/employee-handbook

Handbook for Brickblock Employees

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Working at Brickblock

Table of Content

Organisation Chart 💼

Who works where at Brickblock is listed in our organisation chart

Working Hours 🕙

Most of us start working around 10am and leave somewhere between 6-8pm. Some of us are early birds, begin at 8am already and go home a bit earlier. You have some freedom here to design your schedule.

The most important thing is that the work gets done so: Let your team know about your schedule and make sure they're ok with it.

  • Need a little more sleep because you were burning the midnight oil? No big deal, just let your team know what’s up.
  • Have a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon? No big deal, just let your team know what’s up.
  • Need to leave early because you’re going to a concert? No big deal, just let your team know what's up and catch up on your work the previous or next day.
  • You get the idea 🙂

Remote Work 🛋

Deep Work Days

On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we all work from the office.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are our "Deep Work" days on which you're free to work from home, or a coffee shop or coworking space if you prefer.

Remote Week

On top of our two weekly deep work days, we additionally allow every engineer 1 full week per year to work from wherever they want. For example you can extend your holiday stay by 1 week and work from the pool, or go home early for Christmas and work from the comfort of your parents' fireplace.

Holidays 🌴

Scheduling your holidays 📅

To allow your team to plan for your absence, please file your holiday requests at least four weeks before you’re going on vacation. Now, if there’s a spontaneous thing happening and you want to take a Friday off on short notice, then as long as your team’s goals are not at risk, that's usually ok, too. Just try to give a heads up in due time, and we'll figure it out together.

  1. Log in to Personio with your Google account
  2. Make a new absence request
  3. Your manager will now automatically get an email with your absence request
  4. It never hurts to also informally give a heads up to your team
  5. After receiving approval, your absence will automatically show up in our shared vacations calendar, so your team is aware
  6. Happy Holiday 🏖😎☀️

P.S. If you put in a lot of overtime and feel like you deserve an extra vacation day, please discuss with your manager. We will always try to find a fair solution.

During your holidays 🤖

  1. Email auto-responder: Set up an auto-responder in your Gmail settings.
  2. Slack: Set your status to “on holiday 🌴” or similar

Festive Season 🎅

Many people take a few days off over Christmas. But not everyone is Christian or believes in Santa Claus and we don’t want to dictate how to use your holiday budget. The only mandatory holiday is half a day for the 24th and half a day for the 31st. On all other days between December 24th-31st you are free to either:

  1. Take time off
  2. Or come into the office
    • If you’d like to work in the office between December 24st-31th, you can open and close it with your key as usual
  3. Or work remotely
    • If you’re not in Berlin between the 24th and 31st, spending time with your family, but you know that you will definitely need a break from them 🙈, then you’re free to work remotely from the comfort of your home.

Overall that means you only have to take one day off instead of four, as we used to do in earlier years.

Holiday vesting 📈

The longer you stay at Brickblock, the more holidays you earn:

  • Every full time employee starts at 23 days per year.
  • For each full year of tenure, you earn additional days for your next year.
    • After one full year: 1 extra day (24 total)
    • After two full years: 2 extra days (26 total)
    • After three full years: 2 extra days (28 total)
    • After four full years: 2 extra days (30 total)
  • The maximum amount of holidays is 30 days.
  • Extra holidays vest after completion of a full year, there is no partial vesting (e.g. no additional 0.5 days after 6 months)
  • Vesting starts at 1st day at Brickblock, regardless of bitsandcoins, Brickblock Ltd, or Brickblock DS GmbH

If you are entitled to more days but don’t know how to get them, don’t worry. The changes will be automatically added to Personio.

Parental Leave 👼

You’re expecting a child? That’s great! As a company, we’re trying to provide you with as much flexibility as we can to organize your work around your new responsibilities for your newest family member. There’s just one very important thing you need to do: Let us know early enough so we can plan a potential absence together and temporarily transition your responsibilities to other team members.

Notice Time

Please let us know at least 8 weeks before the estimated delivery date so we can figure out a plan together.

Legal Parental Leave

If you’re planning to take extended time off as part of your “Elternzeit” please let us know as soon as you can so we can plan around your absence and ensure a structured transfer of your responsibilities to your colleagues.

Extra Holidays

You’ll get two full extra days of vacation during the days of the birth.

Remote Work After The Birth

You probably need some time after the birth to integrate your new family member into your life and care for them. You’re of course free to go into “Elternzeit” or use your holidays to take time off completely. However, if you’d like to keep working we offer you the flexibility to work from home for up to 4 weeks post birth. The only condition is that you agree on a schedule that works for you and your team and are able to come into the office on at least 1 day per week, if necessary.

When you’re sick 🤒

When you’re a little sick-ish 🤧

When you’ve got a cold, but still want to work: Please don’t come into the office and infect your co-workers. Take it slow, have a tea, stay home and work remotely.

