🔥 The Fire Rises

Greetings Pioneers!

Welcome to the first edition of Open Org’s newsletter. Exciting! If you’re reading this, then hopefully 3 things are true:

1. You are a real human being and someone who is good enough at that to do it professionally (props to Jessica Zwaan for this expression 🙇‍♂️ )

2. You believe the world of work should be more transparent because it’s how you build trust between leadership and employees and employers and candidates.

3. You’re ready to do something about it and want to belong to a community who are equally dissatisfied with the status quo.

If not, you might wanna unsubscribe, this one’s not for you.

Still with me?

Good.

👉️ What is this newsletter going to have in it?

This is our regular drop of tips, resources, templates and insights from our small but mighty community of amazing People People trailblazing workplace transparency in the pursuit of a less opaque, less busted world of work.

Ready to dive in?

Let’s go.

Free shit to make your life easier: The Employer Handbook Template

We love Notion. We love handbooks. The most open of Open Orgs have {Notion} Handbooks. So what did we do? Yeah, you guessed it! We curated about 50 of our favourite sections from some amazingly transparent companies (see blog post-write-up), stitched them together with superglue, and sweat and then laminated the output into a glorious Frankenstein of transparent policies.

Why did we laminate it?

To catch the tears of joy.

Kidding, but seriously it’s kind of a good start if you’re about to build your handbook or reset it. 8000 people took a look, what ya waiting for? 😉 

No slimy email capture btw, it is a gift…

💡 Transparency Tip

💡 Don’t say “hybrid” in your job ads. Do → explain whether there are expectations written or unwritten about time in/out of the office and make that clear.

💡 Don’t just try and attract talent with your career site. Do → try and repel the ‘right’ talent too.

Bonus tip: Don’t do a Netflix for transparency’s sake (FTS). Read more.

📚️ Hot stuff right now

1. Book: Built for People by Jessica Zwaan. It’s awesome.

2. Tool: Check out 'Open Org’s Employer Handbook Template' – your go-to notion template for fostering transparency in your organisation.

3. Post: How to make the case for transparency.

4. Framework: Check out Redhat’s Open Decision Framework if you’ve got rumblings that your SLT are ivory tower decision-making.

5. Tool: Check out sli.do to level up some transparency on those difficult topics that people tiptoe around your SLT with.

🎉 Transparency Shoutouts

Let's give a round of applause to these legendary pioneers who are pushing the bar higher when it comes to radical transparency:

Lavinia Mehedintu: Open-sourcing pay transparency data for L&D pros. Great initiative. 🎉 Read more.

Shelby Wolpa: Great post on the power of building a culture of documentation for remote teams. 🎉 Read more.

Ghost: Unreal transparent financial reporting. 🎉 Read more.

Pat Caldwell & Send: Awesome viral post on their gender pay gap and pay transparency journey. 🎉 Read more.

Jim Miller, Abhik Pramanik & Ashby: Balanced job ads which try and attract and repel the right talent. 🎉 Read more.

Dan Matthews & Linearity: Great post sharing their new employee handbook. Love to see it 🎉 Read more.

Join the Transparency Revolution

Looking to roll up your sleeves and go deep on transparency? [OO-PL] 'Open Org People Leaders Cohort' is kicking off on September 12! Join 12 other progressive People people beginning their organisational accreditation journeys.

Applications are open for the next 10 days.

Not quite there yet? Check out openorg.fyi for more info or chat with Adam and me to learn more. Our cal is here.

p.s we’re just starting this up so if you know other People People whose jam this might be, please forward it on/share in Slack! Also if you got this forwarded to you and want the next one too, here’s the link.

With 🧊 & 🔥 

John 

The Open Org Movement