Onboarding in a virtual world | with Johnny Campbell

Welcome to episode 55 of the Shortlist. I am your host, Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. I want to welcome you to the first of our summer series of podcasts and broadcasts that we'll be doing over the next couple of months. The summer of 2021 and today's show we're going to be focusing on onboarding and we're going to be sharing with you a panel discussion that we broadcast privately for attendees of our STLive event, which was last month that hasn't been shared publicly before but but we had a brilliant panel discussion that I think is going to be really beneficial to all of you listening here today. If you're listening live, as always, we want your questions and comments and I'll.

Be able to take them at the.

End of the panel discussion when I'll come back on. But if you're listening on our podcast, we really hope you enjoy the show. We'll put any links that we reference in the show notes. And don't forget, of course, those watching live. This is broadcast as a podcast on Spotify and Apple and those of you who are listening to podcasts, you can always watch it live most Wednesdays at 4pm UK time.

And you can find more about our.

Schedule and our upcoming summer shows mixed in with our regular live shows which will be happening over the next few months@socialtalent.com the shortlist so why onboarding? Well, remote onboarding and the move to remote, I guess remote work for all of us a year and a half ago meant that this was one of the first things we had to tackle. How do you tackle remote onboarding? And a lot of recruiters and TA teams were challenged with this beginning the middle of last year. And remote onboarding presents some unique challenges, but done really well. It has such a significant impact on new employee engagement, their productivity, performance and their potential. New hires better understand their role, what's expected of them, they're clearly aligned to the company's goals and strategy and they'll typically perform better and faster and it leads to better progression and development in their career with the whole company. It's a no brainer thing to do, right? But it's challenging when you do it remotely. There are some unique challenges and best practices appropriate to remote onboarding. You've got to ask yourself how do you make sure your processes are inclusive and welcoming? How do you get employees to contribute as quickly? So we lined up a panel of three expert leaders to discuss this.

So I'm going to share this with.

You in Just a couple of moments we had with us Jodi Dembor and Jody is the global director of recruitment for technology@booking.com based out of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. We had Steve Mayer, who's the vice president of talent acquisition at a company called Procore, who on the day that we broadcast the this conversation, the panel had just debuted on the New York Stock Exchange and Sashka Lodman, who is a learning development manager at Munich based unicorn booming company Celonis, are doing amazing things and onboarding. More people post Covid than they actually had employed pre Covid. So three people who've really experienced this who have great insights on what's happening in the world of virtual onboarding and onboarding. I really hope you'll benefit from their discussions. I certainly did. So without further ado, let me put you over to that live, that recorded live panel and we'll play the whole section of the panel live as it was broadcast because there's some great insights. But don't forget to add your questions and comments in as you're listening live and we'll address them at the end. So without further ado, it's over to me for our onboarding panel.

With Joely. I can't see you on my screen Jolie, so I'm going to move my. There you are. Move my camera view. So great to have you here. Jodi. You actually have an interesting story, not just talking about onboarding as your senior TA role, but you are someone who has been virtually onboarded. You're relatively new to booking.com you got onboarded in a pandemic. Can you tell me a little bit about bookings onboarding process from your perspective as a newly onboarded employee?

Yes, yes, sure. Yeah. I started working 18th of January in booking and after 10 years in Cognizant almost. So I came from a really warm company where everybody knows me and I knew everything to a company and completely new, completely in lockdown. Our company offices are closed at least until end of October. But I have to say I got an extremely welcome and there were some things they did really well. So before onboarding, after I accepted offer, since then my current manager had a bi weekly meeting with me already to prep me for onboarding. What worked out really well. And then as soon as two weeks before I joined, I got my laptop, my phone, every equipment I ordered was already at my home. So everything was ready before, before starting. And then when I joined I got a the First Week a program for how the first week looked like for the first month and for the first three months. So a really strong introduction program where we had a three half days virtual onboarding with all new joiners in the company. Besides that, I had first week program with only my peers and my direct reports and after that with the management. So they had set a really clear program step by step. So that, yeah, that was fantastic. The people were really warm and welcoming and good sessions. So I really had a good onboarding.