When you’re really, unpleasantly sick 🤢

Health comes first. Focus on getting better. Just be transparent about how long it might take so we can plan. As much as we'd like to do this purely on a trust basis, for insurance reasons we require a "sick certificate" ("Krankschreibung" in German) from your doctor from the 3rd day of your absence. So if you're sick Monday and Tuesday, it's all good. If you're also sick on Wednesday, we need the paperwork for our insurance.

The Tools We Use 🛠

  • We use 1Password for managing our passwords and secrets.
  • We use GitLab for managing our code.
  • We use GSuite for email, calendars, spreadsheets, slides, and file management.
  • We use Notion for documentation, meeting notes, and as an internal knowledge base.
  • We use Postman for developing and testing our APIs.
  • We use Slack for team messaging. To avoid Slack being too big of a distraction, we recommend turning off all notifications, except direct messages and mentions. It’s also okay to turn off Slack for a few hours if you need some focus time. Just make sure your team knows what’s up and when you’ll be back so they can plan around your schedule.
  • We use Trello to organize our work.
  • We use Zoom for video chats.

Security 🔒

As a financial services provider, security is extremely important to us. We're handling millions of Dollars worth of transactions, so you need to act with utmost care when it comes to security.

Passwords 🔑

  • Use 1Password to manage all Brickblock-related passwords — no exceptions.
  • ☝️ Don’t re-use a password. Always create a new one.
  • Use of 1password’s password generator for creating safe passwords.
  • Read the article "It’s a Huge Mistake to Memorize Your Passwords"

2-Factor-Authentication 2️⃣

Phishing Emails 🎣

  • Email is NOT a secure medium. Always apply a healthy dose of skepticism to all emails that are asking you for internal information
  • Only open email attachments when you’re 120% sure the sender is legit. Special care needs to be taken around *.zip or *.exe, *.dmg, or *.vbs files — they’re almost always malware or viruses
  • When you receive a “strange” email from a co-worker, make sure to ask the person on Slack before following any links or opening attachments. Their account could be compromised, or the “FROM” field in the email is fake
  • We've had cases where scammers where pretending to be our CEO to extract sensitive information from employees or wire money to scammer's accounts.

Growth 💪

Your personal and professional growth is very important to us!

One-on-Ones 👥

You’ll have regular 30-60min one-on-one sessions with your manager to:

  • Check in how you’re doing
  • Give bi-directional feedback (your manager to you, and you to your manager)
  • Discover and discuss opportunities for growth

Learning New Skills 🤓

If you want to learn and grow your skill set, we'll support you in any way we can. So if there are any courses/classes/seminars you want to take, books you want to read, conferences you’d like to go to, or else:

Talk to us. Just explain to us how the company can also benefit from your learnings, and we'll try to find a way to make it happen.

In case of physical or digital goods, just get written approval (Slack or Email is fine) from your manager and then send an Amazon link to the Finance Team. They'll order it for you.

Using Your Growth Budget 💶

If your contract includes an annual growth budget, here's how it works.

Get approval from your manager

You don't have to fill out any annoying forms. Just get a quick written approval from your manager. Can be via email or even slack. E.g.:

You: Hey Boss ✌️
  there's a very interesting course about XYZ on udemy.com
  Would love to do it as part of my growth budget. Is that ok?

Boss: Sure! Approved 🙂

Buy It

IMPORTANT: You will need an invoice that is addressed to Brickblock

Two options:

  1. Pay by yourself and reimburse later 💵

    If it's urgent, or some Black Friday deal is running out: You can always pay with your personal credit card, and we'll reimburse you later.

  2. Pay with a company credit card 💳

    Reach out to our finance team with the written approval from your manager and ask them to pay it for you. If you ask nicely, they'll usually do it on the same day 🙏.

Send us the invoice

It's critical that you always get an invoice in the name of the company. Otherwise, we won't be able to reimburse you!

The correct billing address is:

Brickblock Digital Services GmbH
Ohlauer Straße 43
10999 Berlin
USt. ID (VAT ID): Ask our finance team for this information

Fitness 🏃‍♀️

Your physical and mental health are very important to us.

We will pay up to €44 per month towards your fitness expenses. That can be your monthly gym membership or yoga studio fee, a headspace subscription, or the race registration fee for that half marathon you're training for.

Why exactly €44? Because it's the legal limit in Germany for tax-free bonuses. Every Euro above would incur taxes and social security costs for both you and us.

How to reimburse

Every employee receives a Givve MasterCard. You will get 44€ topped up on your card every month and will be able to spend it towards all physical or mental health-related expenses. It works just like a regular Mastercard, except that you can’t get money out from the ATM.

