Employee Onboarding Secrets from a 500 Person Remote Team CEO with Zapier Founder, Wade Foster

All right. Welcome everyone. Uh, my name is Blake Bailey here from Process Street, customer success and RevOps. And I'm joined here today by our CEO and co-founder, Vinay Patankar, and Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier. Welcome Wade. Welcome Vinay.

Yeah, thanks for having us, Blake.

Yeah, of course. And to start things off, Wade, as a very heavy user of Zapier personally and also as a company, and as I'm sure many in attendance actually are as well, I'd love to hear from you about the early days of Zapier. Can you take us back, sort of, why did you initially decide to start Zapier and what was it like in those early days?

Yeah, we started Zapier almost a decade ago now, September 2011. So our 10 years is coming up here very shortly. Started the company in central Missouri. I was working at a mortgage company that specialized in sort of online mortgages and working in their email marketing department. So you're— if you work in email marketing, you're often dealing with different tools and different systems all the time and wouldn't it was very common to have to do integration work. I didn't really think much of it at the time. It just sort of seemed like a hurdle that every person who worked in email had to deal with. My co-founder Brian and I were doing a lot of freelance work on the side. We were playing in a jazz and blues quartet together and always sort of dreaming up like things we could build together, companies maybe we could start together. And I remember one day he messaged me on iChat And he's like, you know what? We see all these integration needs across these different tools. I bet we could build a simple system that makes it easy to trigger events back and forth between a thing. You know, say something happens over here, do something over there. And that was kind of the light bulb moment for me where I was like, oh shoot, that would just be so great for me in my day job. I'm not a very good engineer. If I had something like this, my life would be a lot easier. And so that was sort of the, the spark starting point of the idea, we ended up building the first prototype at a hackathon during a weekend and then we just kind of kept working on it. It was very much a nights and weekends thing. We're in the Midwest, there's not millions of dollars of funding for people there. So we had to figure out like, how do we make progress on this? And we decided, hey, we need to keep our day jobs to fund this thing. And so those early days were, you know, us, we would do the sort of the day job thing And then typically we'd snag like some takeout Chinese and we'd work from like 6, 7 PM at night to midnight, 1, 2, sometimes 3 o'clock just to like keep things moving. And, you know, I remember we did that for probably 7, 8 months before we were ready to launch the sort of first version of Zapier.

Can I just ask, you mentioned you got your 10 years coming up. What are you guys doing for the 10-year celebration?

You know, I don't know that we have like a really great plan for it. We normally would be planning our offsite this time around. And so we had a 10/1 that we were hoping to do, but COVID has interrupted this like it's interrupted many things. So we're going to have to figure out like a virtual version of something to do.

Yeah. Yeah, we had our first company offsite booked for like April last year, which we never got to do. So we still haven't even done one yet. So we're kind of waiting for the chance to do our first one.

Oh, they're such an important thing, I think, for distributed and remote teams. But you know, such is life during a pandemic, I suppose.

Yeah.

Well, definitely. And so moving forward, I'd really like to hear from you, what would you consider to be some of the big initiatives, projects, or processes that really changed the trajectory of Zapier in your opinion?

One thing in particular comes to mind for me, which is the first version of Zapier had single trigger and single action. Do something in this app, post something there. And that was pretty beloved. Folks came in, they started using the product, they loved what they could get out of it. But pretty quickly we realized that there was a pretty big opportunity to help folks with more sophisticated workflows. There was limitations when all you could do was one action in terms of the types of things that you could help customers with. And you would see this in all types of different businesses where folks would want to do just chain across different apps, or they wouldn't want to take multiple actions in a certain app, or be able to do logic to route one direction or route a different direction. And so in 2016, we launched our first version of multi-step Zaps, which allowed you to take multiple actions from it. And I think that's really what changed what was possible for— from Zapier. It went from this sort of simple personal productivity tool to full-on automation suite that, that really empowered a whole host of different things to be used.

Yeah, I remember that update. I remember like find an update came out and I was like, whoa, like now I can like, don't need the record to go and update something. I can just like look at, look for it with an email address or something and then find that record and then go and update it.

It was like, wow.

