suggestion is GitLab handbook. So how can you create one for yourself? Well, I'm creating one for our team. Well, I should say we are creating for our team because again, I'm not going to be writing it myself. The whole team's going to be writing it and contributing to it, editing it, changing it. So the first thing you need to do is get your technology straight. Number one, this is gonna be the easiest way for you to do this because normally a help desk or knowledge base theme or website will have a search bar on the homepage and people can search for terms, search for topics, and then you can list the topics or the categories on the homepage. This is gonna be like set up automatically because the nature of this theme. Now, if you're not familiar with WordPress, it's pretty straightforward. We recommend WP Engine. You get 20% off if you go to wp eng.inmba and use coupon code WPE20OFF. You can install WordPress in about five minutes and find a theme in their directory for free. Or you can buy one. Where we recommend is ThemeForest. ThemeForest is a great way to buy premium WordPress themes. So once you install your theme, you got your WordPress site set up. It's a knowledge base. Now. Now you need to add some articles. So I would recommend by writing the first article, any piece of information you think would be helpful. It could be like your values, your company name, your company's values, and that could be your first article. Now once you have your first article up, you now need some contributors. You need people that can write new posts or new articles for this new team handbook. So you could just literally make everybody on your team a user. They don't have to be admin, they just have to be a user where they have edit and read access. This is very simple to do on WordPress in the settings page. And if you need any help, the friendly folks at WP Engine can help you out. And from there I'll write a second article, but this time I would video capture it. Do a screen capture using QuickTime or whatever screen capture software you use on your computer. So you can share with your team how this is done. They log into the WordPress site, show them how to create a new article, how to publish it. Done deal. Now you want to host your teambook publicly on your company domain, so you can install this website on a subdomain. So for example, with us, webinar ninja.com we are going to host this in our subdomain of handbook.webinar ninja.com and this site is going to be public. This is the beauty of the handbook. You can write a little blurb in the beginning of the handbook on the homepage that, hey, this is always in draft and you can take a look at what GitLab writes. And it's very simple. Say, hey, this is a running document that we create as a team. But this is what we're all about. This is our handbook. These are our rules. This is what to expect if you are thinking about working for us or working with us is what I should say. So when people are searching your business, when they see a job opening, they're doing a little bit of homework. They know what to expect and it gets them excited to work for your team. Now, GitLabs aren't the only people that do this. There are plenty of companies that have public handbooks. You could check out basecamp's public handbook, GitHub. It's not really a public website, so to speak, but you still can read it. But I really love GitLab's open creation, open collaboration with the team. That model is great and it just doesn't make you feel like you have the burden of writing this whole thing by yourself. The whole team cultivates this handbook together.

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To wrap up today's lesson, one of the most important things you're going to have to do when you start creating this team handbook is you got to get your team in the habit of, of contributing and announcing. If you just say, hey, we're creating this team handbook. Here's a few articles, here's your access to edit. This is what you're supposed to do and you just leave it and never touch it again and never talk about it again, you're asking for trouble. What you need to do is reinforce the fact that you need to be contributing and announcing. So every time you add to the handbook, you gotta ask them, hey, please announce it in the chat, announce it in our, you know, team collaboration software. And it can happen organically or you can actually give them a nudge. So say for example, one of your colleagues is asking for vacation leave and discuss with them, here's your vacation leave policy. This is what we have. And they are applying for leave. Say, hey, can you add this procedure in the handbook before you go on leave? And make sure you announce it. So it's like a just in time contribution to the handbook. You do the same when you think of something. When you have a procedure that you want to add to the handbook, add it, announce it, make it clear to the team that it's everybody's job to create this handbook together. This is awesome because it creates a sense of unity and also creates a sense that, hey, this is our company, this is our team, and everybody's responsible for creating a great environment and a great handbook. One thing I want to add is that once you start having a few articles, 5, 10, 15 articles, you may want to start creating some categories. Categories are very easy to create in WordPress. And that way on your homepage of your handbook, you could see different categories you could search for or you can browse through. And one last thing, if anybody ever asks you a question and the answer's in the handbook, well, if you don't know the answer's in the handbook, check the handbook first and then refer to the handbook. So instead of just giving them the answer, like if a developer asks what's the procedure for submitting code, instead of just giving the developer the answer, say, hey, check the handbook. It's in there. I wouldn't even give them a link. I would just tell them to go and check so they can get used to searching for answers in the handbook, you can follow up and say, hey, if you're having trouble finding the answer, let me know. But it should be pretty simple. That way, you kind of give them an out that, hey, if you still are confused and need help, I can give you an answer and help you out. But you want to again, get them in the habit of going to the handbook, because what will happen is that they'll find their answer, but maybe it's not exactly what they're looking for. Maybe they need more information and they'll get back to you and say, hey, this is what I found in the handbook. Actually, what I'm looking for is this information. You say, oh, okay, that's missing in the handbook. Great. Your answer is so and so. Add that answer to the handbook. Well, there you have it. That's today's lesson on creating a great team handbook for your company. I want to thank Dmitri from GitLab for that great advice. Shout out to you, my man. Great speech at running remote, and great work with GitLab, your team, and your team handbook. Thanks for the inspiration and the great idea for us to implement it in our company. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you haven't hit subscribe, make sure you hit subscribe now so you don't miss an episode by hitting subscribe. You get all our episodes automatically. That way you don't miss a beat. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Admin can sometimes be boring. Probably think, oh, team handbook. That's. That's a lot of work and that's a lot of writing, and that's just not sexy. This is what I love about this concept. There's so little writing that you have to do. Everybody pitches in, so it's not, you know, a laborious task. And as your team grows, as your business changes, this is going to be a running document that changes and updates, and different people will add their contribution. I want to emphasize, don't worry about being perfect. Don't worry about having the perfect document. This is a draft, and it's always going to be a draft. And there may be a few typos, but that's okay. The benefits of this handbook way outweighs a few typos. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesdays, where we answer your question right here on the show. I'll check it in. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.