Running people success at a startup is trying to complete twenty tasks in twenty minutes — and then some.

One minute you're pitching your company to a promising candidate engineering lead, and the next, you're evaluating a tool for engagement. Before you know it, it's 5 pm, and you're yet to figure out budgets for the next quarter.

And when you’re doing so much, you end up not focussing on the things that matter, like being thoughtful about how we communicate.

From writing onboarding emails to framing 1:1 templates, from building decks for monthly all-hands to sending a feedback email, creating communications to engage with employees is a constant requirement that we often have. It’s something we’ve struggled to do justice to at Plum, and we recently realized that we’re not alone.

And that’s a problem.

Our hiring emails are often our first point of contact with a prospective employee. An onboarding mail would be the first thing a new employee would read. Our exit process email would be the last thing an employee would receive from the company.

What we write could leave lasting impressions on the people we interact with — our team as well as our prospective employees.

With that in mind, we decided to build a resource to empower us to craft communications built on a foundation of care and empathy. We worked with our marketing team to rewrite our internal emails, scoured the internet for best practices, and even borrowed excellent templates from organisations who had been there and done that.

There’s more about the process and research behind this property, but more on that later.