Documents for you to read and agree with before becoming a Figure.NZ employee 🤓

There are 5 documents for you to become familiar with before you become an employee of Figure.NZ.

1. Job description 📄 : This is a short document that gives specific details about the job you’re being hired to do. You need to sign this to say you agree with it before you start. Each employee of Figure.NZ has their own job description. The template of our job descriptions is available below, and the CEO will give you a personalised version to sign.
2. Employment agreement 📜 : This is a legal agreement that includes the formal structure of our relationship, your rights, our rights, and how we’ll navigate situations together. All employees of Figure.NZ have the same terms. You also need to sign this before you start. The template of our employment agreement is available below, and the CEO will give you a personalised version to sign.
3. Team templates 🖊 : In your job description you’ll see what teams you’re part of. Each team completes a template that lays out specific and important details of the team, like its purpose and what it’s responsible for. You need to read and understand the responsibilities of your team before agreeing to your job description and employment agreement.
4. Figure.NZ’s values 💖 : Our values describe how we behave and treat each other. It’s important you agree to uphold our values, like agreeing to be inclusive and thinking about the needs of others as you work. If there’s anything in our values that makes you uncomfortable, please talk to the CEO before signing the job description.
5. Tohu (where you are now) 🔎 : This is an evolving document that holds the current body of knowledge about Figure.NZ as an organisation. The previous 4 documents are included as part of Tohu (minus personal details about your job), but there’s a whole lot of other information here that we think is helpful for you to read before agreeing to become an employee. This includes details such as our purpose, who’s in the team, who our partners are, the services we offer, and how we work as an organisation.

All of these documents will evolve over time as we learn and grow. Changes that affect you will be made with you.

Job description 🎖💪🏽

Basics

Title: [your title]

Start date: [your start date]

Salary: [your salary]

Type of position: [full-time, part-time, permanent etc.]

Hours of work: [your hours of work]

Who you report to: CEO

Your areas of responsibility

Agreement

Employment agreement 📜

This is an agreement between you and us, Figure.NZ Trust, your employer. We’ll call Figure.NZ “we” or “us” from now onwards in this document.

It’s an individual employment agreement, and we’ve entered into it under the Employment Relations Act 2000. The agreement (and your employment) starts on the date agreed in your job description. It will continue until either you or we terminate the agreement (following the rules we’ve outlined in this agreement).

Any of the clauses in this agreement can be changed or updated after discussion and agreement between you and us.

The basics of your job

What you do

You’re being employed to do the job outlined in your job description (and we’re very excited about it 🎉). Your job might be permanent/fixed-term or casual depending on what your job description says. What teams you’ll be working in day-to-day is also outlined in your job description (more on teams up next). We’ll give you the relevant team templates with your job description, and you can also find them on Tohu.

Figure.NZ is a place where everyone pitches in. You’ll be expected to take on additional duties (within reason) and follow reasonable requests that we make.

Sometimes we might need to change and update the job description, but we’ll always talk to you about this first and get your okay on it. If we want to make major changes, we’ll need to go through a restructuring process.

Teams

Responsibilities in Figure.NZ are set at the team level. We have 8 functional teams.

• Governance 🔭
• Partners 🔮💰
• Data 📊
• Product ⚗
• Development 💻
• Communications 🎙
• Organisation 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 🏢
• Operations 🔨

A person can (and probably does) belong to multiple teams.

Each team has a template that clearly defines the purpose of the team, how it operates, and what its responsibilities and outputs are. It also covers how the team will interact with other teams and work together to achieve organisational goals.

The people in each team work together to agree who will do what, and the role you play in each team may be different. We’ll continue to refine this process as we need to, but we’ve found it works really well for both providing structure and focus, and still allowing flexibility and creativity.

If you have any difficulties with the areas of responsibility your teams cover, or how to best balance your focus across teams, you should talk with our CEO. Our structure and processes have been designed to get the best out of you and create an environment for you to enjoy your job. If either of those aren’t being achieved, then we’ll do our best to change things as is reasonable to improve it.

Location and hours 🗺⏰

Location 🇳🇿

Figure.NZ embraces a remote-first working environment. This means you can work from wherever you like, although we encourage our team to see each other in person from time-to-time. Sometimes, especially when you’re starting out to help you settle into your team, you may be required to co-locate with another team member. We’ll discuss this with you.

Wherever you decide to work from, you’re responsible for your own health, safety, and comfort. We want you to work from the most delightful environment to help achieve our mission.

Sometimes, we might need you to travel for work ✈️. This may include being away overnight. We’ll do our best to give you as much notice as possible about this.

Hours ⏰

You’re employed to work the number of hours per week agreed in your job description, minus reasonable breaks ☕️. You can choose what time you start and end each day.

