News and thoughts from the people at EllisLab.

Company Intranet

Posted by Rick Ellis on March 25, 2008

One of the byproducts of having started out as a company with one employee (me!), and allowing our growth to happen organically, is that until recently we didn’t need much in the way of employee documentation, or even internal policies and such.

Over our first five years, until 2006, we had only grown to four full-time employees including me, plus a couple part-timers.  We didn’t need internal documentation for a group that small.  Everyone communicated constantly. 

All we had was a simple employee handbook that covered the basics, the rest we filled in by talking amongst ourselves.  We discussed all important issues, and often made decisions as a group.  It was a good dynamic.

From then until now we’ve more doubled our staff size, and this year we’re on pace to add three or four more team members.  Unfortunately, we can no longer expect new employees to learn our process, goals, policies, history, and culture through osmosis and direct discussion anymore.  As much as I enjoyed the more personal approach of the past, it doesn’t scale.

The solution we’ve decided upon is to create a staff intranet, as a series of blogs, containing everything that an employee might need to know.  The book on EllisLab, if you will. 

The intranet will also help us, perhaps most importantly, continue to integrate new people onto our team and into our culture.  It’s critical that as we grow we continue to maintain our values, and help new employees adopt them.  This is an area where so many small companies screw up as they grow.

Part of me thinks it would be interesting to make our intranet, at least in part, publicly accessible.  Why not share with the world how and why we do the things we do?  Why not be totally transparent?  It could be a refreshing approach…