About > Employee Handbook
Employee Handbook
Inedo is a small business by design. We don’t run on bureaucracy, but on Chōwa: our Business Culture of Balance.
Many companies have an Employee Handbook assembled from legal templates, HR boilerplate, and years of accumulated bad decisions. It is long, cautious, mostly unread, and quickly forgotten. We are not interested in that.
Our “handbook” is intentionally short because the expectations here are intentionally simple.
Don’t be an asshole.
Like Robert Sutton said in his best seller, The No Asshole Rule, words like bully, jerk, and meanie just don’t convey the same meaning.
You can passionately disagree with someone, and may even use colorful language that is obviously less-than-ideal, but there’s a clear line between being ineffective and inappropriate.
But instead of straddling that line, just don’t be an asshole and learn how to effectively communicate by training with us all on Renraku.
This rule doesn’t only apply to your coworkers at Inedo, but to anyone we have a relationship with, whether over email, in person, on social media, etc. And if you’re going to be an asshole to your friends, family, or random strangers, do it privately — and certainly not at a level that will land you on the news.
Act Professionally.
Do not mistake casualness for carelessness.
Professionalism does not mean acting like you are in a corporate stock photo. It means remembering that Inedo is a workplace, taking your job seriously, and practicing Shintaku: making yourself worthy of trust.
That is more challenging than it might seem. We actively fight micromanagement, which means you will have more freedom here than at many companies. And more responsibility.
We expect you to make mistakes, but we also expect you to own them and practice Kaizen to learn and improve.
Be Flexible.
Flexibility is not just a perk at Inedo; it is a responsibility we all share.
Reliability, communication, and results are more important than where you are sitting at 2:00 PM on a Tuesday. We all have lives outside of work, and sometimes appointments, responsibilities, and emergencies happen during normal business hours. Just Act Professionally and work it out with your team.
But you also need to be flexible. We have teams in Cleveland and Tokyo, as well as customers all over the world, which means not every business meeting will can occur in normal business hours. Just Don’t Be An Asshole and figure it out with whoever you need to meet with.
Write it Down.
As a small business, things can fall apart quickly when important information exists only in one person’s head.
We’re not asking you to complete paperwork for the sake of paperwork, but adhering to Hōkoku ensures important knowledge is shared instead of locked away, helping others see the bigger picture in line with Taikyoku.
If you’re the only person who understands a process, a project status, or the reasoning behind a decision, you’ve created a bottleneck whether you meant to or not.
Write things down and your future coworkers, and your future self, will thank you.
Use our Space Well.
The office is more than a place to work. We like to think of it as a shared space used by community groups, events, meetups, and other things that bring people together. Sometimes for work, sometimes for fun.
You are generally welcome to use the office outside of normal work hours for reasonable things: a board game night, a meetup, a small event, a filming project, or something else that brings people together. If it’s a community effort, we even may be able to host it, help organize it, or even sponsor it. Just make sure to ask!
Life Happens.
We’ve all had a rough patch. Legal trouble, financial stress, family issues, health scares, and plain old life happens to us all. When something serious is affecting you, it will probably affect your work too, which can create even more stress.
Don’t handle that alone. We are not here to pry, but we may be able to offer resources, flexibility, connections, or just plain advice to help you think through what to do next.
The same goes for your career. Our CEO not only wrote Everyone Quits, but even talked about how he effectively quit as the CEO of the “scaling version” of Inedo.
While many on our team are long-term employees, we are proud to have alumni (not ex-employees) who left Inedo to pursue opportunities at other companies or even start their own. We’ll help and guide you in exploring these, wherever they may be.
In addition to this “handbook”, we have a single policy document to describe how Paid Time Off works at Inedo. Long story short, it’s a fairly standard “PTO bank” system, localized for Ohio and Japan as appropriate.
Outside of Chōwa, everything else is generally covered during new employee onboarding as training modules.
But if anything is unclear, don’t hesitate to ask. That’s another reason we like to keep this short.