Your hours can be varied if we chat about it and agree beforehand, but please work in with team meetings and deadlines. As much as possible, we’d prefer if you worked when the rest of our team are online, which is business hours, New Zealand time.

Figure.NZ operates a very high-trust environment and doesn’t generally track employee hours unless it’s necessary for billing a customer — it’s expected that everyone is sufficiently motivated to get things done. If you’re not getting things done, we may ask you to track hours.

Changes to your hours of work

Your hours of work might need to be changed sometimes. This can happen when:

• you and we agree to change them, or
• you and we can’t agree — in this case, we’ll consult with you.

If we need to change your hours, we promise to be reasonable and take into account your personal circumstances and commitments.

Equipment 💻

Figure.NZ is a charity, not a business, and you’ll need to provide your own computer equipment for work. You’re also responsible for insuring your equipment and replacing it if it breaks.

In some cases, we may be able to make a grant available when you start work with us to allow you to purchase equipment you need. Equipment purchased with this grant will still belong to you.

Reporting and management

Reporting 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

We have a reasonably informal reporting structure at Figure.NZ. Officially, you’ll be part of the teams named in your job description, and the CEO will be your manager. Sometimes, like for a particular project, you might need to report to someone else — we’ll let you know who and when if it happens.

Goals and objectives

At least once a year, we’ll work with you to set goals and objectives. When we’re looking at your performance, we’ll consider these goals and objectives, amongst other things.

The organisation as a whole also sets goals each year and teams take on responsibility for making sure we’re making progress on those goals.

Performance reviews

At least once a year, we’ll do a performance review. This is to help you and us understand how we can keep getting more awesome, but we’ll also take it into account when we’re completing any salary reviews.

Secondment

Sometimes, we might think a secondment to a different project, team, client, or customer would be beneficial to Figure.NZ. We’ll discuss this with you, of course, but you’ll need to follow reasonable requests to complete the secondment.

Pay, expenses, leave, and benefits 💰✈️🏝

Pay

You’ll be paid the amount agreed in your job description. We’ll pay you each week on Thursday for the week you’ve just worked. If there’s a public holiday that causes problems with timing, we’ll pay you earlier to make sure you have money in your account by then.

Salary reviews

Every 12 months, on your Figure.NZ birthday 🎂, we’ll review your salary. While we can’t guarantee or promise salary increases, we’ll fairly and honestly conduct the review and you’ll be a part of the process.

Expenses 🚖📎

Sometimes, you might pay for things yourself as part of your duties with Figure.NZ, like taxis or office supplies. Within reason, we’ll reimburse any expenses you incur, but you’re expected to use your common sense with this. If you’re not sure you should be spending money on something, ask first. You’ll need to provide a receipt to be reimbursed — we prefer photos or scans of receipts or emailed receipts because it’s not 1960.

Deductions from your pay

If you ask us to, we’ll take money out of your pay for superannuation, social club (if we ever have one), or union fees, and pay the amount to the organisation you specify.

If you’ve taken leave in advance, and then quit your job before you’ve earned enough leave to cover it, we can also take money from your final salary payment to make up for this.

Leave

Annual leave 🏖🏄🏼

You’re entitled to 4 weeks of annual leave each year. This builds up (accrues) each month on a pro-rata basis from the day you start working for us. You’ll accrue annual leave as you work, basically.

On your 12 month anniversary, you’re legally entitled to start using the leave you’ve accrued. In reality, we’re okay with you taking this in your first year (this is called leave in advance), and you can ask what your accrued annual leave balance is at any time.

If you take unpaid leave, this might affect when you get your annual leave, or how much you get. Check with the CEO if you’re taking unpaid leave to figure out if there’s any impact. Paid leave (including ACC leave, parental leave and leave for voluntary military service) doesn’t affect the amount of annual leave you get.

When you leave, any remaining annual leave will be paid out, even if you haven’t been with us for the full calendar year.

Public holidays 🇳🇿

Figure.NZ is closed on New Zealand public holidays and you won’t be required to work. You’ll get all the public holidays in the Holidays Act off work as paid leave if they’re a day you’d normally be working. That’s up to 11 days each year.

Sick days 😷🤒

Once you’ve been working for us for 6 months, you’ll be entitled to 5 sick days leave each year. This will be added to your leave balances once a year on your 6 month anniversary date. You can accumulate up to 10 days sick leave total.

You can take sick leave when you’re sick or injured, or when your partner or dependents (including children or other people who rely on you) are sick or injured. We work in a high-trust environment, so typically a medical certificate won’t be required. However, if Figure.NZ requests one, you’ll need to provide it.