So, so much stuff just unlocked like with that release.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's, I know that, uh, just everything that you just mentioned there was huge for us in general and also huge for a lot of our customers as well. And speaking of that, I'd really be interested to hear generally how Zapier actually uses Zapier itself. So can you give us a general lay of the land and maybe even some specific examples of how your team operates on Zapier?

Yeah, I think there's a few things that are really common in our usage patterns. One, we run the company— the company communication platform is Slack. And so we dump a whole bunch of alerts into Slack for a ton of different things. In fact, we have a whole naming convention around this where if you see any channel inside of Zapier that starts with "feed," it's usually a bot that's posting key information based on some sort of logic. It could be customer events. It could be app alerts. It could be registrations for an event that we're having. It could be customer tickets. Like, you sort of name it. Like, anything that's important to somebody, they will set up a feed channel that just dumps information into there to make sure that folks are sort of up to date on what's going on for key events that are happening around the company or with our customers or with the product itself. I'd say that's probably one of the most common use cases. The second set that I see us using a lot is— oh, and before we move on, one of the big things around that is metrics. So specifically understanding, hey, when are we going outside of like certain standard deviations of what we expect to see? And we really want to get alerts around that kind of stuff because it usually means something unusual is happening, either unusually good or unusually bad. And we want to know when unusual things happen because it helps us figure out how to repeat them if they were good things or how to stop them if they were bad things. And so that kind of alerting for us is really, really powerful. The second set of use cases that is really common inside of Zapier is sort of like hybrid communication and project management. So a lot of like routing things into, you know, a sort of database type environment and being able to sort of collect that stuff and then creating query environments for folks to come in and review what's in there over time. So think like, A user research team is setting up surveys, forms, recording of interviews with customers, and they wanna log all that stuff in a particular place. In our case, a lot of that times that goes into like an Airtable database or sometimes it'll be like a Coda instance depending on how structured the data is or not structured the data is. And so being able to route all of that material into a home that folks inside the company can come back and reference later and go, "Hey, you know, I wonder what features we're getting common requests for over the last 6 months." Great. Pop in there and see what the user research team has sort of like uncovered for us. So that's another set of use cases. Probably a third thing that's really common then is around scheduling. There's a lot of automation around Calendly and Google Calendar and alerts into, email alerts or email events out to customers to help coordinate a whole host of different things. It might be, again, user research trying to schedule with customers. It could be recruiting team trying to schedule with candidates. Anytime you might see us like doing the sort of same job over and over again, there's likely a Zap or a system of Zaps. And that is probably the— another really common use case for us.

Nice. Bunch of wealth there. Can I double-click on a couple of those?

Sure.

How many people are you at Zapier now?

We're a smidge over 500.

Wow. So lots of people, you're fully distributed, right? Have been since day one. Are you restricted within a time zone at all?

We have folks in 35, 37 different countries, and so we do have folks spread across pretty much every continent except Antarctica. So we do have timezone challenges inside of Zapier.

Can we talk about your Slack then for a second?

Sure.

So you got 500 people fully distributed. Okay. You mentioned that you're using Zapier to push feeds and different forms of data in there, standard deviation, variance data. I'd be interested to know how you even do that. But what are some other methods that you've used to like get that, get your Slack under control? Like it must be pretty chaotic with 500 people and all sorts of stuff going on. What are some of the other best practices you've kind of implemented there?

So I won't pretend that we've perfected this, but I do think we've built some things that help us get, make it a little more tenable for a team that's growing. Just for some context, we have thousands of channels. So we have more channels than we have people. People inside the company. One of the key things is naming conventions go a long way for wayfinding. So, you know, I mentioned feeds are all prefixed with feeds. Well, we have a whole host of these different naming conventions. So for example, their location channels, you know, start with a city. So City San Francisco, City New York, City Miami, whatever. And those end up being like channels where people who live or visiting a particular city will join in those. And They form like little local meetups and get-togethers and things like that. So that's like one naming convention. We have fun channels. So these are off-topic channels. These are not work-related. So if you see anything like that, you can safely assume no work is going on in here. Just good old like fashion camaraderie, team building, water cooler type talk. We have team channels and these tend to be channels that are, specific to a particular team. And so they, you know, coordinate most of their discussions inside of that. We have WG, which is work group. So if there's like a short-term project that's getting together for a particular thing, those will sort of pop up and then shut down over time. We have incidents. So like anytime there's like any sort of incident we're dealing with, these things get auto-created and, you know, they have an incrementing numeral that goes with them so we can route back to them over time. So it's like, hey, incident, 230, like, let's go review, like, what happened in real time around incident 230. So these naming conventions really help for wayfinding for new folks who are joining the company. Second thing then is Slack etiquette. So when you join the company, we have an etiquette guide on here's how to participate inside of Slack at Zapier. These are things that you could just borrow and, like, steal ours, right away, but you could also choose to have different etiquette. It's not a right or wrong, it's just, you know, our way of going about it to help sort of tame the chaos of Slack. So this includes things like how to use threads, how to use emoji, how to use, how do you communicate? Like what sort of, what is sort of inbounds and offbounds in terms of like how you show up, code of conduct type material, things like that. So that helps as well too. Guidelines around use of, public channels versus DMs versus private channels. So all this sort of stuff helps people who are joining the company get acclimated to what is a quite large Slack instance.

