How we used a developer-focused solution to improve efficiency by 99%
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good onboarding experience can improve employee retention and productivity. It is also true that while there are approximately ten billion articles on the internet about how to onboard new employees (“be nice, don’t forget their name, remember their start date”), there are surprisingly few insights around how to manage the backend of the onboarding process.
It’s an important subject; onboarding typically involves plenty of time-intensive and fast-moving pieces, and if those pieces get missed due to lack of accountability, poor visibility, or inadequate tracking, it can result in a lacklustre experience for new hires.
The old way: slow, steady, and leaving much to be desired
Out of a need for better project management and tracking, our team built ZenHub, a project management tool that helps teams collaborate by using drag-and-drop cards inside GitHub. We used to manage our onboarding by creating a ZenHub issue for each new hire, and populating it with “one checklist to rule them all”. Seriously, this list was longer than the hobbits’ walk to Mordor. This meant that, much like Sam and Frodo, we ran into plenty of challenges, providing a good-but-not-always-great experience for our newest team members, including:
- Lack of accountability. We couldn’t assign the checklist tasks to the individuals involved, so things would get missed.
- No visibility. The checklist was buried towards the end of the issue, so it wasn’t always clear if it had been actioned (or if it even existed).
- Vague tracking. With a checklist, something is either done or not done. There was no way to tell what was awaiting action, in progress, or finished. Identifying the deadline for each task was also a challenge.
An epic application of developer-focused tools
ZenHub has a feature called epics; they allow you to organize what we call a theme of work (essentially, a collection of task related to a larger project) and attach issues to it (pro HR tip: new hires LOVE it when you refer to them as a “theme of work”). We created a ZenHub board for onboarding, started adding our new hires as ZenHub epics, attached onboarding tasks to each epic as a series of issues, and assigned each issue to a single team member to manage. We also added pipelines and milestones to show the status of each issue and when it was due.
Making this change helped us resolve several of the challenges we were facing:
- Accountability. Each issue is assigned to one person, who is responsible for seeing it through to completion.
- Visibility. Using pipelines, we can easily see if an issue is awaiting action, in progress, or completed. This means we know if we’re on track to have everything ready for a new hire’s first day.
- Accurate tracking. In our old system, it wasn’t always clear when onboarding tasks were due. By using milestones, each person assigned to their respective task(s) knows when it should be completed.
The feedback from internal teams and our new themes of work (oops, team members) was great: people had the tools they needed to start making immediate impact, and felt supported as they ramped up in their first few weeks.
Thinking quick to fix an unexpected roadblock
While everything ran smoothly once we added the details for each new Axiom, it was taking us around 30 minutes to add the issues every time. It was not the fast and scalable solution that we were going for — so we automated it.
One of our engineers wrote a script (and built a scrappy but usable interface), allowing us to simply enter the information for each team member, and BAM — we’ve saved 29 minutes (the time it takes to walk from our office to Body Energy Club, order a smoothie, and walk back). We’ve hit our protein macros for the day, and everyone is happy.
Finally, we achieve “serenity now”
We built this system in the spirit of ‘done before perfect’ — an Axiom Zen core value — and there are still plenty of opportunities to improve it. We’re exploring ways for new hires to self-onboard using ZenHub, and building out automation to help us manage other processes, such as relocations, more effectively.
Something else interesting came out of this process. We started out by optimising our onboarding to be more efficient, but realised along the way that while efficiency is good, adaptability is more important. Our onboarding process shifts rapidly as we experiment with different approaches, and there’s no value in having the world’s most efficient onboarding process if it quickly becomes obsolete.
Takeaways for onboarding at your startup
- Build your onboarding process for adaptability over efficiency.
- Checklists are fine, but be aware of their limitations. For processes with a lot of moving pieces, try using a system that allows you to track more than simply “done” or “not done”.
- Make it easy for the people managing the process. Our team is extremely familiar with ZenHub (*cough*, we built it), so it makes sense for us to manage our onboarding there, rather than jumping between multiple different systems.
Written by Rachel Barclay
Edited by Yasmine Nadery
