Template · 30 min read

The 37signals (Basecamp) Employee Handbook

37signals · GitHub (basecamp/handbook) Free Beginner

This is the lean counterweight to GitLab: a real, Creative-Commons handbook you can fork today, written as short human sections (Getting Started, How We Work, Making a Career, Our Rituals, Benefits) instead of a 40-page policy PDF. 37signals deliberately ran with no handbook for over 10 years and only wrote one when new hires felt lost past ~50 people, so it captures exactly the decisions-and-defaults tone you want. Copy the section list, delete what does not apply to a 5-person Indian team, and add your India specifics (leave policy against actual holidays, PF/ESI once you cross thresholds, notice period).

  • A handbook can be short, human, and voice-driven rather than a legalistic policy document, and still cover the essentials
  • 'How We Work' plus 'Our Rituals' are the sections that actually get read: how decisions and feedback happen, not HR boilerplate
  • It is Creative Commons and forkable, so you start from a working structure instead of a blank page, then localise for Indian statutory bits
Open on github.com ↗

The question it answers

  1. How do I write my first company handbook without it becoming dead documentation nobody reads?

Read with it

  1. This is the reference implementation of your thesis: the handbook IS the process, not a description of it. GitLab's rule that... GitLab Handbook Article · browse 30 min The GitLab Handbook (and the Handbook-First Approach) GitLab
  2. This is the 'why does nobody read our handbook' guide, and it names the real failure mode: fewer than 1 in 20 docs get updated... Slite Article · 15 min read Internal Documentation: How to Build Docs Your Team Actually Reads Slite
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