That pre boarding element. Jody, earlier Anjana from IBM talks about how their focus during particularly the pandemic was on removing anxiety from their 27,000 employees that they onboarded last year. In the pandemic, from your perspective, what were the key things that helped remove the anxiety for you of not just joining a new company but joining a new company in a pandemic virtually?

Yeah, I think the pre onboarding is really important to keep the alignment. Of course you feel a little bit unsafe leaving a really safe place behind and to really buy in and get to know the people up front. I think it's key to your success later on because you come in much more comfortable. I think it really helped me.

I love this. We had a comment from Angela on her slide which was that something along the lines of, you know, your first day, it's not your first day but it's the celebration of you joining us. You should have joined us before that in terms of the.

Yeah, yeah. And then they also really, the last team meeting they had before I joined already went in. I got a good overview about the people connected with all my team members already on LinkedIn to get to know them a little bit upfront already.

I love that. I love that. Thanks for that Jodi. I'm going to come back with a couple of questions in a few minutes, but Steve, I'm going to go to you. You're still on a high from the IPO yesterday, no doubt a big week for Procore. I'm going to ask you perhaps to tell us a little bit about your onboarding program, particularly the kind of way that you integrate the use of the product in the onboarding process, which I thought was fascinating and a really smart way to I guess socialize what the company actually does in a very experiential way with new hires. So maybe I should tell us first of all how you feel this week. It's a big week, maybe introduce Procore to the audience who don't know the company and then maybe tell us a little about that experiential experience you have around onboarding new employees.

First off, Johnny, it's kind of hard to get away from any experience other than the one I'm just feeling it was today. So I just ran from the floor on the New York Stock Exchange. So we went nyse. So we went the old school New York Stock Exchange, where you actually ring the bell. I got my little badge you can't see, but it's like on the floor. And I ran. My hotel's two blocks away, so we're still there and it's still going right now. But I ran here because of my love for you. So it's good to be here.

Thank you.

But, yeah, no, I. And I'll run back to the floor right after this. So very excited and kind of elated and probably not focused and not. I'm not focused on a good day anyway. But yeah. So when we go through our onboarding, no one goes, gets out of school or in their professional career and goes, I want to be in construction technology. So Procore Technologies is the platform for construction technology. And we do multiple products and have over 275 partners that build on our platform. But nobody puts their hand up when they get out of school and is excited about construction technology. It's actually one of the reasons we're in the space. It's a very underserved space. And so we take our product and we ship out boxes of LEGO to all of our new hires, and they actually use our product to construct a building, using Lego, but actually learning how to use our product at the same time. So they get to be experts in how our customers see our product, why they use our product while building Lego, So they get to have some fun. We hope if you have kids, you get to enjoy that with your kids. If you're like me and my kids are older, I still played with the Lego. It was fun. And it's actually kind of a competition, too, to see who builds the best, most accurate replication. And it's the building they're building is actually our head office, which is out on the ocean on the coast. And so they actually build that through the process and it gives them an introduction to how to have some fun together. Our culture is about enjoying each other and really getting to know each other, but also getting to use the product and learning through orientation and learning in a way where it's virtual and you could feel detached, but you're all doing it together. And people screw up all the time. And that's part of us trying to get people to understand that our culture is also about being perfectly imperfect. We don't expect People to nail everything on the first go. We just expect you to get up and be optimistic and try again. And so it goes through that experience and it's worked out really well and everyone likes it because it's weird. It's kind of funny to get toys sent to your house for your first day of work.

I like that. Is it something you're measuring? Are you polling or NPS surveying folks to understand are they enjoying this and what are the insights?

We are, yeah. It's kind of like we try and lead with humility. So this doesn't sound like it. So the last score, like our last, I think six months, we've been in the 98 to 99 on MPS.

Wow, that's amazing.

But in fairness, a big part of it is too. Like our executives quickly understood they had always been involved in orientation. Our orientation is a full week, the first week and then we do boot camps for different functions. They've always been pretty involved, but they realized right away when we went home and had to switch to virtual because we didn't have any virtual prior to that, that they needed to be all in. And so all of our executive team spends time in orientation with each of the class and they each own different parts of walking through the mission, the vision, our values, why we care.

