How Teachable adapted to a remote onboarding experience
Since Teachable went remote in March 2020, we’ve onboarded over 100 new employees. The process went from various degrees of preparedness to — what we hope is — a well-thought-out experience.
Teachable was conceived as an in-office first company, and we took pride in cultivating an office environment where employees looked forward to coming into work. Once we went remote due to the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about what it meant to be an employee at Teachable. While our business was growing, our employees felt increasingly isolated — especially our new hires. A lot of our social onboarding aspects, such as team lunches and coffee meetings, didn’t translate as easily as we hoped.
In order to create a better experience, we had to get organized.
We created hiring classes. Folks would start on a specific day and go through various onboarding meetings together, such as meeting with our People and Leadership team. This helped create a sense of belonging from Day 1 as you were able to meet with people who were also new and experiencing Teachable firsts with you on a consistent basis.
To get people excited before they even started, we sent swag boxes with Teachable branded t-shirts, water bottles, tote bags, and notebooks. Our Training Manager, Christina Gizinski, said she was so thrilled to receive her swag box that she was posting it all over her social media.
On the hiring manager side, we improved our onboarding packet template, adding more information on Teachable culture and knowledge. We included links to our intranet, information on our Employee Resource Groups, and fun Slack channels. We recommended managers have daily 1:1s during the first week and make sure that new hires have meetings with everyone on the team during their first two weeks. This made sure to create a sense of inclusion and team support at Teachable.
We also started hosting Meet and Greets so that new hires and managers could have a virtual happy hour with folks from different teams. Our People team organized different virtual games and utilized breakout rooms to prevent any sort of awkwardness. One of our new colleagues said they really appreciated the improv-like games as an easy way to connect without having to make small talk.
In order to meet more people at the company, we encouraged new hires to join our #coffee-break Slack channel that was integrated with Donut. People were paired at random once a month and tasked with setting up an introduction meeting. This was a great way to meet folks outside of the department since there were no longer run-ins at the coffee station at the office. We also created a separate channel specifically for those who started remotely and integrated it with Donut as well. This way people could opt for more frequent meetings than just once a month.
“Onboarding with Teachable was really smooth and felt very personable even though everything was remote,” Rady Pheng, our Recruiting Coordinator, said.
There was a huge learning curve when we first started onboarding remotely, and 18 months in, it’s still a work in progress. Our People team frequently syncs to discuss how we can create a better onboarding process that places the employee experience first. We’re constantly improving and are excited for everyone who is going to join the Teachable team next year.
