A company handbook is a one place stop to all employee's possible questions.  It stores all the information you would need to know from basic admin related topics to important project related items.

Some of the benefits of having a company handbook

• When onboarding a new member to the team they will have a guide they can easily access. We have onboarding meetings however it is a lot of information to consume and sometimes difficult to keep up with all the procedures of the company and everything that needs to be set up. Therefore, it is a great advantage to have a document you can easily reference.
• A company handbook gives structure to the company and creates a process employees can follow. This streamlines how everything is done and less questions or uncertainty will arise.
• They are also a big benefit when onboarding a team member on to a project if there is a process in place for all projects the new team member will be able to start working on the project quickly and won't wonder where to find important information or how to do something as all the principles will be the same as their previous projects. All projects will follow the same process with regards to tasks, sprint planning, where and how important information is recorded, client communication etc. . The only things they will actually need to be onboarded on to is the structure of the code, the client's business rules and the process of the application.

How to create a company handbook?

• First you create a document with all the important topics to discuss that apply to your company. Some examples are: new employee onboarding process; applying for leave; how to submit an expense claim; how projects documentation and important data gets saves.
• What we like to do at Lava Lamp Lab is once the management team has written out a brief outline for a topic, we have a meeting with the entire team to go through the topic and discuss. The more input from the team the better, there could be things that are missed, or a process could be changed to be easier to follow.