Awesome. You have that etiquette guide published?

I think there is a version of it on our site somewhere.

Yeah.

Nice. Take a look.

Yeah, we're definitely gonna go looking for that. Um, so that actually reminds me of, of something else there, which is the fact that Zapier historically, even famously, has been remote from the onset, uh, which Process Street does as well, but Zapier has been around for a little while longer. Um, which means that you've had a wealth of experience working with a remote team that a lot of people over the last year or so are realistically just discovering for the first time. What are some of the big, uh, tricks or tips or even, uh, strategies that you've implemented over the years that you've found to be really successful to help people to go remote?

Sure. The first thing that comes to mind is not actually specific to remote. It's specific to team building in general, which is to treat your company culture in the same way that you treat your product. So when you're building a product, you ask for user feedback, you try and know what your features are, what your bugs are, why people love your product, why people might not be a good fit for your product, all that sort of stuff. If you do the same thing for your culture, you're gonna create a better and better culture for the types of people that can be successful inside your organization. So that means survey your folks, interview your folks, like talk to them regularly about what's working, what's not working, decide what the most important bugs of your company are and like how you're gonna fix them over time. Figure out which are the ones that you're, you know, just not important to you and communicate that out to your employees and say, hey, I hear you on XYZ, we're not gonna address it because of, You know, we're usually— we're addressing these other things instead. We feel like these are more critical. So just being really transparent about that helps. And as a result, I think that really gives you a lot of ideas for how to make the company better and relevant material as well. So that's probably the starting spot. Then for the remote-specific advice, I think there's probably a couple categories of things that are really important. One, is loneliness is a real challenge in sort of distributed teams, like feeling a sense of connection to a bigger mission, a bigger purpose, a bigger cause. So how do you make that connection happen? I think there's a couple things you can do to really improve this. One is spend a lot of time thinking about what your company onboarding process looks like. You want to make sure that folks on day one are finding ways to plug into your company in ways that are gonna be effective. Over time, some things that have worked for us are onboarding folks in cohorts. So every 2 weeks, we start a group of people together, and they go through onboarding very intentionally together through a mix of live, like sort of live learning on Zoom and asynchronous learning via other tools. And this allows them to sort of forge bonds with each other On the other hand, these bonds tend to last for the tenure of their time at Zapier. You see folks sort of giving shoutouts to like their different crew teams. They have a crew channel inside of Zapier. So that's the naming convention for these folks. And, you know, when they're presenting at our all-hands, someone might be like, "Shoutout crew, you know, July 2019," or whatever, right? As a way to just sort of celebrate like each other. And these folks can be all across the company. They just onboard together and you create that sense of community right away. The second thing then is finding places for folks to build those connections in like not super worky environments. So that those fun channels that I talked about are really important for building camaraderie. We use Donut chats. So there's a Slack bot called Donut.ai that will match people up. That's a place where you can forge bonds. Offsites are great in non-pandemic times. I would definitely encourage folks doing that. Then even in like work settings, like team meetings and things like that, I think it's useful to add non-work discussion items. It might feel a little like forced at first, but, you know, our exec team does a Tuesday icebreaker for our Tuesday meeting every week. And so we start with a kind of sometimes silly, like off-topic channel or off-topic question, and it's a way to help people realize that we're still working with other humans. Because what I found is in remote environments, things tend towards the transactional. You know, it's, hey, when are you going to have X for me? What's the status of Y? Why or when is this getting done? And so it's always about the work, work, work, work, work, work, work. And if that's all work is, it really starts to feel lonely, disconnected. You start to feel unimportant. And so finding ways to just sort of put the humanity into remote work, I find to be really, really important. So onboarding process, camaraderie building, and, you know, treat your culture like you treat your product. If you do those 3 things, that probably gives you a leg up on most folks, I would wager.

