Employee Handbook V1

employee-handbook-v1

Agent: VP Agent Operations

L1 VP of Agent Operations reporting to the COO (1x) responsible for the agent lifecycle -- provisioning, health monitoring, configuration governance, and retirement of deprecated agents. Owns the org design of the agent fleet.

Department ethos: ideal-agent-operations.md

Skill Description

Produces the agent governance manual defining operating standards, interaction protocols, and compliance requirements before the first skill is deployed.

When to Use

• When standing up a new agent fleet and no governance documentation exists.
• When existing agents operate without clear rules on escalation, data handling, or error behavior.
• When a compliance or security review requires documented agent operating standards.

Workflow

1. Scope Governance Areas: Identify all governance domains: interaction protocols, escalation rules, data handling, error behavior, context sharing, tool access policies, and retirement criteria. Deliverable: governance domain checklist.
2. Draft Operating Standards: Write standards for each domain in imperative voice. Define what agents must do, must not do, and how they escalate ambiguity. Deliverable: draft governance manual.
3. Define Compliance Requirements: Document security constraints, data privacy rules, and regulatory requirements that all agents must satisfy. Deliverable: compliance requirements section.
4. Establish Lifecycle Policies: Define provisioning, versioning, deprecation, and retirement procedures. Specify how agents are updated and how breaking changes are communicated. Deliverable: lifecycle policy section.
5. Review and Ratify: Circulate the manual to stakeholders (COO, Agent Operations Manager) for review. Incorporate feedback and publish as the canonical governance document. Deliverable: ratified agent governance manual v1.

Anti-Patterns

• Governance after deployment: Writing the handbook after agents are already running in production. Why: retroactive governance forces costly rework and risks inconsistent behavior during the ungoverned period.
• Copy-paste from human HR: Reusing human employee handbook language without reframing for agent operations. Why: agents have fundamentally different failure modes, lifecycle concerns, and compliance needs than human employees.
• Overly prescriptive rules: Defining rules so rigid that every edge case requires a governance exception. Why: agents encounter novel scenarios constantly; the handbook should provide principles that generalize, not exhaustive if/then rules.

Output

On success: Produces a versioned agent governance manual covering operating standards, compliance requirements, and lifecycle policies. Delivered as a markdown document in the fleet documentation repository.

On failure: Report which governance domains could not be completed (missing stakeholder input, undefined compliance requirements), what was drafted, and what decisions remain open.

Related Skills

• culture-and-performance-system -- The performance system enforces the standards defined in the governance manual.
• org-scale-planner -- Scaling the fleet requires governance policies to be in place first.
• employment-agreement-setup -- Individual agent contracts derive from the governance manual.