We talked about pre boarding a bit, and you and I have talked about this separately. The differences between different parts of the world and their approach to pre boarding based on just the average notice period. In your experience, how much of a focus is put on pre boarding in the US versus other markets where perhaps the notice periods are longer?

A lot less. A lot less. We do try, but you're right, when it's condensed to two or three weeks instead of two or three months, it can be a lot harder and a lot tighter to try and get that for people to wrap up work before they move on. And so we don't overload too much because of the US model. And while we're predominantly hiring in the us, we do hire globally and so we try to be aware. We do have our teams in the UK and Australia and Singapore and Abu Dhabi understanding that they do have longer notice periods. So here are some other activities to do. So we have built that out for our leaders in those areas. But in the US we try not to load it too much because there's already enough stress on people trying to switch jobs.

I'll come back to explore that a little bit further within a few minutes, Steve, but I'm going to jump to Saskia as Ask you have as an organization probably an even bigger challenge. You know, sending some Lego out and having somebody, you know, experience construction is one thing, but your product is that much more technical, I'd argue, and probably that much more difficult to explain to everyone working in the organization. Maybe the engineers might get it, but not necessarily everyone else. And the growth rate that, you know, your company has experienced, particularly in the last year, has meant that I'm not mistaken. More than half the workforce that work for the company today were onboarded virtually in a pandemic versus were there before. Can you walk us through the program you've helped build more recently and tell me a little bit about why you built it in that way and what the focus of that is?

Yes, yes, sure. And yeah, indeed to all what you just said. First of all, yeah. Hi everyone, thank you for inviting me. It's really a pleasure to join this panel today. Yeah, Virtual Onboarding week actually happens once a month and just because we have or in this insane hyper growth phase at the moment and have between 80 and 100 participants each month. So it's like a real big onboarding week, to be honest. And yeah, it consists of different elements. So we try to also bring a little bit of variety for the participants. So it's. We have self paced trainings they normally do just before the actual virtual onboarding week. We have live sessions with our executive team members and experts from different departments. And why we need experts from different departments is just like what you said. Our product is not well known or easy to understand for everyone who doesn't come from a very technical side. And we also have a lot of networking opportunities and a little team challenge. And this team challenge is actually more or less the heart of the goal, how we succeed, that everybody understands the company, the product and our culture.

And you mentioned to me when we had a conversation, and I think it was mentioned by Jodi as well, the importance of leadership. And I asked you when we first spoke about this, did you find it difficult to get the leaders to give the time over continuously these sessions that they would have to deliver these live sessions with new starters? I wonder, would you mind sharing with me the answer that you gave to me on that?

Yeah, interestingly, it goes very, very well because we have rec level leaders who are really behind onboarding and really obviously want to grow and want to succeed in onboarding our new journeys and also keeping them. So it's actually very, very easy. They're super motivated and I always. And yeah, I mean don't tell anyone but it's almost every month that one of our C level leaders asks me if I need any assistance if they should join Launchbook Week because they know how important it is for us as a company to succeed. So I think that's also most important aspect why our onboarding week is successful and we're keeping our people.

Great to hear. Great to hear. Thanks for that. I'm going to jump back to Jody for a second and Jodi, you know, again, whilst you spoke from your perspective as a new starter, you are a senior leader in the TA team and you have the opportunity through your colleagues to influence future onboarding processes. What have you seen as someone who's experienced it firsthand, what have you seen in the onboarding process that made you think, okay, that's the thing we need to either heighten or do more of or there's something that perhaps we need to focus and maybe do less of. It wasn't a great thing even talking to other people who've been onboarded.

I think what worked well is giving a lot of personal time with people. So I was amazed about the senior leadership making the time to speak with you really go through their org and explaining what everybody was doing. But yeah, what doesn't work so well doesn't work what is really hard. It is really hard to connect the dots. So normally you come into an office, you see people having a coffee, you know, who are friends with each other, you go into a meeting room, you feel the atmosphere and now you only see this. So you don't see what are the real connections, you don't see the politics. So that makes it a little bit more hard to onboard. It will take more time to get that knowledge because the concept doesn't come in the first weeks, especially not a video screen. So I think it's important to help really bringing connecting the dots more. So really give this overview. Who's working with WeBoom, how does it work, what are the products? A more deep dive into that because that is a little bit missing and you go too quickly into the materials.

