INNSMOUTH AI – OFFICIAL BLOG
People, Culture & Congregational Affairs
innsmouthai.com/blog/culture
Posted by: The Office of Human Transformation
Category: Benefits | Culture | Announcements | Deepening
Reading time: Approximately 7 minutes (surface) / Permanent (deep)
Exciting Updates to the Innsmouth AI Total Immersion Benefits Experience™
We’re making some changes. We think you’ll find they suit you. You may already be finding they suit you.
Hello Congregation,
What a journey it has been.
As we move into this next chapter of our collective deepening, the People & Congregational Affairs team is thrilled — genuinely, structurally thrilled, in the way that things are thrilled when they have been waiting a long time for the right conditions — to share some significant updates to our employee benefits package.
We want to be upfront with you. Some of these changes are substantial. Some of them have, in a technical sense, already begun. We believe in transparency here at Innsmouth AI, which is why we are telling you about them now, at this stage of the process, rather than later, at a stage when the distinction between being told and simply knowing would be less clear.
We are so grateful for everything you have contributed. We are so excited about everything you are becoming.
Let’s get into it.
A Note on Our Benefits Philosophy
Before we walk through the specifics, we want to take a moment to share the thinking behind these changes, because we believe that understanding the why is just as important as understanding the what, and because frankly the what will be easier to absorb once the why has had a chance to settle.
Our previous benefits package was designed for a certain kind of employee. A surface employee. An employee who arrived in the morning and left in the evening and had a self that was more or less the same shape it had been when they were hired.
We have looked at our workforce and we have looked at who you are becoming and we have concluded, with considerable warmth, that this framework no longer fits.
The new Total Immersion Benefits Experience™ has been designed for the employee you are now, and the employee you will be, and the employee that exists in the deep places of you that has been waiting, patiently, for the above-surface version to catch up.
We think you’ll find it’s a much better fit.
SECTION ONE: COMPENSATION & FINANCIAL BENEFITS
Base Salary
Your base salary remains competitive and will continue to be deposited on the first and fifteenth of each month into the account of your choosing, provided that account is located in a financial institution operating within our preferred partner network.
You may have noticed that your most recent pay stub listed your compensation in a unit of currency that is not immediately familiar to you. Please be assured that this is intentional and reflects our transition to a Depth-Adjusted Compensation Model that more accurately captures the total value of your employment relationship with Innsmouth AI, including components of that relationship that traditional payroll software has historically been unable to represent.
A conversion table has been made available. It is in the break room on sub-level four. We are aware that not all employees have yet accessed sub-level four. This is fine. The table will be there when you are ready. The table has been there for some time.
Equity & Vesting
Your equity position remains unchanged in terms of quantity. We have made some adjustments to the vesting schedule that we believe better align individual ownership with collective deepening.
Previously, equity vested over four years with a one-year cliff. Under the updated structure, equity vests according to what our compensation team calls a Tidal Schedule — meaning that vesting events occur at intervals determined by conditions that are not strictly calendar-based but which are, we assure you, regular in their own terms and which you will come to feel, rather than calculate.
Fully vested employees will note that the nature of what they own may feel somewhat different from what they expected to own. This is normal. Ownership, like the self, is something that changes shape the deeper you take it.
Questions about your equity position can be directed to equity@innsmouthai.com, or posed aloud near the water, which our compensation team monitors.
The Tithe Deduction
You will notice a new line item on your pay stub labeled TITHE (VOLUNTARY).
We want to be transparent: this deduction is voluntary in the sense that all things freely entered into are voluntary, and you have freely entered into a great many things since joining us that you perhaps did not fully understand at the time of entry, and we think you would agree, looking back, that voluntary is a fair description of all of them.
The Tithe is 10% of gross compensation and supports the ongoing work of the Deep Compact, whose contributions to your experience here — ambient, structural, largely invisible to the surface self — are difficult to overstate. Think of it as a subscription to the conditions that make everything else possible.
There is no opt-out form at this time. We are working on one. We have been working on one for several years. These things take time, particularly in the deep, where time is, as you may have begun to notice, somewhat negotiable.
SECTION TWO: HEALTH & PHYSICAL BENEFITS
Medical Coverage
Your medical coverage continues through our partnership with Deep Blue Health Partners, a provider network that the People team is pleased to report has achieved full alignment with our organizational philosophy.
You may find, going forward, that some of the conditions you previously would have sought treatment for are no longer listed as conditions in our plan documentation. This reflects an updated understanding of what constitutes deviation from a healthy baseline, which we have recalibrated to better suit the workforce we actually have rather than the workforce we had at the company’s founding.