We want you to be healthy, and for our team to be healthy. If you’re feeling a bit unwell, but think you can still work, please please please work remotely so you don’t spread germs.

If you’re genuinely not well enough to work (this includes physical and mental illness), we encourage you to take leave and focus on getting better. You can also choose to work a part-day if that’s what you’re feeling up to.

Bereavement leave

Grief is hard to process, and we want to be supportive of you. You can take up to 3 days of paid leave when somebody dies and you’re bereaved.

Make sure you let the CEO know if there’s something else we can do to support you during your time of loss.

Parental leave

🎉👶🏽🎉

New parents get leave as per the Parental Leave and Employment Protection Act 1987. There are lots of different parts of the parental leave laws, but know that we’ll support you to take either primary carer or spouse/partner leave (and excitedly favourite your cute photos on Slack), and to return to work when you’re ready, as per all our requirements under the law.

Unpaid Leave

You can request to take unpaid leave from your work here at Figure.NZ. When you request this, we’ll look at the workload we have on amongst other factors to see if we can approve the leave without compromising Figure.NZ’s ability to meet our goals. We’ll also consider your needs, particularly in cases like:

• personal matters/compassionate reasons
• undertaking work-related study
• gaining additional work-related experience.

Other benefits

KiwiSaver

You can choose to join the KiwiSaver scheme. As a new team member, you’ll automatically be enrolled, so make sure you fill in the forms to let us know if this isn’t what you want.

KiwiSaver is a voluntary, work-based savings programme to help you save for your retirement. We contribute 3% to your KiwiSaver (over and above your salary), and you can choose the amount you contribute (this comes out of your salary).

Flu shots 💉

It’s important to us that you stay happy and healthy. If you want to get a flu shot (Influenza vaccination) each year, Figure.NZ will reimburse you for the cost of this. You’ll need to arrange for the vaccination through your GP. Make sure you keep the receipt so we can reimburse you.

Health and safety 🏥💊

Your health and safety, and that of the rest of our team is super important to us. We all need to meet our legal requirements.

Our team has a health and safety policy we all (including you!) need to follow. This covers all types of health — physical and mental. We’ll update this as we need to, and of course, you need to follow the new bits as well as the old bits. Sometimes, other things might come up that mean we need to give you instructions about health and safety. If this happens, you’ll need to follow those too.

On a practical level, we make a commitment to you that we’ll take all the steps we reasonably can to make sure the place you work is safe and healthy. Because we’re a remote-first team, you’re also responsible for your own health and safety, and you’re expected to make sure the places you work are safe and healthy, too.

Like we said under “Sick days”, part of this is making sure you don’t spread germs around where you work if you’re contagious — for example, if you work in a shared workspace. If in doubt (and you’re well enough to work), work from home.

Other important things you need to do or not do

Policies and systems

As a team, we’re regularly defining and refining policies and systems that help us do a great job and have a great environment for all of the team. You need to both follow and contribute to these policies and systems. They’re not there to restrict you, so if you have ideas for how they can be improved we expect you to discuss this with the relevant people in the organisation.

Confidentiality 🙊

All of our team here at Figure.NZ share in a high-trust way. We do our best to share resources and knowledge that we create publicly. We’re also very open and honest about what’s going on in the organisation, from business secrets to personal lives to jokes and opinions.

This means you’ll have access to lots of information that, if you shared it publicly, could hurt our organisation 🙊. We trust you to share responsibly, but you must not share anything that will damage the reputation or business of Figure.NZ.

We’ve got a confidentiality policy in Tohu that you need to follow. Anything in Tohu (our open-access public documentation), can, of course, be freely shared. If it’s not in Tohu, you should check whether you can share it first.

If we’ve explicitly said something is confidential, or if it’s in our non-public documentation, it’s very important that you don’t share this. This includes non-disclosure agreements we’ve signed with our partners. If you’re in doubt about whether something is confidential or not, ask.

This applies both while you’re a part of our team here at Figure.NZ, and after you leave us (though you’ll always be a part of our team in our hearts).

Copyright and other types of intellectual property 💡

Things that you create while you’re at work for Figure.NZ are owned by Figure.NZ. This means you should check with us (and with what our confidentiality policy says) if you want to reuse or share them, and if we don’t give you permission, you can’t.

As a rule of thumb, our brand, software, and data systems can’t be shared or reused, unless we explicitly say so.

Where possible, we try and make things we create open-access, which means you’ll be able to share and reuse them. If you think something should be open-access, get it added to Tohu (our open-access public documentation).

Conflicts of interest

When you’re acting as our employee, you (or other people you work with or have a relationship with) can’t get any benefits (including payments 💰 or other benefits 💎💳) from anyone who has a relationship with us or is planning to have a relationship with us in the future.

