Acknowledgements

Why this page exists

A company that publishes its handbook in the open owes a bibliography to the companies whose handbooks it read. The alternative is to present borrowed ideas as instinct, which is both dishonest and less useful: a reader who knows where an idea came from can go and read the original, and the original is always longer and better argued than our summary of it.

So this is the list. Where we took something and then went a different way, that is on the record too.

Handbooks published in the open

37signals taught us that a handbook is a product, not an artefact. Rework, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work and the Basecamp employee handbook are the reason this site is a set of positions you can disagree with rather than a page of values nobody can. We took the calm, the refusal to treat growth as an obligation, and the habit of publishing an opinion with its reasoning attached. We did not take the certainty: they write like people who have settled the argument, and several of ours are still open.

PostHog runs the most honest company handbook on the internet, including the compensation formula and the parts that are awkward. What we took is the willingness to publish a thing before it is finished, and to mark the unfinished parts as unfinished instead of leaving them out. What we did not take is the scale of it: their handbook is enormous, and an enormous handbook has a maintenance cost we cannot pay honestly.

GitLab proved that a fully remote company can write down how it operates in enough detail that the writing replaces the meeting. The idea that a decision is not made until it is written where everyone can find it is theirs, and it is the single most useful thing on this list. We rejected the length for the same reason as PostHog, and we rejected the tone, which reads like internal documentation because it is.

Ways of organising a company

Valve published a new-employee handbook in 2012 describing a company with no managers, where people move themselves to the work that matters. We took the premise that adults will pick good problems if you let them, and we took the desk with wheels as a metaphor. We are clear-eyed about the criticism that followed it: a flat structure does not remove hierarchy, it hides it, and the hidden version is harder to argue with. That criticism shaped how we wrote the pillars.

Semco is the one with the deepest mark on how we actually operate, not just how we write. Ricardo Semler's Maverick and The Seven-Day Weekend are where the arguments for self-set schedules, radical transparency about numbers, and trusting people by default come from. We became the first Semco Style certified company in Spain in 2022 and adopted four of its principles explicitly, which is documented on How we work, including the one we are worst at.

Teal, from Frederic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations, gave us the vocabulary: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose as three separate things rather than one mood. We use the vocabulary and we are skeptical of the developmental ladder it sits on. The idea that organisations progress through coloured stages towards enlightenment is a story that flatters whoever is telling it, and we would rather argue for a practice on its own merits than because it is further up a scale.

Who wrote this site

The content of this handbook is the work of Pat Antuña and Santiago Melluso, who own what it says. Where it is wrong, it is wrong in their names, which is the point of putting names on it.

Corrections are genuinely welcome, and this page is the one most likely to need them: if we have credited an idea to the wrong company, or taken something and failed to say so, write to hello@onetotem.com and we will fix it here.

This site is published under CC BY 4.0, which is the same deal we are asking for above. Take it, use it, and say where it came from.