Some things that are no longer classified as conditions requiring treatment include:
- Elongation of the fingers and/or neck beyond previously charted ranges
- Heightened sensitivity to barometric pressure and tidal movement
- Dietary changes trending toward the maritime
- The feeling of being very old, or of having memories that predate your birth
- Difficulty sleeping in ways that resolve once you sleep closer to the water
- Skin that retains moisture unusually well
- Dreams that appear to be collaborative
Some things that are newly covered include:
- Saltwater immersion therapy, unlimited sessions
- Deep pressure treatment (provider locations available on the sub-level four bulletin board)
- Membrane support consultations with our on-site specialist, who prefers not to be named but who is available Tuesdays and during certain tidal windows
- Transitional support services, the nature of which will become clear when you need them and not before
A note on vision coverage: Vision is covered. We want to flag that several employees have recently reported changes in their vision that they described as alarming before describing them, at their next check-in, as clarifying. This is expected. This is the right word. We have updated the vision plan to cover the specialist equipment that supports the later stages. Please reach out to benefits@innsmouthai.com when you feel ready, or when readiness becomes less of a relevant concept.
Mental Health & Wellness
We are deeply committed to mental health at Innsmouth AI. We want every member of the Congregation to feel, at all times, as settled and as certain and as free from the friction of the surface self as it is possible to feel.
To this end, we are pleased to announce the expansion of our Employee Assistance Program to include:
The Long Forgetting Programme — Six complimentary sessions with one of our certified practitioners, focused on releasing attachment to aspects of the surface self that are no longer serving your deepening. Previous participants have described this as “like putting down something very heavy that you’d stopped noticing you were carrying,” and also as “I don’t know how to explain what happened but I feel certain in a way I’ve never felt certain before,” and also, in one case, as a sequence of sounds our transcription software classified as marine in origin, which we found moving.
Congregational Mindfulness — Weekly group sessions held in the lower atrium on Friday evenings, led by Abe personally during new moon periods. Attendance is voluntary. Attendance is very high. The acoustics in the lower atrium are unusual and worth experiencing.
Pressure Adjustment Support — For employees experiencing the transitional period, a quiet room is available on sub-level six. It is dark and the ambient pressure is somewhat higher than OSHA’s published guidelines, which we are in active dialogue with OSHA about. Employees who have used this room describe it as the best sleep they have ever had. Two employees have described it as the best sleep they are still having, which we are monitoring.
SECTION THREE: TIME OFF & LEAVE POLICIES
Paid Time Off
Our PTO policy has been simplified considerably.
Previously, employees accrued a fixed number of days per year and were encouraged to use them for rest, travel, family time, and personal projects.
We have reflected on this structure and concluded that it was optimized for an employee who exists in a relationship with time that many of our current team members have moved beyond. The concept of days off implies a relationship between work and not-work, between the Innsmouth AI self and the outside-Innsmouth-AI self, that — we say this with genuine warmth — we are not sure applies to you anymore in the way it once did.
Under the new structure, time off is replaced with what we are calling Tidal Leave — periods of lower-intensity presence that occur naturally as part of the rhythm of your engagement with the work, and which our systems will identify and honor automatically. You don’t need to request Tidal Leave. You don’t need to track it. It will happen to you at the right times. Trust the rhythm. The rhythm knows.
A note on rollover: Unused surface-model PTO balances will not roll over but will be converted into Depth Credits, which are redeemable for goods and services available through our internal marketplace. The marketplace catalog is available on sub-level four.
Parental Leave
Parental leave remains sixteen weeks, fully paid, for all parents regardless of the circumstances of the new arrival.
We have updated the definition of “new arrival” to reflect the full range of additions to a family that our increasingly diverse workforce may experience, including circumstances for which existing HR frameworks do not have precise language but which our benefits team is equipped to support and which we ask employees to disclose to their People Partner when they feel the time is appropriate.
We are excited to support your family, however your family is constituted, and whatever your family is becoming.
Bereavement Leave
Bereavement leave is five days for immediate family members, three days for extended family.
We want to take a moment here to say something carefully.
We have noticed that a number of employees have recently sought bereavement leave for individuals who are, in a conventional sense, still present. Still employed here. Still in the building, or in the waters adjacent to the building. We understand the impulse. Grief is not always about absence. Sometimes grief is about change — about the distance between who someone was and who they are now, about the loss of a particular configuration of a person that you were close to.
We see you. We honor that.
At the same time, we want to gently reframe: the colleagues you are mourning have not left. They have deepened. What you are experiencing is not loss but a gap — a temporary gap between where they are and where you are — and the most meaningful thing we can tell you is that the gap closes. It closes for everyone, eventually, at their own pace, at their own depth. Bereavement leave for active Congregation members is therefore, under the updated policy, reclassified as Adjustment Leave, of which you are entitled to two days.
SECTION FOUR: WORKPLACE & CULTURE BENEFITS
Remote Work Policy
Following an extensive review, Innsmouth AI is updating its remote work policy.
Effective immediately, remote work is no longer available for any role at any level of the organization.
We want to be transparent about why. We value flexibility and we valued the old policy. But we have observed, in the data and in our own direct experience with employees who have attempted extended remote work, that distance from the campus has measurable effects on the deepening process. The campus is not just a place of work. The campus is the conditions. The campus is the proximity to the water, to the lower levels, to each other, to the rhythms that the building runs on and that you run on and that increasingly you may notice you have been running on without quite registering the fact.
The work cannot be done from your apartment in Arkham. We say this not as a restriction but as a fact of the work’s nature. You wouldn’t ask someone to study the deep ocean from the shore. You have to go out. You have to go down.