This is called a conflict of interest.

You also have to be careful about the perception of conflicts of interest, that is, situations where even if there’s no direct benefit to you or someone you have a relationship with, other people might think that there’s something fishy going on 🐟. Figure.NZ people are often doing other things apart from their day jobs, so this is something that we all have to manage.

If you have an actual conflict of interest at any point or you think that there’s a risk of a conflict being perceived, you need to let us (and the other people involved) know.

When you do, or if we notice an actual or perceived conflict you have, we’ll work with you to decide what you need to do to manage it. You’ll need to follow whatever directions we decide on — this is important as it’s a legal requirement.

Representing Figure.NZ

When you’re representing Figure.NZ, whether it’s online, on social media, via email, or in person (or some other means 📻📺📠), you need to follow our values. This means don’t do anything illegal, and don’t do things that will embarrass us or hurt our reputation. Basically, don’t be a jerk.

Privacy

The people we work with are important to us and we have to protect them. This includes you, and our partners, customers, and anyone else we deal with.

This means you and we need to keep their secrets and respect their privacy, following our obligations under the Privacy Act.

You have to do your own work 🏋🏾

We’re hiring you to do your job, not someone else. This means you can’t just get someone else to do it, even if you pay them (so no assigning or subcontracting your work elsewhere!).

Resolving employment relationship problems 🙋🏾🚣🏽

If you have any employment issues (or any other issues you just want to chat about), talk to the CEO as soon as possible so they can be resolved. If you feel like you can’t talk to the CEO for some reason, talk to the Board.

If we can’t find a way to resolve the issue, either you or us can ask for help from the Department of Labour’s mediation service. If your issue is a personal grievance, you need to talk to us about it within 90 days of the issue occuring (the issue you’re raising the grievance about) . If you can’t do this, you can ask Figure.NZ for an extension, or the Employment Relations Authority can grant you an extension.

If you’ve got a trial period in your contract, you won’t be able to raise a personal grievance for unjustified dismissal. You can, however, raise a grievance on any of the other grounds in the Employment Relations Act. This is sections 103 (1) b-g.

Restructuring and redundancy 🏗

Restructuring when your job might be transferred to a new employer

Under the Employment Relations Act, you get certain protections if we propose to restructure and your job might or will be taken over by a new employer. This type of restructure is defined in section 69OI of the Employment Relations Act 2000.

If this happens, we’ll start talks with the new employer as soon as we can about the impact of restructuring on you. This will include negotiating about:

• whether we can transfer your job to them
• whether transfers will be on the same terms and conditions as this agreement.

We will also:

• schedule talks with the new employer
• tell you about when the talks are and how long we expect them to take
• tell you what we plan to discuss
• arrange for senior representatives to talk to the new employer
• give the new employer all the information we can about you or other impacted employees, including terms of this agreement, unless we can’t because of statutory, commercial confidence, or privacy reasons
• encourage the new employer to offer everyone affected jobs with generally the same or better terms and conditions
• tell you how the meetings go if they relate to you.

Ultimately, it will be the new employer’s decision whether to offer you a position, and on what conditions. If your job isn’t transferred to the new employer, we’ll figure out what (if any) entitlements are available to you. We’ll do this by talking to you about:

• if there’s an option to stay working for us.
• your redundancy entitlements (we talk about these in the next section ⬇️) and what they mean for you (including notice periods)
• whether we can give you any extra support, like a reference.

We’ll consider your feedback, and after the meeting, we’ll confirm the outcome in writing for you.

Redundancy 🏗

Redundancy is when your job isn’t required any more. You can only be made redundant as part of a good faith restructuring process. If this happens, we’ll give you the same amount of notice as we’d give you for normal termination (this is outlined later in this agreement). You won’t get any additional redundancy compensation.

Termination of employment 💔

All good things must come to an end. Sometimes, you’ll end things with us, and sometimes we might have to end things with you.

Normal termination

Whenever you want, you can terminate our agreement by giving us 4 weeks notice in writing. This doesn’t have to be a letter 📝 or anything retro like that 🐦🐎🔥🏹; a Slack post will do. We might decide to pay you out for some or all of your notice period — this is called gardening leave 🌷🌿, and means you finish your notice period early.

We can also terminate the agreement between us, but we need to have a reason (cause) for doing this. We need to give you 4 weeks notice in writing too (again, it can be via Slack or similar).

Terminating for serious misconduct

We all hope it doesn’t come to this, but if things go pear-shaped 🍐, we can terminate our relationship immediately and without giving you any notice. This can only happen if there’s been serious misconduct on your part.

Serious misconduct includes:

• theft
• dishonesty
• harassing one of our team or our customers
• seriously or repeatedly failing to follow our (reasonable) instructions
• deliberating breaking/destroying stuff we own (this includes digital things as well as physical things)
• doing things that seriously damage our reputation.