And start working on projects, let's say immediately. Our prior speaker just before the panel, Simon talked about the importance of trying to align new starters with the vision. The strategy of the company was that something that was done quite seamlessly with you in your experience?

Yeah, they did it really well. I said they had really written out the plan and really with org charge and connecting with the right people and they, they took a three months period for that. It's not a one week something. So they really Spend a long time on it because it's more important now to take the longer time. Also have a strong buddy program. So I got a buddy from the business who's helping me. We'll have a once a week connect where I can ask questions about how the organization looks like asking a lot of information. So yeah, I think that is really important that you catch somebody as a buddy to help you where you feel comfortable to ask the questions you won't ask other people. And I think that helps a lot.

Yeah, a lot of science around the importance of bodies and how they really help. New starters. Thanks, Nasholi. I'm going to jump to Steve for a second. Steve, again, if your organization is scaling on an incredible race and you're looking to expand internationally as well, what are some of the big challenges that you've seen when you're trying to create a virtual onboarding experience on scale and adapt.

That as you go and you adapt.

It perhaps for different roles, different culture, different markets?

Oh, there's so many challenges. And I love the buddy program. We do that and I think we don't do it well enough. I need to amplify that more. I think one of the pieces we've done to continue that is create a slack channel for every orientation class so that group gets to stay connected and see what other questions each other's asking. But to answer your question, Johnny, the hardest part we have on the Global side is just the typical. Everyone's challenge with Global is when you try and cover around the clock and still build connection and have live content because we can have our mission and vision. We can have our CEO likes to walk through the mission. Our coo, he's now moving into a new role called Chief Cultural Officer focuses on values. But typically when we're not, when it's in the middle of the night, those are being done on video. And it really doesn't build anywhere near the connection because where the beauty of having executives involved in it is when they can actually share stories and go back and forth and take questions. So what we have tried to do is we've tried to break it up a little bit and go. And we're actually doing this right now because we have a month of development where we're having keynote speakers, one or two keynote speakers a week, and we're doing them at just all hours of the day across the board and making it really wide open for every employee. It doesn't solve the problem, but it allows for connections of other groups that you might not normally get, but to Be honest, I was hoping someone else is going to have a great answer for that one because I don't think we're doing the best job at it. We're trying and we care and we want to make sure we're listening. But our NPS score on our international is typically trailing our domestic for the US Even though there's the three hour time change in the US but the international. The other piece we have done historically, which obviously we can't in Covid right now, is we've sent executives out to help lead sessions from there from locations. We've asked executives in region to step up and actually own more parts of that and be there and run the Q and A. But what I really am trying to still focus on is how do I build those connections between APAC and EMEA ever, not just with the US So we get out of thinking we're a US centric company. I don't know if I answered your question, Johnny, but it's a huge challenge that we're not doing. We're trying and we have put in every effort, but I don't think we're great at it by any stretch.

You mentioned storytelling. In your past, you've worked for Disney, you've worked for Lucasfilm, arguably two of the best storytelling organizations in the world. Anything that you can take from your prior experience around storytelling that worked really well in an onboarding type situation?

