A introduction from the CEO

Throughout my career I've worked at companies that didn't have a handbook. In that time, I watched as new people would join a company and were expected to figure things out for themselves. This can work for small companies but as we grow from a company of a few employees to many, the “introduction by immersion” style won't work. Joining SALT can be unnerving, given how different some of our practices are. There’s as much to unlearn as there is to learn.

So, this is where we’ll try to share what’s worth knowing about SALT: the company, our culture, our process, and our history. It’s a guide to understanding everything SALT from whether it’s okay to take your vacation when you’ve only been with us for a month (yes), to why we're not a family, and hopefully everything in-between.

This handbook also offers us an opportunity to clarify who we actually are as a company. What do we stand for? How should we work? Codifying those beliefs into a handbook makes them tangible and, most importantly, editable. Making the company our best product is a guiding principle, but we can’t easily improve what we haven’t articulated. So whatever version of this handbook you’re reading, you can be sure it’s not the last. Please do help keep it up to date! And by up to date, we're not just talking about misspellings and team changes. It’s just as much “we say we’re about X, but what we’re really doing is Y”. So many of these employee handbook projects turn out to be ideal-case prescriptions rather than real-world descriptions. They cover all the ways people should act, not the ways they actually do. That’s a sham. Let’s not write a handbook like that. Let’s keep it honest.

If you’re reading this just after joining the company, it’s particularly on you, actually. It’s harder for us slowly-boiled frogs who’ve been with SALT Insure for a while to spot the broken ways. Please take advantage of that glorious, shiny ignorance of being new, and question things.

- Jonathan Simmons