New Hire Nudges
To put it plainly, Potato’s people managers are often between a rock and a hard place.
They’re managers, but they’re also ICs who are too often100% billable on projects
We don’t (yet) have a formal manager training program
After robust feedback, our Managing Director (MD) committed to changing the way we bill and staff projects, essentially including a line-item for managerial oversight in our SOWs. But it was a process that would take time, and we knew that not every client would embrace the cost. So while our MD focused on building a financial structure that gave our managers time to focus on people development, I focused on helping our managers make the most of the time they had.
I first investigated formal manager training courses (LifeLabs, ThinkHuman, as well as the training docs from Google’s re:Work) but after talking with the reps, I soon realized my error: our managers barely had time to manage the reports they had; they certainly didn’t have 10-20 of spare time for training. training time available to them. In short, at that particular moment, investing in a 3rd party training service would be throwing good money after bad (and I mean good money; the offerings were not cheap).
Instead, I took a leaf from Google.
In the chapter “Nudge…a Lot” in the book Work Rules!, former Google SVP of People Laszlo Bock wonders “But what if we could get a team off to the right start and avoid its becoming dysfunctional?” Like managers at Potato, Google managers were also time-poor. Bock explains, “Google managers were already busy and took a variety of approaches to acclimating new people to their teams, with no consensus about what worked best.” The experiment Google’s People Ops team ran was this:
“We decided to prompt managers with a reminder about the very small tasks they could perform that would have the biggest impact on their Nooglers, and therefore the highest return on an investment of their valuable time. In the pilot, managers received just-in-time emails the Sunday before the new hire started. Like the Project Oxygen checklist, which showcased the eight behaviors of successful managers, the five actions were nearly embarrassing in their simplicity:
Have a role-and-responsibility discussion
Match your Noogler with a peer buddy
Help your Noogler build a social network
Set up onboarding check-ins once a month for your Noogler’s first six months
Encourage open dialogue”
So I decided we at Potato could try it too. And the idea wasn’t completely foreign; I had already started including “suggested topics” when I set first meetings between New Hires and their managers.
But the potential benefits of more robust nudges—a “whisper course,” in short—were incredibly high for the investment required to get it off the ground. At Google, their experiment generated the following results: “Nooglers whose managers who took action on this email became fully effective 25% faster than their peers, saving a full month of learning time.”
On Research and Plagiarism
The initial draft email took me three days and cost $99 (which was for a digital subscription to Harvard Business Review; I ran out of free articles). When I began working on the project we had a director-level new starter joining us within the week—and because executive onboarding is notoriously bad—I was typing fast.
Plagiarism is bad, full stop. Citing, however, is just fine. Let me tell you about the life changing magic of block quotes. Blessed Laszlo Bock included the entire first paragraph that Google sends to its managers in his book and shamelessly, I copied it wholesale—with attribution.
Old, Weak Nudges
As the person who organized new hire onboarding, on the new hire’s first day I would set a 30-minute, 1:1 meeting between the them and their manager. In the calendar invite I included a short, simple message suggesting some topics the two could discuss. The message I routinely included is below:
Hey {New Hire},
This is chance for you and {Manager} to say hi! If you'd like, y'all can chat a bit about working styles, management styles, 1:1 cadences, any initial goals or expectations, etc.
Have fun!
Google-Inspired Nudges
As Bock noted, “We then had to make sure there were unambiguous steps the manager could take. Our people are smart but busy. It reduces cognitive load if we provide clear instructions rather than asking them to invent practice from scratch or internalize a new behavior.”
In writing the Potato edition of the email, I followed the original Google format of:
The task
Why it matters (with evidence from a reputable source)
How to action it
And that’s a wrap! We’re test driving the program now. I’ll update and let y’all know how it goes.
It Takes Two
I also included links to template emails managers can send to their new reports. The email above is taken from the team at Fellow (a tool we’ve used in the past) and explains that the new hire needs to take an active role in their development, which I loved.
Potato is a company that’s still got a start up heart (and start up struggles) and the folks who thrive are those who take initiative and embrace responsibility. And taking that step can be hard, especially in a remote setting where the social cues might not be immediately visible. So I was delighted to find copy that explicitly championed that kind of self-direction.