Yeah, certainly. Definitely. You're right. Both of those brands have some pretty decent stories to be able to tell. And like when we're onboarding at Disney, when you actually go to the studio lot and you get to walk through the underground tunnels where, you know, the film that was printed on glass is actually still there, you can still see parts of it and some of it's wrecked because the old cinematographers used to ride on it down the hill for fun, to surf on it. So it's kind of like you can get those kind of, but it's those real stories that matter. It's the same with Lucas, but I think where I'm at now with Procore, we talk a lot about our stories to try and give a real sense of what the culture is like and that it's an overnight success that took 22 years and trying to get people to understand that, yes, we're going like this right now, but there are hard times in every company. There's gonna be hard times in your job. And so we use stories to talk through that a little bit. What it was like when we were like first selling our product and there was no WI fi on a job site. So we actually were selling our product for 100 bucks, 180 bucks a month and buying WI fi routers and actually going out to job sites, flying to job sites, and putting the WI fi router on a pole. Imagine the cost of flying there, getting a ladder, getting your own router, and us paying for all of that. We were like losing money hand over fist. But having people understand how dedicated we are to making this product work in the long run and people getting a better sense of what it really was like when we struggled to make payroll, when we were trying to regrow. And so we talk a lot about those stories and how the company really was founded in the backyard of someone's house and it just kept growing from there. And then it failed because the housing bubble was not a really good moment for construction. But it's those hard times where you get the best stories. And so we really try and focus and tell those stories so people get a sense of where the heart is in the company, why we do care about our employees, why we did do things differently and why we've treated people the way we do and why we continue to do it. Because I think that's where it's real, not hr putting something up on the wall saying happiness is no, it's like this is really what we are. And what we, when we say optimistic, we don't mean everyone's smiling, means we get knocked down a lot, but we get back up and we help each other out. But if you see someone else knocked down, your job is to help them get back up. And here's like. And we. Then we go through stories for it.

I love the Chumbawoomba method of life. Steve, thanks for your storytelling is really important and it's, you know, you can scale stories if they're the right stories that make that moment happen. Saskia, I'm going to go to you. We have a question coming from the audience wondering for your virtual onboarding week. Is this nonstop events all day long for a week or is a little bit of tough times set aside each day? And the person asking is curious how this works with managers and employees dedicating a lot of time to this instead of working on their primary responsibilities?

Yeah, good question. So no, it's not like the whole week, the whole each of day virtual onboarding and live sessions and everything. Because I think now, especially when you're joining a virtual onboarding, it's so much harder to focus and concentrate the whole time. So that's one reason. And the second reason is why we all always have only half a day of live sessions and the rest of the day they can actually do other networking things or work on. The group challenge is because of the time zones differences. So we hiring globally. So we have Amy Americas and also other time zones joining, which makes the whole thing much more complicated to be honest. So yeah, did I answer the whole question or was there another part?

I think that makes sense. I think the person asked was trying to explain the logic of why they were asking, but that makes 100% sense and there is a lot of complexity there. And actually I might ask you to start on this because another question that came in and it talks about higher volume roles where groups of people are starting at the same time. I think all of you have this challenge and the hiring manager may not be their main contact through onboarding. How do you ensure empathy and personalizations are probably two parts. Is the hiring manager always the main contact through onboarding? And if they aren't always, how do you still ensure the empathy and personalization? So maybe I'll start with you to continue that for Salonis.

Yeah, honestly, we have this situation for almost every new join course of just because we are growing so much. So very, very good question. So what we do, what we're doing is also to have a buddy program. I think similar as Julie mentioned that she also has a buddy by her side and I had one too. So I joined in February and had a bit of the same situation. So my actually new manager, she will join next month. So I haven't met her in person yet. So that's the one thing. So we have this buddy program and have a dedicated buddy who really helps answering all the questions and also make it a bit more personal and help connecting and networking with the whole company. So that's one thing and one part of our onboarding week, which we actually call Launchpad week because when you join synonymous you just feel like you're joining a rocket ship. So that's why Launchpad week and yes, it's like that we have really a big focus on networking. So that's why we have several networking sessions where they actually can meet and have these team challenges where they are really in small teams like five to six people and have the whole week to work together and they are from different departments as well, so that they also not only get to know the people within their little circle of their team or their department, but also just to broaden their minds and network even more beyond their little own circles.

It's so important. Thanks for sharing that task. I'm going to ask the next question that came in from our audience to Jodi. Arguably, booking will be the most internationally diverse in terms of the scale of the organization of the different locations. You have staff in not only the booking.com property but the other properties that the group owns. How do you deal with language barriers during your onboarding? Do they come up and in your experience or knowledge, Jody, how has that been dealt with?

No, I have to say I have 22 nationalities in my own team now and I don't really see see the language barriers because the main length yeah, the core language is English. Myself, I am, I'm dyslexic and also my English is always not the best in class. But even then you work it through and I think everybody's quite used to work in English. Where I see some challenges sometimes with language is because onboarding is first of all it's getting to know the people. But then you have the etiquette compliance trainings and that kind of other onboarding trainings into the company with security.