We are excited to introduce our new employee manual, the HQ Hub which lives in Notion. The HQ Hub is built to be the central database of the most critical HR information and will grow with us as HQ continues to grow. Here we will share ways of working, our HQ Employee Handbook as well as upcoming events, team building pictures and FAQ’s that anyone on the HQ team can access at any time.  

We hope that you will find it to be a valuable resource and to provide clarity around HR policies and procedures here at HQ. We also hope it will help drive engagement as we continue to hold events across the business. 

In the hub, you will also find a few of the following policies which have changed slightly or are new to HQ and will go into effect on August 1st. We have spent the last several months thinking through these most critical policies and working to standardize them to support HQ for growth.   If you have any questions, please reach out directly to your Team Leaders who have been working with us to understand these changes.

• Paid Time Off: We now have standard public holiday calendars, increasing PTO based on tenure, and a simplified process for tracking time when you work a holiday.  Check out the policy for more detailed information.
  
  
• Simplifying Timesheets:  We are enabling the timesheet submission functionality in Hubstaff and ask that you now submit your timesheets on a weekly basis. Our aim is by tracking this on a weekly basis we will have fewer issues at the end of the month which will simplify the payroll process at the end of each month, and provide better clarity on which clients & projects consume the most amount of our time.
  
  
• Moving to the Hubstaff Break Tool: We will be moving to the built-in Hubstaff Break tool beginning in August.  As with today, all employees will receive 60 minutes of break time per day. Hubstaff will award this break in three increments (2x15min + 1x30min) and you will see your breaks become available each day after one hour of work. Breaks at HQ have always been intended for our people to eat lunch, attend to personal tasks or maybe just take a walk and get some fresh air.
  
  
• Revising our Overtime Calculations: We have noticed a lot of small overtime (~1-3 hours) across everyone at HQ and want to try to reduce this overtime bleed across the board. Moving forward overtime will be calculated after 40 working hours logged each week (excluding breaks & unpaid time). With this change, we want to be clear that our intent is that everyone at HQ continues to take their full break each day. We hope this change will enable each of you to better prioritize tasks and projects. On the HQ side, this change will help us to make better decisions - from expanding teams, to offering the right support during workload influxes. After all, time is the most valuable resource we have.

• Health Insurance Reimbursement: As our team has grown to more and more countries it has become difficult to standardize our health coverage & support across the business. Moving forward, we will begin reimbursing all contractors for Health Insurance fees up to a certain monthly limit depending on their country of residence. We want to be clear that anyone who is covered by HQ today will not lose that level of coverage during this change. There are no planned changes for OBS employees at this time.
  
  
• Making HQ a Great Place to Work: We were excited to see you join and participate in our new engagement initiatives over the last couple of months -  including our weekly team meetings, the Friday Weekly Feel Good, and our new monthly Fireside Chats.  We are grateful for your feedback, and for those who didn’t get a chance to attend, we hope you will in the future.  We can’t wait to see you at our team-building kickoffs which will be followed by smaller regional events quarterly. Stay tuned for more details!

We made many of these changes based on feedback from you. We want to hear from you, so be sure to complete the weekly Heartcount surveys now available via Slack!