Handbook-first documentation
GitLab has a great guide to being an all-remote company with a lot of great info that I’m still reading through and digesting. One thing that stood out to me right away though was their “Handbook-first” mentality:
A handbook-first organization is home to team members who benefit from having a single source of truth to lean on. This type of organization is able to operate with almost supernatural efficiency. An organization that does not put concerted effort into structured documentation has no choice but to watch its team members ask and re-ask for same bits of data in perpetuity, creating a torturous loop of interruptions, meetings, and suboptimal knowledge transfers.
They go on to recommend imposing a 90-day limit on retaining messages for forms of communication that should be more ephemeral, such as Slack. It’s a big shift for most organizations and I know that I need to take the messages that I’ve starred in chat and convert many of them into long-living documents that will be a lot more useful to more people.