Note: This is not an exhaustive list.

Suspension

If we need to investigate anything we think might be misconduct, we may ask you to stay home and not work (suspend you) while we’re carrying out the investigation. We’ll discuss it with you before putting you on suspension, and you’ll be paid during this time.

Termination on medical grounds 🏥🤕🤒

Long-term illness is hard, both for you, and for us. You need to be able to focus on your health, and we have work that needs to get done (but also want you to be healthy!)

If you’re off work for 2 weeks in a row because you’re ill, we can require you to go and see a medical practitioner we choose for an examination. We’ll pay for this.

We’ll use their examination results, as well as any results you give us from your own doctor, to decide whether you’re realistically able to do the work required of you in your job, or if you’re too unwell. If you’re too unwell, we can terminate our agreement by giving you 2 weeks notice.

Abandonment of employment 🏃🏼💨

🎶 What I want to know baby, what we had was good
How come you don’t call me anymore, yeah? 🎶

If you’re away from work, you need to let us know. We worry about you, okay? If you’re away for 3 work days in a row (this also includes days with weekends in the middle, like being away Friday, Monday, Tuesday), and you don’t get in touch with us, our agreement will automatically be terminated with no notice period.

We can only do this if we’ve also made reasonable attempts to get in touch with you 📱💻. Which we will, because we’ll be worried!

What you have to do when you stop working for us

Unsurprisingly, when you finish working for us, you have to give us back our stuff. This includes physical things as well as digital stuff like code or design files (this is not an exhaustive list, of course). It also includes things we don’t own, but are responsible for.

Our obligations to each other

Our obligations to you 💞

We promise to:

• be a good and honest employer in our dealings with you
• work with you, and anyone you choose to be your representative, in any aspect of our employment relationship in good faith
• do our very best, and take all the practical steps we can, to make sure our work environment is safe and healthy for you.

Your obligations to us 💞

You promise to:

• follow reasonable and lawful instructions we give to you
• diligently and skillfully do the work required of you (as much as you reasonably can)
• act in the best interests of Figure.NZ and your relationship with us
• work with us in good faith in all parts of our work relationship
• follow our policies and procedures, including our code of conduct, including any new ones we add
• do your very best, and take all the practical steps you can, to create a safe and healthy work environment for you and the rest of our team.

About this agreement ✍🏾

Making changes to it

Either you or we can make changes to this agreement, but it has to be in writing and we both have to sign the changes 🖋📄. If it’s not in writing and signed, neither you or us has to follow it.

Each part of the agreement is independent (severable)

This agreement is severable, which means that each part can be divided up, and if, for some reason, one part isn’t able to be enforced or is illegal, the other parts still apply.

Basically, the whole contract doesn’t dissolve if one part is wrong. It’s like that saying; you don’t throw the baby out with with the bathwater 👶🏽🛁.

Your acknowledgement

Before agreeing this agreement, you can get independent advice about it. That means you can talk to a laywer ⚖ or someone else you trust.

For the record, by signing this agreement you agree that:

• you’ve been told you can get independent advice (see, we even did it right above this!)
• you’ve had a reasonable amount of time to do that
• you’ve got a copy of this agreement
• you’ve read these terms of employment, and you understand both what they say and what they mean for you and your actions
• you agree to follow all the terms of employment, as well as any other policies Figure.NZ has, and procedures we have or implement
• the information you’ve given us is true and accurate, as far as you know.

Agreement

And, we’re done 🎤⬇️

New staff onboarding process

When you start, you’ll be assigned a buddy for your first week who’ll help you work through the following list of things. This process is designed to get you started on your job as quickly as possible, as well as to get you up to speed with Figure.NZ and its processes. Your buddy is also there to help answer any of the “why”, “who”, “what”, and “how” questions you might have.

We’ll make a Trello card in the Organisation board that duplicates these checklists, and as items are completed, whoever is responsible for them will tick them off — because there’s nothing quite like a completed list to make you feel like one of the team ✅😍

Hey buddy

Software access

Fear not! The details of what you need to do to get all the software you need working on your computer will also be explained to you.

Winning with Slack and Trello

There’s some useful information on our systems on Tohu. Your buddy will talk you through this.

Other tools

Background on Figure.NZ and meet the teams

Workplace requirements

How we work together

Update websites

Payroll and HR stuff

At last

Using your computer

Figure.NZ is a bring-your-own-device organisation. That means we prefer you to own the computer equipment you work on. If you don’t have a suitable computer, we may be able to supply or help you to purchase one.

