One company has made its employee handbook public so other companies can learn about dispersed workforces
The pandemic has been a tricky navigation for most businesses but the timing of one of the biggest disruptors to business in modern history couldn’t have been more fortunate for the founders of Oyster – just as COVID was taking grip in China in December of 2019, they were incorporating their global HR software platform as a company.
“Yeah, the need and appetite for global employment rapidly materialised during that time and as a result of that, our category has seen wild success,” said Matt McFarlane, director of people operations at Oyster.
Oyster is a HR platform that enables workforces to seamlessly hire global workforces by providing an infrastructure that creates an environment where dispersed global talent can thrive. The software provides solutions for everything from 100% digital onboarding with localised compliant contracts to global payroll and equity packages.
“We’re certainly not breaking new ground here, but as a category, global employment is definitely still emerging,” said McFarlane. “A large part of the functionality is built out in the platform in terms of navigating local laws or nuances to employment within those respective countries,” said McFarlane.
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Despite being barely 3 years old, Oyster has 600 employees, who work from 70 countries. They’re proud of they’re dispersed workforce and want to see other companies making the same move.
Recently, the company made the move to make their full employee handbook available online with the note, “We’re sharing our best practices so that other companies can learn and be inspired to build distributed teams.”
“Because so much of what we do internally ourselves, can be used to aid our customers, it seemed from our perspective, a natural progression to want to make that available to companies that are looking to leverage that global talent marketplace, so we did take that step of making it public, so that other organizations and people teams could benefit from those global employment practices that we are seeing work best.” explained McFarlane.
The online handbook is comprehensive, explaining everything from how Oyster does meetings and manages projects to how you socialise and how you might expect to be appreciated, along with the usual mission, vision and values and a list of the software tools you’ll be engaging. McFarlane said that two-year project had been a long journey. “There was a lot of investment put in to making sure it was robust enough to facilitate such rapid growth for the business,” said McFarlane.
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“A lot of companies are still in this situation where they're more surviving than thriving necessarily when it comes to things like distributed work practices, and so this is our opportunity to try and help make that seem a little bit less daunting. And a little bit more functional for not even just customers, but I guess people that are in distributed web practices,” said McFarlane.
Working as an HR person in the HR software industry McFarlane said was exhilarating. “I've never worked somewhere where the thing that I do day in day out is part of the product in a sense and where I can really relate to and be a sounding board for our product and our development teams because ultimately my role is a customer of our product as well, so from that perspective, it's, it's exhilarating. I really enjoy it,” said McFarlane.
