How We Improved New Hire Onboarding at Teachable
Joining a new company is incredibly exciting and somewhat daunting. Starting at Teachable, I met a million new people, forgot half their names, and got lost on the way to the bathroom. Things could have been better.
The Problem
In an ideal world, everything for a new hire would be set up ahead of time and a new hire would spend day one learning about the company and the people in it.
But often, existing employees, especially in an earlier-stage startup, are busy, new hires (like me) can be reluctant to ask questions or don’t know who to ask, and the resulting experience turns into a seat-of-the-pants trial by fire, instead of a measured, gradual acceleration into the workplace.
What We Do
So how does People Ops solve this? Our aim at Teachable is to put resources and process in place that allow employees and their team to define the scope and content of the onboarding process, while providing a fixed set of standard experiences. In the simplest terms possible, People Ops should aim to make it impossible to fail at onboarding, while allowing a new hire to accelerate as quickly as they want into the day to day workplace environment.
At Teachable, we do this in a few specific ways.
1. The Schedule
We provide a full onboarding schedule ahead of time for your first 1–2 weeks, which transitions from meetings with the team to an objective-driven system. The schedule is sent a few days before your start date, along with a list of things to bring on the first day.
As a new hire, you’ll meet with our department heads (leadership team) to get to know them and the work they do, even if it isn’t immediately relevant to your day to day. You’ll also get a chance to meet people from other teams, both informally through coffees and 1:1s, and formally through inter-team Q&A’s.
Finally, you’ll be tasked with creating your own Teachable School in your first week, to gain familiarity with the product and better understand our mission and impact! Here are a few schools to check out, made by recent hires!
2. Buddy System
New hires get an “onboarding buddy” who they can bounce random questions off (everything you want to know, but are too embarrassed to ask your manager). Your onboarding buddy can also show you around the office and help you get set up in all the right slack channels.
We also set up a couple lunches for your first week, with members of your team and department. Finally, we aim to have a company event roughly once a month, so they’ll likely be an opportunity within your first few weeks to get to know the team in a more informal setting. Events include movie night, happy hours, board game nights, picnics, bring your child to work day, and summer camp!
3. General Documentation
We have some handy references for getting started, including a culture doc that states our mission and values, a Slack etiquette guide to help avert embarrassing @channel incidents, and one-pagers on our company benefits to help you and your family stay healthy and happy. We’re also working on an updated KPI system, to make team KPIs easier to find and understand, even with minimal context.
In addition, our organization chart is supplemented by both a seating chart/office map and an open-source staff directory, meaning you can somewhat reliably locate people in the office, and know what they’re up to! Most of our documentation is kept in Confluence, is open to feedback and is constantly evolving.
Behind the scenes, we have a checklist for physical resources (laptop, keycard, custom equipment, swag) and accounts (Okta, G-Suite, Slack, etc.), to ensure everyone has the equipment and software they need to get started. Some of this (account provisioning) is automated, but we do a checklist review to make sure things are setup correctly.
Why We Do It
We know that onboarding can take a few meetings to get set up, but think it’s worth it for a few reasons. First, the interactions and welcome that a new hire gets can set the tone for their career at Teachable. First impressions count, and can have a big impact on trajectory.
Second, centralizing administration for onboarding eliminates the inefficiencies of a hiring manager or new hire figuring out accounts, process and paperwork. People Ops can build and maintain a customizable process that reflects the needs of new hires, and is also available to answer questions that come up during onboarding.
Finally, having a process means we have something to improve upon! We know the current process isn’t perfect, but having something that we commit to sets the bar, and asking for feedback from our recent hires helps us continually improve the process.