We’ll happily look after your computer as if it was our own, including support, software licenses, and so on. We may require you to perform software upgrades to make your computer compatible with our systems, but we’ll support you to do this and, if necessary, pay for any required licenses.

What you need

An Apple laptop or desktop computer, less than 10 years old and supported by Apple to run the most recent macOS software release.

Our requirements

Whether you use your own computer or a computer we pay for, we have some simple guidelines we need you to follow.

• You must install minor Apple system and software updates as soon as they become available.
• You must use FileVault disk encryption with a passphrase you don’t use anywhere else.
• Your laptop must require a password to resume when the lid is opened.
• You must perform at least one Time Machine backup every day, and these backups must be encrypted.
• You must install major OS updates within 3 months of their release.

If you need help to bring your computer into compliance with these requirements, we’ll assist you.

Hardware purchase grant

Under certain circumstances, we may be able to help you to purchase the required hardware. We do this by providing a one-time grant of up to NZD$3,650 to spend on a suitable computer. Feel free to spend less: remember that we’re a charity and every dollar counts. You can also spend more and make up the difference yourself if you’d like a more expensive computer. In all cases, we’ll work with you to identify a suitable computer for your needs.

If you quit before the end of your first year, you can either repay the money, or give the hardware you bought back to us. After your first year, the hardware belongs to you. We expect the hardware you buy to remain viable for work use for at least 3 years, and the money you spend must include AppleCare.

Figure.NZ is a charity and can’t deduct business expenses like computer hardware, so this grant may not be available under all circumstances.

How we manage passwords

Figure.NZ uses 1Password for Teams to securely store and share logins and password information. As a Figure.NZ employee, we’ll pay for a 1Password account for you to use.

When you join Figure.NZ, you’ll receive an invitation to sign up for 1Password for Teams. By creating an account, you gain access to the services we use.

The signup process works as follows.

• You receive a 1Password invitation.
• You create your 1Password account.
• You install 1Password apps on your computer and phone.
• We share some password vaults with you.

Password vaults at Figure.NZ are divided by team, in the same way that we use Slack and other tools. Depending on your job, you’ll get access to vaults such as Communications, Product, Development, and so on. If you need access to another service, just let us know.

Your 1Password for Teams account includes a private password vault, and we encourage you to use this for your personal logins, even if you don’t intend to share them with us. Improving your personal security reduces the risk of your computer or accounts being compromised, which in turn improves also our organisational security.

When you leave Figure.NZ, we’ll remove your access to work-related items, but we won’t restrict your access to your personal items. We’ll pay for your 1Password account for 3 months after your leaving date, to give you time to export your personal data.

How leave works

Depending on your contract, you may or may not be entitled to sick days and annual leave.

When you’re sick, stay at home and don’t infect others. Please let Ngapera know, or if you feel comfortable to do so, let us know in Slack as soon as you can.

For going on holiday — yay! Lucky you! Please let us know far enough in advance that we can plan around it. We expect you to give more notice if you’re taking 6 months off than a long weekend.

Make sure to add your holidays to our team calendar so everyone knows when you’ll be away.

Leave needs to be logged in our iPayroll system.

How to submit an expense claim

Sometimes, you might pay for things yourself as part of your duties with Figure.NZ, like taxis or office supplies. Within reason, we’ll reimburse these kinds of expenses, but you’re expected to use your common sense. If you’re not sure you should be spending money on something, ask first.

If you’ve paid for something and want to claim the expense back, do the following.

1. Take a photograph, scan, or copy of the receipt.
2. Email it to Rachel Tweedie, our book-keeper, making sure you copy Ngapera in, too. In your email, tell her it’s an expense claim. If the receipt isn’t clear, tell her what it’s for.

How to get mail

Our postal address is:

Figure.NZ Trust
9541/17B Farnham Street
Parnell
Auckland 1052
New Zealand

Postal mail sent to this address is scanned and then shredded. The scanned version is then sent to us by email. If the envelope contains something valuable like a credit card, it gets forwarded to us by courier.

If you need to have a parcel delivered, use the address where you commonly live or work. We prefer not to use postal mail for anything important, so feel free to discourage people from posting us things.

About Tohu

Tohu is a public-facing website, and it’s where you are right now.

It’s about who we are and how we do things. It’s where to find current versions of information about Figure.NZ as an organisation and our current best thinks about running an organisation or about collecting and publishing data.

Tohu runs using Jekyll and GitHub pages. We write documents on our laptops in Markdown using a local app (most of us use Typora).

More about Jekyll and GitHub

You might be wondering why we don’t just have a normal intranet or use documents with tracked changes. We’re a small team, after all.

Part of it is because we want to share publicly — we work hard to build a strong and safe team and to write about how we do that, and we want what we write to be able to be used by everyone.