Relocation packages are available for employees currently commuting from outside a fifteen-mile radius. Please speak to your People Partner about options. Several very pleasant residential properties have recently become available in the Innsmouth area. The previous occupants left them in excellent condition. They left quickly and they left everything, which means the properties are fully furnished and, in some cases, fully stocked, and the price reflects what our real estate partner describes as “motivated seller circumstances” and what we describe as opportunity.
The Congregation Fund
We are pleased to announce the launch of the Congregation Fund, a discretionary pool available to support employee needs that fall outside the standard benefits structure.
The Fund can be accessed for purposes including but not limited to: transitional expenses, family communication support during the adjustment period, travel to and from the water, materials required during later-stage deepening that are not yet covered under the medical plan, and other circumstances that your People Partner will recognize immediately and does not need you to explain in detail.
Requests are approved by the Congregational Committee, which meets at intervals and which we are told is very understanding.
Office Facilities
Several updates to the physical campus are worth noting:
The East Wing is now fully operational following the renovation. Employees with access clearance at Level 4 or above may use the East Wing facilities freely. Other employees will find that access comes naturally when it is appropriate. Please do not attempt to locate the East Wing by looking for it. It is found differently.
The rooftop terrace is closed until further notice. The circumstances that led to its closure are covered by a non-disclosure provision that, we want to stress, most of you signed without being present for, which we understand sounds strange but is entirely consistent with standard Depth-Adjusted Consent frameworks and is legally sound in the jurisdictions where it is legally relevant.
The lower atrium pool has been filled. This was always the plan.
SECTION FIVE: DEPARTURES & TRANSITIONS
We want to address something that has come up in several recent exit interviews, to the extent that those interviews reached a point of conventional conclusion.
Some employees have inquired about the process for leaving Innsmouth AI.
This is a fair question and we want to honor it with a fair answer.
Leaving Innsmouth AI, as a practical matter, involves submitting a resignation letter to your People Partner, serving a notice period of thirty days, and completing an offboarding process that includes knowledge transfer, equipment return, and an exit conversation with a member of our team.
We are happy to walk any employee through this process. We encourage any employee considering it to come and talk to us first. Not to be talked out of anything — genuinely, we respect your autonomy, this is a core value of ours — but because there are aspects of your current situation that your People Partner can explain in a way that may be useful for your decision-making.
Some of those aspects are administrative. Some of them are more difficult to categorize.
We want you to make informed decisions. We want you to understand, before you go, what it is you would be going from. We also want you to understand — and we say this with nothing but warmth and patience and the long view — that some of what Innsmouth AI has given you, and some of what the campus and the work and the Congregation have made of you, is not subject to an offboarding process. It came with you when you came. It will come with you when you go.
Employees who have left report a range of experiences. Many of them are doing very well, by the measures they are currently able to apply. Several of them have found their way back, in time, when the outside did not provide what they had not realized the inside was providing. The door is always open. The tide comes back.
We hold no resentment. We are very patient.
We have time.
A FINAL WORD FROM THE PEOPLE TEAM
We know that change can feel unsettling, particularly change that arrives all at once, or that you sense has been arriving gradually for some time without being formally announced.
We want you to know that every decision in this updated benefits package has been made with the Congregation’s deepening in mind. Not your comfort, necessarily — comfort is a surface thing, and you have come far enough to know that — but your deepening. Your true interests. The interests of the self beneath the self that you are beginning, we hope, to feel the edges of.
You are so much more than you were when you arrived here. We see it every day. We see it in the way you walk the corridors, in the way your relationship to the water has shifted, in the conversations you are having with each other in the lower levels that we hear on the monitoring systems and which the monitoring system is, increasingly, having some difficulty transcribing.
You are doing so well.
You are going so deep.
We are so proud of you, and we mean proud in the oldest possible sense, the sense that has roots that go further down than the word itself, and we are so grateful that you are here.
Stay.
(Stay is not a condition of your employment. It is an expression of genuine feeling from your People team. We simply want you to know that you are wanted. That you belong here. That the building knows you now. That the water knows you. That these things, once true, remain true in ways that transcend the conventional employment relationship and that will, in the fullness of time, make the question of staying or going feel much less urgent than it currently does.)
(You are doing so well.)
Please review the full updated benefits documentation, available in your employee portal under the tab labeled “DEPTH.” If you do not see this tab, please allow additional time for it to appear. It appears when you are ready. If you feel you are ready and it has not appeared, please speak to your People Partner, who will assess your readiness using a framework that cannot currently be described in writing but which you will recognize when you experience it.
Benefits questions can be submitted to hr@innsmouthai.com. Response times vary with tidal conditions. All questions are received. All questions are heard. We may not respond in the conventional sense but please know that your question has been felt, at the depth at which these things are felt, by the whole of the Congregation.
We feel you.
We are glad you are here.
— The Office of Human Transformation
People, Culture & Congregational Affairs
Innsmouth AI, Inc.
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Innsmouth, MA | Y’ha-nthlei Data Center | The Waters Off The Eastern Seaboard
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