Welcome Aboard — Virtually!
March 25th, 2020. I was just finishing a call with Ankur, the co-founder of TinkerLabs. I was joining them the next day. Ankur mentioned that I will be on-boarded — remotely. I was really wondering how that would work? I had worked previously at MNC’s where on-boarding required me to go to the office physically, sit with the HR team, know the organization, understand their culture, meet important and relevant people and finally sign off some documents. How could all of this be done virtually? Has anyone tried this before? I was intrigued and was waiting for the next day with palpable excitement.
It was early the next morning, when I received an email from Ankur — It was different from all the emails I had seen before in my fledgling 5-year career. It had a big “Welcome” GIF which had all the team members celebrating in it! First Impression — What an awesome way to show that the team is excited for my joining! :). Then the mail read “Who we are”. It gave introductions of the team members in the following format — “What he/she loves, what he/she is good at, what he/she can give advice on or help you with”. I have got to admit, just those 3 sentences about my new team members actually gave me much more insight on them than I would have obtained if I were to talk to them physically for 3 months. What this basically did was — 1) Create short and sweet visual personas of my team mates that I will be working with and 2) gave me a massive scope for breaking the ice with my team members before I could go on to work closely with them.
The next two parts — “How we feel about you joining” and “What we want to learn from you” basically told me what the team really found exciting about me and my work and these pointers actually set some initial expectations as to what I need to bring to the table. According to me, this was a really important thing to do as it instantly gave me a sense of purpose, a direction in which I could start contributing. This eliminated the new comer’s weird first week experience, which happens so often everywhere — not knowing what to do, sitting idle, smiling at people, wondering whether you can bother people or not. Super Awkward.
Next came in the “Values that are key at TinkerLabs”. It was quite a departure from the normal culture statements I was accustomed to (Nothing wrong with them though!). These were quite free flowing, because of which they somehow felt more authentic. The statements were actually phrased in a way that spoke about the company’s positive response when a team member exhibited a certain key value. This way, it seemed more actionable than the noun form of the culture words. What I loved the most was how these statements were also playing out in the mail structure and content. It seemed that TinkerLabs truly believed in learner’s mindset going by the kind of information they gathered about their team. When TinkerLabs said it respected people who ask interesting questions, you could see it reflecting in the kind of content that was on display –elaborate, well-articulated responses to interesting questions.
The last part was a set of questions called — “Things we would like to know about you” — I was really amazed by the kind of questions that were asked here. They were so crisp and simple, yet could reveal a lot about a person. Something like “what makes you happy on a sad day?” or “Are you good at confrontations or bottling it up?” was a one line question but could trigger many thoughts in your mind. What was even better was that you could read the answers for these set of questions for your team mates. This whole exercise was like reading about characters from a very fascinating book and visualizing their personalities, behaviors, likes and dislikes, working styles and communication styles. It heightened my imagination and also my excitement of meeting each one of them personally as I already had images of them in my mind.
A major part of why this section was interesting was also because the questions were framed in a fun way. They had a fun and casual tone to them and the answers that were written by the team were refreshingly honest and direct. It gave me an impression that the kind of people I would be working at TinkerLabs were really self-aware and proud (not apologetic) for who they were. This kind of authenticity helped me to express myself more confidently at TinkerLabs.
As I was going through the rest of the mail reading out some policy related points and enjoying the remote on-boarding experience, I received a call on my phone. It was Aloke, my team member. He had volunteered to be my on-boarding buddy, which was so cool of him. He suggested that I start arranging one on one meetings with all the team members to understand what they did in the organization and the projects they worked on. To my surprise, not even one person cancelled my meeting request! Some team members were so kind enough to actually call me and reschedule their meeting times.
That evening, I had to give a brief introduction about myself to the whole team in a creative way. Even after all these years, introduction presentations always gave me jitters. How would the audience receive it? Would they find my story interesting or not? Whether my creativity was creative enough? I was able to manoeuvre through all these questions and present about myself to the team. To my pleasant surprise, the team liked it very much. Especially, my Tintin Slide — which was representative of me venturing towards a new adventure in my career and life!
Over that one week, I had one on one meetings with all my team members. They were even more awesome than I had imagined. They were all from different backgrounds but believed in the shared vision of Human Centricity and Design Thinking. The meetings were a good mix of introductions, sharing experiences, work related stuff and suggestions for housing in Mumbai. It was absolutely cool when the team told me that it is the first time any new comer had interacted with all of the team in the first week. It was really rare that you could catch up with everyone at one time in the office in a pre-COVID world. But Remote On-boarding could do that for me. In a matter of few weeks, I already felt like I belonged to TinkerLabs from a long time. I became really comfortable with the team members and started contributing in my full capacity.
Looking back, Remote On-boarding was the best thing that could have happened to me — Understanding the people and the organization became easier through innovative questions and smart display of information. I could see the culture of empathy, experimentation and collaboration in the on-boarding process itself. Such a validation reinforced my interest, conviction and belief on the organization. To be able to set-up meetings with everyone at their preferred times at their preferred destinations (Home :)) and reach out to them ASAP was possible because of Remote On-boarding. Otherwise, it would have taken longer for me to meet everyone and integrate into the system.
The reservoir of information that I had on my team members made it possible for me to have meaningful conversations with them from time to time. In this time that I have worked at TinkerLabs I have never felt the absence of having a Physical on-boarding. I only keep thinking about the things I can do and celebrate with all my team members once we meet physically :). As for the remote on-boarding, I believe that it has been a successful one and should be implemented for everyone who join TinkerLabs in a post RAVI world :D
