I bet your company has an employee handbook and I bet you have never read it.
I’ll bet some don’t even know that the company they work for has an employee handbook.
And if you have read the handbook, I’ll bet it was only because you were made too.
That’s quite a few bets.
Am I right on at least one of them?
Infinite Monkey Factory, my game development company, is growing up and expanding. With our new projects currently going in to production we’ll hit fifteen full-time employees within two months and with future planned projects for the rest of this year, by the end of 2007 that number could well double.
I’ve been contemplating writing some guidelines for new hires and to ensure that our current employees remember what we are trying to achieve as a company.
One of the tenets of IMF is “Act different.”
I keep reminding people that IMF exists in a bizarro opposite world where we try to do everything differently to almost every other company. I’m trying to give every production position a private office with a door that closes, five weeks of vacation time a year in addition to the regular Federal holidays that everyone gets, required vacation time (IMF shuts down completely between the 24th December of 2nd of January and an entire week at the height of the Summer), employee profit sharing, a democratic company, completely open information, in addition to all of the best hardware and software we can lay our hands on.
So when it comes to the employee handbook we’re going to do it differently to everyone else too.
We’re going to create a philosophy manual instead. I want something like a “Zen and the Art of Game Development” or “Sun Tzu’s Art of Development.” We want the philosophy manual to be something you want to read, and we want it to impart the philosophy of what it is to work at IMF.
And we want it all told in comic strip format.
Maybe Dilbert’s Scott Adams is looking for a new job…