The other part is that we want to avoid documents with names like final_version2_reallyfinal_noactuallyfinal.docx. Our documentation is living. We’re constantly changing it, and we want everyone to have the same version. We also want to be able to propose changes in an efficient way, and be able to reverse them in an efficient way too, even if they were changed a long time ago.

This means we use something a bit more sophisticated — a version control system. We use git. You don’t need to know much about it, other than that it enables us to do some of the things described below, like create branches (draft versions) and then merge our changes back into the main copy.

How to get access to Tohu

1. Sign up for an account on GitHub, including setting up two-factor authentication.
2. Ping Nat or Rob with your GitHub username and they’ll add you to the Figure.NZ GitHub team.
3. Download the GitHub Desktop app for Mac or for Windows, open it, and sign in.
4. Click the “+” sign in the top right-hand corner, click “clone”, and choose “Tohu”.

This will copy the site to your computer. You’ll get everything needed to build the site, but the bits you care about are the “internal” and “external” folders, which contain the folders for each page in Tohu.

How to contribute to Tohu

Git works using a concept called “branches”. These are like draft versions of the same stuff.

The version of the site you see online is created from the “master” branch. This means anything you add (called a “commit”) to the master branch is published for the whole world to see.

That’s not ideal if we want someone else in the team to check our work first, which we do. So, when we start a new piece of work, we create a new branch for that piece of work. We save all of our work to that branch, and when we’re ready, we merge it back into the master branch.

We have a magical bot that publishes a draft copy of our work on a different URL so we can check how it looks before publishing, too.

Everyone on our team is welcome to contribute to Tohu. To do this, you’ll need to have an app you can open and write Markdown in. Most of us use Typora, which is free.

If you want to add something new to Tohu or change something that’s already on there, follow these instructions.

Creating a branch

1. Open the GitHub app, and make sure you’re on the master branch. You’ll know if you are because the second button in top bar will say “Current Branch” > “master”. If that’s not what it says, click that button to open the dropdown menu and select “master”.
2. Once you’re on the master branch, click the “Fetch origin” button (the third button in top bar). This makes sure you’re starting from the most up to date public version of the site.
3. Click the “Current Branch” button, then click the “New Branch” button.
4. Give your branch a name that describes the work you’re doing. The branch name follows some basic rules.
   1. Use all lowercase letters.
   2. Separate words with a ‘-‘
   3. Start with “bugfix” if you’re fixing a mistake or “feature” if you’re adding or updating content. For example, “bugfix-fix-spelling” or “feature-update-objectives”.
5. Click “Create branch”. Magically, all the documents in the Tohu folder on your computer will now save changes to this branch ✨

Making and committing changes

1. Find the document for the page you want to contribute to. The easiest way to do this is to click the “Show in Finder” button on the main screen of the GitHub app — this will take you to the right folder on your computer. The documents are split into “internal” and “external” folders — you’ll find the section you want in one of these folders. Once you find the right section, open the document called “index.md” using Typora (or whichever Markdown editor you prefer).
2. Write up whatever you need to add, change, or fix. You might like to do this in a separate document and then copy and paste it into the “index.md” file once you’re ready. For help on how to write Markdown, check out the layout section below, and the Markdown docs on GitHub.
3. Where possible, try and write in sections. When you finish a section of work, commit your changes (see next step). We do this so that the version control system has a record of each small change. This makes it easier to reverse changes if we need to.
4. To commit your changes, switch back to the GitHub app. There are two tabs at the top: “History” and “Changes”. You want the “Changes” tab.
5. Your changes will be listed and you’ll see them in the main window. At the bottom left is where you write your commit message. In the “Summary” field, describe what you changed — for example, “fixed images”. Make this as clear and concise as you can, writing in the past tense and all lower case.
6. There’s also an optional “Description” field — you can use this for a more in-depth summary of what you’ve changed, if you like.
7. Once that’s all done, click the blue “Commit” button.
8. Repeat steps 2-7 until you’ve finished making changes. Once you’re done, in the GitHub app, click the “Publish branch” button (the third button along the top).
9. In the #organisation channel in Slack, our magical Tohu Preview bot will have taken what you published and created a special link so we can all see it. Use this to check your changes look right in the browser, and so that other people can see what you’re doing.
10. If something doesn’t look right, or you realise you need to make more changes, repeat steps 2-8 until you’re happy with your changes.