  1. Get written approval from your manager for your expense (informal slack approval is enough)
  2. Use your Givve card to pay your expense
  3. Send the receipt to our finance team along with the written approval from your manager

Expenses 💵

We trust you to spend money wisely. It’s simple: Are you acting in the best interest of the company? If yes, then it’s pretty likely that you’ll get your expenses approved.

So if you’re booking a flight, you don’t need to buy the cheapest, 2-layover redeye; buy the direct connection as long as it's reasonably priced.

If you’re attending a conference on behalf of Brickblock and want to invite some business partners, sure, Brickblock will buy your meals. Just don’t buy caviar and champagne for everyone ❌🍾❌. Due to German tax legislation, we can not reimburse your private meals, only meals with business partners.

Try to limit conference travel to once a year, and if you want to extend your hotel stay for personal reasons: That’s cool, but please pay the extra nights yourself 🙂. Unless there are important events before or after the conference (meetings, networking events), that’s OK of course.

If you have questions about what “spend it wisely” means, just ask!

Getting Approval

Expenses need to be approved by your manager. For small things (office supplies, cables, USB sticks...), a simple slack message asking for approval is sufficient. For more substantial expenses (new laptop, expensive conference ticket, etc.), please email your manager.

Receipts / Invoices

Always make sure to get a written invoice with our official company address as the recipient:

Brickblock Digital Services GmbH
Ohlauer Straße 43
10999 Berlin
VAT ID: DE317623147

Reimbursement

We reimburse expenses quarterly. Please make sure to send all expense reports and invoices to our finance team (cc your manager) before the end of the quarter. If you had a large expense and can’t wait until the end of the quarter to be reimbursed: talk to us.

Company Credit cards

We have Pleo credit cards for senior-level employees. Not everyone will get one but if you do, here’s how it works:

  • You have one virtual and one plastic card; both are Prepaid MasterCards.
  • With the Pleo app for your smartphone, you'll get real-time purchase notifications and you can scan receipts on-the-go.

What you have to do:

  1. Watch this Video 👀 to understand how it works.
  2. Check out this presentation that explains what and how you can make use of the cards here
  3. Always upload the invoices or receipts - it’s super easy to add them to your app or on your desktop. Pleo will ping you to add the receipt, so you won’t forget to do it ;)

Limits

Management will set the limits per employee. It entirely depends on your role. If you're a Business Developer that's traveling a lot, then you'll need a higher limit than somebody that spends most of their time in the office or working remotely. Just talk to your manager to figure out the right limit for you.

Pleo Expense Policy

We compiled a list of things that you can use your card for. If you need something that's not listed here, just ask your manager or the finance team and we'll figure it out.

Here's what's explicitly approved:

Digital Card

Digital services or recurring fees. Typically this will be services for the company such as GSuite, Trello, or Slack; or software licenses such as Adobe Creative Cloud, WebStorm, etc.

Plastic Card
  • Meals with business partners or team meals when approved or paid for by the respective team lead.
    • Please always write down with who you were dining and what the reason for it was. We need this information for our tax advisor.
  • Business trips
    • Flights to and from the destination, train tickets, bus tickets or taxi receipts at the destination
    • Hotel or Airbnb at the destination
  • Transportation to and from business meetings
    • Please take public transport if available and reasonably fast. Taxi or Ride-sharing in all other cases is ok as well.

Need Hardware? 🖥

If you need specific hardware for your work and it isn’t ridiculously expensive, we’ll always try to make it happen. Please write an email to your manager that answers the following questions:

What do you need?

MacBook Pro 13''
CPU: 3.5GHz
RAM: 16GB
SSD: 256GB
Link: https://www.apple.com/de/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=MPXV2D/A&step=config

How much does it cost?

€2.599

Why do you need it?

Need the extra CPU because for developing, I need to run many CPU-intensive processes (e.g., Tests, Docker, Virtual Machines, Web servers, etc.)

Need the extra RAM because for developing, I need to run many processes in parallel (e.g., Frontend Server, Backend Server, Database, Ethereum Node, Browser in Development Mode)

Email Signature 📧

Here's how to use our company email signature using Gmail:

  1. Download the Email signature file file and open it in a browser window
  2. Select and copy everything (command + A, command + C when you're on a Mac)
  3. Open your Gmail settings and paste it into the ‘Signature’ field
  4. Update the signature with your information (name, email, etc.)
  5. Above the signature there will be some space; this is where the Brickblock logo should be placed.
  6. Click your cursor on the gap and then click the ‘insert image’ icon above the email signature box. You can find the logo at: Brickblock’s Google Drive —> Design —> 5. Assets —> Logos —> Email signature
  7. Select bb_logo_blue.png
  8. If all looks good, scroll down to the very end of your Gmail settings and click Save Changes
  9. Try it out! Send an email to your private email address and check whether everything looks alright. If not, just reach out and we'll figure it out together.

Thanks to Basecamp for the inspiration