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.
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
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
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.
📄 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.