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Making a People Operations Wiki on Coda
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Making a People Operations Wiki on Coda

How much can I contribute to my HSA? What’s the travel policy? When do we get paid? Where do I file this receipt for reimbursement? etc. etc. etc.

Why Coda for wikis?

If you work on a People team, you’ve likely been asked these questions... and probably more than once. At Coda, we use our product to make information as easily accessible to our employees as we can. Having it all in one place makes sure that employees have the all the information they need at their fingertips, and saves our People team a ton of time.
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What’s in this doc?

Along with this primer on decisions we made in building our people wiki outlined below, we’ve included our wiki content starting
. We scrubbed some information out to protect private information - hopefully you can still get the gist.
If you need this at your company, feel free to make a copy of this doc use this as a starting point!
Make a copy

Some choices we’ve made on our People Wiki

👥 Grouping relevant topics

We have our People Wiki grouped into 5 main sections, which you can see along the left side of this doc.
Within each section, we have as many subpages as we need, easily adding, removing and consolidating as our programs evolve. The doc is searchable, so even if a Codan doesn’t know what category their question belongs to, they can easily search for mentions across the wiki.

⚙️ Consolidating and automating Q&A

If one Codan has a question, it’s likely others do, too. In the page of this doc, we have a table of each category, and a of every question that Codan have added.
On each page, we include a callout and button to add any questions. Clicking that button adds a new row to the Q&A table and applies the current page’s category.
Each page shows a filtered view of the the table by the category so it only shows relevant questions.
If you want to get extra fancy, that sends you a Slack message or email for whenever a new row is added.
We hide the categories and base table on our page to keep the doc looking clean.

📄 Embedding pages to collect information from disparate source

The content in our wiki isn’t strictly limited to folks from our small People team. We lean on Finance, Recruiting, IT, Legal, etc. for content. Rather than make our partners keep their policies up to date in multiple places, we use embedded pages to display and link docs from across the business.
Here’s an example of an /embed in action:

Writing Principles to spark your writing

Here are some writing principles we recommend to make your Wiki, a powerful one!
Conversational tone. Write as if you’re talking to a friend. This will make it more relatable and less formal.
Provide real-life examples. It’s often helpful to break down concepts, especially when it may go over someone’s head like taxes and withholdings, or rollovers, by applying an example so they can picture themselves in that common situation.
Break up the content. Use subpages and headers to get your point across, quickly, so readers won’t have to read through large chunks of text
Use searchable words. To help employees find information on a particular topic, think of common words or phrases used. It’s trickier for employees to think of “HSA” or “COBRA” but they’ll likely search “health care” or “benefits”.
Leave a spot for questions. Having a Q&A accessible on each page will make it easy for your employees to know where to post their question.
Add your POC. In case they want to follow up with a person directly, this alleviates your employee not knowing who to go to.

walking

Start your walk through of our Wiki here at .

If you have any questions or want to know how Coda People Team runs on Coda, shoot me an email at leah [at]


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