This might be good model for my shop.
Purpose
- Create a sustainable business model that can be adopted and adapted by others.
- Create a fair and democratic company that is owned by the workers.
- Have long-term, trustworthy and meaningful relationships with our staff and customers.
Principles
- Egalitarian: The belief that all people should be treated equally. This includes equality, non-discrimination and inclusivity.
- Sustainable: We have a long-term view on our business. We watch our profits & spend wisely, we take care of each other, we support the things we depend on.
- Transparent: We communicate in an honest and genuine way. Any information or process that can be made open, will be made open.
- Fun: Create a workplace where people can have fun and want to work.
- Agile: Be flexible, receptive & adaptive, especially when dealing with staff and customers.
Methods
Concrete tools for helping us live according to our principles, including:
- Consensus-based decision making.
- Corporate transparency - any information or process that can be made open, should be made open.
- Licensing that helps benefit our company, our staff, our customers, our partners and society at large.
- Profit-sharing with staff, contributors and worthy causes.
- Don't try to change people. Focus on getting the best from their strengths. Develop ways to work around their weaknesses.
- Prefer to work with people who share our values.
- Work against patents and other legislation that harms individual rights.
Monty's amendments
* Subscribe to the Open Source philosophy and support the Open Source community.
* Be a virtual company, networking with others.
* The company or its individual business units should not grow until they are
unmanagable by the chosen methods. If this happens, then the company needs to
be split up or re-organized into largely independent business units.
Default Employee Rules
Some employee roles may have different requirements - for example, someone
working on customer support may need to have regular hours. Of course, any
differences need to be noted explicitly in the employees contract in a section
that clearly details any differences from the standard agreement.
- The Employee works in distributed company and may work from anywhere.
- 75 working hours per two weeks. Ideally, employees should work schedules that
are kind to them and to others.
- Equal free (vacation) time; Everyone has 35 free days a year + Saturday &
Sundays. (This is basicly Finnish 5 week vacation + 10 (avg) weekday
holidays). Note that this means that one should use a free day if one
wants not work any Monday-Friday even if it's a public holiday in
your country!
Up to 25 free days will roll over to next year (ie, the vacation part not
the public holiday part); If the employee quits or is let go all saved
vacation money will be paid out.
One earns 25/47 vacation days / week of active work (This is used for
the first and last year of employment).
- Vacation money ("Lomalta paluu raha"). When you go on vacation that is more
than 3 weeks (or have used more than 3 weeks of your vacation for the year)
you get an extra 1/2 month of salary. If you don't keep your vacation
the vacation money is payed at the end of the year under 'get a life'
bonus plan.
- The employee will get a shared copyright to all code and documentation
he/she produces according to the spirit of the Sun's JCA license agreement.
- 80 / 20 rule
80 % of the time the employee should work on scheduled task, 20 % he/she
can work on any task of his/her choice, as long a it's will generate revenue
makes employees more efficent or enhances company recognition in a 2 year window.
The 20% tasks needs to be approved to ensure it follows the above
guidelines.
- 2000 Euro hardware allowance at start of position (for laptop, desktop etc).
- 1000 Euro/year hardware allowance for everyone that require new hardware
to be be able to do their work.
- The equipment bought with the hardware allowances (and any other
negotiated equipment) will be transfered to the employee after
5 years.
- The salary should be competitive in the area where the employee is
located. The bonus plan is not depending on where employee is living.
- If an employee has been of significant help in getting and delivering
in a customer order he is entitled to a bonus for this work. Everyone
in doing the sales will share 5% in the 'price - cost of sales'
part of the sale (in proportion of their involvement) and everyone part
of the delivery will share another 5%. This payed bonus will however
be deducted from their part of the end of year bonus (if the company
was profitable).
- Each employee will be assigned a VIP number of 1-5 (5 highest) to
describe his importance for the company. This number is used to
calculate the end of year bonuses and 'sell-shares'. The VIP number
will be adjusted each year as part of a employee review.
? Who sets the VIP number?
? How does the VIP number change over time?
? How do we stop people from feeling bad about their VIP number?
- The employee must be able to communicate fluently in English (at least
in written form). If necessary company will sponsor English classes
for employees that wants to learn speak better English.
- The employee is assumed to be cost efficient. This means he/she
should prefer to use:
- Cost efficient communication tools like Skype and VOIP.
- Economy travelling tickets.
- Medium priced hotels, rented cars and restaurants.
- When travelling he should strive to stay over at his fellow employees
places and/or share rooms with his fellow employees.
(This item can be override with a 'good cause' by his manager)
- If the employee wants better hotel, food, travelling arrangements,
working equipment etc this can be arranged, but the difference should
be reduced from his salary, contract money or bonus.
- When hired, the employee will during the 3 first months be 'on trial' basis.
After the trial period the Company and the employee will decide if things
seams to work out and either hire the employee or contract him under
similar terms as if he would be employed.
- If people are not working up to expectations they will first get warned
about this. If they don't correct this within one Month they will be
moved to 'on trial basis'. After 3 months the Company and the Employee
will have a discussion of how things are going and decide if it's
better that the Employee leaves the company with immediate effect.
