At Vend, we’re always striving to improve our new employee onboarding experience. We love it when new starters join the team and we know how much first impressions matter, so we want new Venders to not only have a really great experience but feel as though they’re ready to contribute to Team Vend as soon as possible.
Our People and Culture team recently hosted a webinar where we spoke very enthusiastically about our employee onboarding programme — and one of the viewers commented that it was very unusual to hear people speak so fondly about an onboarding process!
There’s plenty of research out there about how important onboarding is. Not only does it set the tone for an employee’s experience throughout the course of their career in the company, but a great onboarding experience is associated with a lot of other good stuff like quicker ramp-up time, longer tenure, higher job satisfaction and increased job performance.
Onboarding is also one of the key parts of an employee’s journey at Vend where we can start to build a truly empowering employee experience. So of course we love it!
It’s been a while since that webinar, but the comment really stuck with us. We really do love our employee onboarding programme, so we wanted to share some of the things that we’ve found work for us when we’re onboarding new Venders globally.
Let’s pretend you’ve just joined Team Vend (hint: we’re hiring!) as we go through the details of what to expect when you join us!
Welcome aboard!
We’re so pleased you’re here!
Day one is our chance to really blow your socks off. You’ve chosen Vend as your new workplace where you’ll delight retailers, collaborate and solve complex problems. That’s really exciting for us!
We use the first day to show you that we’re really happy to have you be part of the Vend story, that you have a great career ahead of you here and ultimately that you’ve made the right decision to join us.
We’ll start the day with an office tour, showing you to your new desk and team, introducing you to as many people as we can and kick-starting your official onboarding calendar with a session entitled ‘Vend 101’. This is a one-hour chat designed tell you everything you need to know about Vend, like how we make money, our strategy, mission and values, and what each team does.
This is generally followed by tech setup where you’ll get your new laptop and be initiated into each and every one of our company-wide pieces of software (e.g. Slack, Trello, G Suite, Honey and Bamboo HR). We’ll also get you some top quality coffee training, hosted by one of our many in-house office coffee-experts. Why buy your flat whites when you’ll soon be able to make them yourself?!
Health and wellness is a big thing at Vend too. We make sure that we run through the details of our health and wellness programmes at Vend on day one, as well as the important “what to do in case of an emergency” type information. A new starter’s lunchtime on day one will also be scheduled in, with a Vend Friend — more on this later. We don’t want you to be left twiddling your thumbs, wondering who to eat with and where to get good food from.
We’ll get you a new Vend-style headshot too, and encourage you to update all of your profiles with this picture — like on Slack, because this will be the way all of your global colleagues will get to know you first!
This is a lot for day one, but we’ll also make sure you spend a lot of time with your team and start to learn the ropes of your new role too ;)
Getting to know the business
For the rest of week one, new starters spend time with someone from nearly every area of the business.
You’ll learn what sales and marketing do, how the product and engineering teams work, what our strategy is and how we’re planning on reaching our big, hairy audacious goals. You’ll learn about our software, get a demo store setup, grow it into a multi-outlet account, and integrate it with payments providers, accounting solutions, and e-commerce.
You’ll meet the People and Culture team and learn about what we do. You’ll be taken through the basics of online security with our Security team, learn about what to expect from our internal communications, and learn what all of the acronyms mean that we talk about so frequently.
You’ll learn how we bring delight to our retailers from our Customer Success and Support teams, how we educate our retailers about Vend from Education and learn about our external brand activities.
We want you to know as much as possible about our business, from as many different people as possible.
You’ll also learn all about Vend’s values, and how you can live them every day. We have four core values at Vend, which are woven through each and every part of our onboarding. These are:
Delight our retailers
Make the impossible happen
Act as an owner
Bring your best self to work
You’ll find out how our values are operationalised in your first few weeks with us. This will include things like how you can help create happy surprises to delight our retailers, how to access the data to help you act as an owner, and how we celebrate the wins (and learn from failure, too) to help you bring your best self to work.
Depending on the session that you’re attending, you could be hosted by one of many people. You might be hosted by an Exec member, a department head, a team lead or someone from the team who knows a lot about the topic being presented. The overall goal is that we want you to make as many connections with people around Vend as possible.
We want you to know a friendly face in each team so that when you’re presented with a problem or question, you’ll know at least someone in that particular area of the business who will be able to help you out.
You’ll meet so many people in your first week that you’ll have new Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram followers coming at you from all directions!
We put a lot of information in front of you during your first week, and it’s totally normal to feel a little overwhelmed by it all. In fact, we plan it this way. We’d rather you be busy than bored — no one likes twiddling their thumbs in a new job. Maybe you’ve never worked for a tech company before or you’re not familiar with the apps that we use across Vend to communicate. Never fear, you’re not alone. It usually takes two to three weeks to feel totally comfortable. There’s no expectation that you know everything by the end of week one!
As long as you feel comfortable asking questions, we’ll feel like we’ve done a good job.
Countering Uncertainty
We know that starting a new job can be pretty scary and we want to do as much as we can to help you feel sure of yourself right away. This is part of the reason why we set up your calendar the way we do in your first week — so you know what to do, where to go and who you’ll be meeting at every step of the way.
We’ll also give you a Trello board full of information that you should know about Vend. This is the stuff that you may or may not have an onboarding session on, but you’ll likely hear people talk about at some point, as well as the place you’ll find the basics about things like payroll and benefits. For example, if you hear someone talk about Vaughan’s Ted Talk (actually, there’s two!) but hadn’t heard anything about it, the Trello board is where you can find the link. Your manager will be connected to the board so they’re able to coach you through everything on there, too.
Vend Friends will be organised for you as a way to meet people socially across Vend in a less formal setting than a meeting room in presentation mode. Vend Friends will take you out for a coffee or lunch or just a walk around the block, tell you a bit about what they do at Vend and answer any questions you have so far.
We also, when possible, will set up your onboarding week so that you start with other new Venders. This adds another layer of connection and community across our roles and departments (and sometimes locations, too). It’s common for groups of four or five people to start on the same day — and the connection between these groups will usually last for years.
And finally, we’ll give you your very own Planty — a plant that will sit on your desk and signify to everyone that walks past that you’re new and that they should introduce themselves to you if they haven’t met you already. You’ll get the chance to pass this on to the next new Vender when they start!
Final thoughts
We’re constantly striving to improve the experience that our new starters have at Vend so we’ll ask you for your feedback after your first couple of weeks. For the most part though, you’ll be confident to get stuck into your new role, you’ll have strong relationships across Vend (both inside and outside of your direct team) and have a solid grasp of the way that Vend works (both the product and the company!).
If this is an experience that interests you, why not check out the open roles that we have on our careers page to find out how you might be able to help on our mission to create remarkable retail life!