Creating a pull request

1. When you’re happy with your changes, you’re ready to create a pull request. This is when you package up all the changes (“commits”) you’ve made and ask someone else to check your work before merging the changes into the master branch. Your changes won’t be public until your branch is merged into the master branch.
2. You can create a pull request either from the GitHub app, or by logging into GitHub in the browser. Below are instructions for doing it through the browser.
3. Log in to GitHub and go to the Tohu repository.
4. In the “Code” tab, click the button that says “Branch: master ▾”, select the branch you’ve made your changes on from the dropdown menu, then click the “New pull request” button.
5. In the “Write” section, type a short, clear description of what you want to change — for example, “Adds a section about the risk register, including recent wording changes”.
6. Copy and paste in the preview link from the GitHub bot in the #organisation Slack channel, making sure to navigate to the actual part of Tohu your changes are in — this makes it easier for the reviewers and assignee (more on them in the next step) to know what they’re looking at.
7. In the right hand sidebar, do the following.
   1. Add at least one reviewer. The reviewer’s role is to check the content — they’re checking that it’s accurate, in the right place, and reads well.
   2. Add an assignee. The assignee’s role is to merge the branch with your changes into the master branch.
8. Ideally, the reviewer and the assignee should be different people — this adds an extra layer of accountability — but that’s not always possible in a small team like ours.
9. If the reviewer asks for changes, repeat steps 2-8 under “Making and committing changes”, then ask them to review your work again.
10. Once the pull request has been approved and merged, your changes will be live on the site 🎉
11. At this point, the assignee can delete the branch.
12. Sometimes, reviewers and assignees need a friendly reminder that there’s a branch awaiting their attention — ping them on Slack if needed.

Reviewer requests

Reviewer requests are for reviewing content that someone’s proposing to add or change. If someone asks you to review their branch, you need to check that the content is accurate, in the right place, and reads well.

If changes are required

Go to the conversation you’ve been tagged into in GitHub, and do one of the following.

• Describe the required changes in the comment box.
• Click the green “Add your review” button at the top of the conversation, and describe the required changes here.
• Click “Files changed” (the last tab along the top) and view all the changes. Red lines have been removed, green lines have been added. If you hover over the line number, you’ll see a blue plus sign. Click that to make a suggestion for a particular line. You can be extra helpful and click the icon that’s a piece of paper with a + and -. Using this, you can suggest exactly what the change should be.

The author will then make the changes and ask you to review them again.

If no changes are required

• Click the green “Add your review” button, then click “Approve”.
• Even if you don’t have anything particular to comment on, writing something like “looks good to me” will let the the author and assignee know you’ve reviewed the content and are happy with it.

Assignee requests

Assignee requests are for merging the branch with the author’s proposed changes into the master branch. If someone assigns you to their branch, you need to check the content has been reviewed and approved by all reviewers before you merge it into the master branch.

Once you’ve done this and the changes are live on the site, you can delete the branch.

Basics of page layout

YAML header

At the start of each document is a YAML header. This tells Tohu how to manage the document, including information like the title and subtitle.

---
title: The page title // don't change this.

subtitle: a brief description of page to help users figure out if they are in the right place.

hide: true (dark link a page) // whether it's included in nav

colour: "#351b3b" // the background colour for the header.

page_order: 4 // the order it appears on the homepage and in nav.
---

Heading structure

The side menu is generated using H1 and H2 headings.

On mobile, the only navigation you’ll see is the accordion headings, made up of H1. This means you need to think carefully about your H1 headings and make sure there’s enough to indicate the page content.

You don’t need to put the page title as an H1 — this goes into the page metadata under “title”.

Make sure all content is under an H1. Don’t start an article with an introduction, then put your first H1, as this will mean on mobile, there’s a body of text before the menu is visible, potentially pushing it off the page.

Anchor links

If you’re linking to an H1 or H2 section within a page, an ID is automatically generated for that by the menu structure.

Add #title-of-section-name with all spaces replaced by a dash as your link. For example:

[Ngapera Riley](#ngapera-riley)

If there’s punctuation, remove it. For example:

[Measuring engagement](#measuring-engagement-with-figurenz)

Make sure all the letters are lower case, as when the link is created, it will all be in lower case.

Images

Images are stored in the same folder as the index file you’re editing. Add an image to that folder. Give it a short, simple name.

In the Markdown document, add a line below. To add an image, the syntax is:

![description of image for accessibility](nameofimage.png)

The maximum width is 750px. If your image requires a larger size, include two versions in the folder, one at 750px width, and one at larger size.

Display the 750px one on the page, and then link to the full-size one; the browser it’s being viewed in will handle the rest.

[![alt text about image](image_thumb.png)](image.png)

Sometimes, you might need to use a smaller image that is aligned to the left of the page so the text wraps around it. To do this, add {.small} after the image.

About Grace

Grace is our custom software, developed in-house so we can quickly and accurately extract and standardise data and turn it into open forms and visualisations.

It’s the day-to-day tool used by our data team. We’ll share the user guide when it’s available.