👋ARMA Handbook

This handbook explains our culture, processes, and approach to empowering self-directed Bible study, with an invitation to new hires to help keep the handbook up-to-date and honest.

For over 3 years, we didn’t have a handbook (or any documentation for that matter) at ARMA. In those 3 years, when a new person joined the company, they were expected to figure things out for themselves. But as we've grown our “introduction by immersion” style has stopped working. New hires felt lost and isolated, and their first weeks or even months on the job were stressful because of it. It can be daunting to join any young startup, but perhaps ARMA Courses in particular, given our unique position in the church tech space. There’s as much to unlearn as there is to learn. Prior to this handbook, navigating that path was somewhat haphazard and almost entirely word-of-mouth. For a company that prides itself on clarity and self-directed learning, that just wasn’t sustainable.

So, this handbook is where we’ll try to share what’s worth knowing about ARMA Courses - our culture, our process, and our short history. It’s a guide to understanding our approach to empowering people to study the Bible for themselves. This handbook offers us an opportunity to clarify who we are as an organization. What do we stand for? How should we work? Putting those beliefs into a handbook makes them tangible and, importantly, open to improvement. Making the organization our best product is a guiding principle, but we can’t easily improve what we haven’t articulated.

If you're reading this as a new hire, please help us keep it up to date and honest. It's harder for those of us who have been here a while to spot where reality diverges from the ideal. Please take advantage of your fresh perspective to question things.

This handbook is an ever-changing team effort. If you want to suggest a change just jump into Slack and let us know.