Onboarding Made Better
Transatlantic: A Brief History of Potato
Potato, a digital product agency, was founded in London in 2010. In 2017, a skeleton crew of Brits arrived in San Francisco to open the US studio. They brought with them a host of wonderful things: charming accents, humane people policies (a minimum of 20 days off per year), and a tradition of opening the main Slack channel with a “Good morning!” every single day.
They brought what they knew, and this included a culture of very light documentation. In the UK studio long tenures are standard, even among engineering—until spring 2021, the “youngest” engineering hire had been with the company for three years. Most of the UK team had been with the company between five and nine years.
In short, they never had to focus on documentation because, odds were, the person who knew how Thing X worked was just a few desks away.
But America was another country.
About Agencies
In agency life, you’ll often sell a project knowing full-well you don’t have the team on-hand to staff hit. But no matter, you rectify the situation in two easy steps:
Sign the SOW
Hire at breakneck speed
Note: I have spoken to many folks at other agencies and they have confirmed that this is also their process.
When we were a co-located team, the team mostly made the onboarding work. The mild chaos was enervating, the whole team was obscenely friendly and eager to help, and people generally figured out how things worked by a combination of chance and dogged pursuit.
Catastrotunity
COVID was a true catastrotunity (catastrophe + opportunity). We were incredibly fortunate to win new work during COVID and in the winter of 2020, we realized we’d need to dramatically increase the headcount of the engineering department. As the sole recruiter and onboarding manager, I needed a way to quickly, cheaply, and warmly share who Potato is and how we work with our New Spuds. I ended up utilizing three principles in the development of the system:
Use tools you already have
Scale yourself
Write it down
#1: Use tools you already have
In the fall of 2020, we moved our entire Employee Handbook to from an internal Wiki page to Notion, championing the site as our new Single Source of Truth (thanks GitLab). Since our team was already using the site to understand policies and share project information, it made sense to use it for New Hire Onboarding as well. Fortunately, the folks at Notion had already thought of that and had a built-in template for getting new hires up to speed.
(Note: This is not Notion sponcon! It was just really helpful).
#2: Scale Yourself
The best advice I got in the early days of my People Ops adventure was from an HRBP at Airbnb who said, “Find ways to scale yourself.”
Once we got our COVID bearings and decided to lean into remote staffing, we needed to develop an asynchronous, high-context, and Potatoey onboarding flow for new hires who lived across the US. And as I wore a multitude of hats in the org, I also needed a system that minimized admin time.
The New Hire Onboarding Checklist
I built two checklist templates inside of the New Hire Onboarding page, one for full-time employees and another for contractors. Once you select the nature of the employment relationship, the checklist auto-populates. The checklist takes them through the following sections:
The Basics (I categorized these as the onboarding tasks that are essential for Day1success as well as those that provide a significant quality of life boost, like how to expense lunch)
Administrative and Internal Tools
Payroll and Benefits
Time Off and Company Holidays
Support and Wellbeing
Career Progression Framework
Training and Professional Development
Performance Reviews
For FTE staff, the personalization step takes about 30 seconds—we add their name, manager, project, and onboarding buddy. (For contractors, personalization takes slightly more time as invoicing/payment terms can be different). This personalized page gets emailed to the New Hire just after we set up their email account.
Prior to this system, I had a series of Google docs that I would convert to PDFs and email to the new hire. It was fine, but could be overwhelming. Even with abbreviated information it ended up being a 30 page document, which was just a lot. However, thanks to the toggle function and internal links, we’ve been able to give folks step-by-step instructions for setting up their ADP accounts or file their expenses in a fun, easy-to-read, and satisfying checklist.
I update the templates regularly, providing additional information and context based on the feedback and additional questions from new employees.
For the next iteration of the checklist, I’d like to experiment with the following:
Gamifying parts of the checklist to help the New Spud learn about company culture, connect with their new teammates, and direct them to information that can improve their quality of life (like, the fact that you can invest HSA funds).
Crafting department specific checklists. For instance, engineering might have a section about best practices.
#3: Write it Down
Our new hires aren’t the only folks who need checklists! As our team added new tools (Figma, Expensify) and processes (shipping laptops to remote hires, “Introduction to Discipline X” onboarding sessions), I started missing missing tasks. A new hire in New York would have to wait for me to wake up so that I could add them to Jira, wasting three hours of their day.
We had previously used BambooHR’s internal checklist function for new hires. While it was great for sharing simple actions (“Collect New Hire Info Sheet”), it wasn’t ideal for communicating multistep tasks, storing blank documents, or for sharing sample comms.
Now we have a clear, easy-to-follow checklist, complete with step-by-step instructions and template emails so cognitive energy can be better spent elsewhere. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow, a new People Team member could onboard a new hire themselves, and with relative ease.
And that’s a wrap! If you found that interesting, perhaps you’d like to read about New Hire Nudges?