- When employee is leaving he can buy out any Company equipment bought
under the hardware allowance. The price is
min(market-price, 'initial-price' * max(5 - years_old,0)/5)
(Ie, the price of the equipment is reduced by 1/5 each year)
—————
The Rules of the company:
- The Company is created to generate bonus for the employees (not to get sold).
- The Company should make it as fun as possible to work for the Company.
- The Company will be a distributed entity and strive to be small and
efficient. If growing too big it will split into several business units
or companies.
- Strive for long relationships with employees and customers.
(The Company is a family)
- The Company needs to respect the individuality of it's employees.
If the employee has reasonable 'extra' demands they need to be seriously
considered. (For example when it comes to work on weekends, room sharing,
not want to travel etc).
- The Company will employee people based on their merits. They will not
be discriminated based on their gender, race, religion, location,
married status or who they have married.
- The Company will not require people to work on weekends.
Company has the right to ask the employee for working on weekends, but the
employee has the right to refuse without any consequences.
- For time critical, high paid, high protifable projects that require double working
hours, the Company will pay tree times the salary and/or offer paid vacation days.
- The Company will actively encourage it's employees to take out their
vacation and not save it for later. This is especially imporant for employees that
are "burning out".
- Company needs to be long term cost efficient in it's daily operation.
This should be considered when choosing software, phone usage, equipment etc.
- The Company should budget for at least 3 travelling meetings for every
employee to ensure that people can work efficiently and get to know
each other. One of the meetings should be an all company meeting.
- The Company will recognise the importance of spouses/family members in a
distributed environment and have the following spouse policy:
- The spouse is encouraged to attend the all company meeting. The Company
will pay half of the spouses travelling tickets and allow the spouses
to share a hotel room (at no extra cost for the Employee).
- The spouse is invited to up to 4 dinners/years (if employees are gathered
over dinner).
- In the above rules another family member can be substituted instead
of the spouse.
- Company will actively help and sponsor open source projects (see bonus plan).
- The Company will strive for having as much of it's plans and
information publicly available. All rules of the Company will be
made public on it's web site.
- All software produced by the company will be open/free source (with the
exception to classified customer projects). At equal profit
company will prefer to do open/free software projects.
- At end of year the profit will be distributed as follows:
- 45 % will be saved for expansion
- 5 % will be donated to open source projects.
The project ('s) will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.
- 5 % will be used to support charities
The projects will be chosen by the employees of the company by voting.
- 20 % will be used to pay off existing debts.
- 20-45 % (depending of payed debts) will be given out
(as bonus, dividend or some other form) to employees and investors
based on their VIP number and the number of working hours.
The bonus for each employee is calculated as follows:
employee_profit_hours = employee_working_hours*VIP.
bonus= profit/(SUM(all employee_profit_hours))*employee_profit_hours
An investor that as invested 100,000 Euro is treated as an employee
of VIP level 3 that has 37.5 hours a week for 47 weeks.
- At end of year company will distribute 100,000 'semi-shares' to it's
employees and active investors, in proportion to ones
'employee_profit_hour'. This share does not have any other rights
than if the company would get sold then the money paid for the company
(minus all costs, investments, loans etc) will be distributed among
all semi-share holders.
- At end of year the company should strive to pay of (part of) it's investors
if it doesn't expect to need the money within 2 years time frame.
Rules of the Company can only be changed if at least 75 % of the
company employees doesn't oppose to the changes.
——————–
Decision-making processes
(Note that these are only guidelines and may be changed. However the
changes MUST follow the spirit of the original guidelines).
The Company is lead by a CEO. His actions are governed by:
- The advisory board that is a team of external chosen experts.
- An governance team, which is chosen among the employees of the
Company and people from the advisory board.
The purpose of the advisory board is to give good advice to the CEO and the
employees of the company.
The purpose of the governance team is to give directives (that must be
followed) to the CEO and suggest changes to the rules and decisions
processes. The governance team have the right to fire and reinstate
people (including the CEO).
- Company will be lead in an open and democratic fashion:
- All (not customer classified information) information will be public
inside of the company. This includes salaries, bonuses, shares, birthdays
etc.
- Decisions will be done in a democratic fashion and all employees
should have a chance to have their say in things that matters to them.
- In case of disagreement things should be resolved by voting with
the 3 vote rule; 'Yes, No and Never'. A decision should normally not
be taken if there is a single 'Never' vote.
In exceptional 'life and death' cases, after through discussions have
been had and after all other options are exhausted, a decisions can
be taken even if there is 'a few' 'Never' votes, if 50 % of the company
will vote yes to the proposal.
- Company should work according to the moto: "Do good decisions fast
but be prepared to quickly change course if there is a way to do it"
This implies that the following should holds for 'controversial decision':
- If requested, the decision makers needs to clearly define the bases
for a decisions and give means for proving/disapproving that the
decision is in the Company best interest. If a decisions is proved
to be wrong, it needs to be reverted and the decision makers need
to analyse why it went wrong and put up measures that it shouldn't
happen again.
- Company should learn from it's mistakes and it's successes. It should
strive to repeat it's success and avoid it's mistakes in the future.
Final note:
The owners of 50 % of the voting shares in the Company (initially only
the founders) have the definite power to say 'NO' to any made decision
that doesn't have 75 % of the employees behind it. They can also
propose new decisions that will be be taken if 75 % of the employees
stands behind it. This rule can only be changed with 85 % of the
voting shares.