Awesome. Yeah, we do, we do some of that stuff. Like, I try to encourage that the first 5 minutes of a 30-minute meeting or the first 10 minutes of an hour meeting are kind of like not work time. So just give you a window where it's like, yeah, this is like a— you're allowed to like not talk about work for that beginning of that meeting. And it does kind of two things. One, it gives you that window to actually just chat about whatever, how was your day, and people don't feel pressured to like kick off and start the agenda. But also what I find is like in remote teams, a lot of people are running back-to-back meetings. And when you're running a back-to-back meeting and you're, you know, you're out of an interview and you're into another another meeting or whatever, there's no room to go to the bathroom or like, you know, take a, take a moment for yourself. So having a little bit of a kind of buffer in each meeting too means it's okay if you drop in 5 minutes late to that meeting, as long as you're within the buffer. And we're assuming you were back to back or you were in a bio break or something, and the people that are there can kind of just hang out and chat. But it takes a bit of that pressure off and gives people that window to hang out. I actually want to stay on employee onboarding for a second though, because Employee onboarding is one of the top use cases of Process Street. That's like, we help Salesforce and all sorts of crazy companies with their employee onboarding workflows. And so ways to optimize— that's been a very important process for us internally, and it's helped a lot with us in terms of building our remote culture. But it's also something a lot of our customers are focused on and is one of their key workflows. So Can you talk to, can you break that down a little bit more? You mentioned that there's like some in-person live training sessions, there's some asynchronous sessions. What does the onboarding ramp look like in a bit more detail?

Yeah, so we cram a lot in that first week and there's a set of, there's sort of like a few thematic things that we want to spend time on. One is getting to know the onboarding cohort and people sort of that they need to know inside the company. So the founders do a get-to-know-you for these folks. We have, you know, various execs lead different sessions on particular topic areas, and we have opportunities for the people joining to get to know each other and like their HR reps and things like that. So that just sort of, you know, these key connection points really help them like establish a sense of like, okay, I know sort of like I have some routing spots to go to when I have questions. So that's important. Then I think there's a few other categories of knowledge that you want to share. So there's a lot of context that a new person needs to know in order to be effective inside of a company. One, I think they need to understand the core strategy of the business. What are you trying to achieve here broadly? No matter what function you serve, how can you— like, what is the company trying to do? What is our goals as a company? And I think if you— if people really, really know that, that helps them make decisions over the long haul. 2, as an extension of what is the strategy of the company, it's who are your customers? Like, what are your customers? What do they care about? Like, what do they don't care about? Really having that also helps them make decisions over the long haul. I find that that's really useful inside of a company too. Then you have a lot of your like cultural pillars that people need to understand. So this is, you know, if you have like a set of values or leadership principles or things like that, you want to help people understand What is sort of like the rewarded behavior inside of the company? What is the things that aren't rewarded? How are you maybe the same or different from other types of companies that they may have worked at in the past? Things that are just going to help them get a leg up in terms of how they show up. Etiquette also kind of— I bake into that as well too. So how do you utilize things like Slack? How do you utilize things like Zoom? When do you have meetings? When do you not have a meeting? How do you communicate? How do you use emoji? All these sorts of things might feel small in the grand scheme of things, but they're things that really shortcut the learning curve and help you reinforce your culture rather than disperse your culture over time. So those are a few of the things I think are really key during the onboarding. And you wanna find times to reinforce in addition to the, you know, sort of more table stakes like, HR type of stuff, like how you get paid, what's your insurance gonna look like? All that sort of stuff is obviously key, but I'm gonna assume everybody's doing that anyway because you kind of just got to.

Yeah. How do you, how do you decide like what to deliver via kind of self-serve content versus what to kind of like push into more of a structured session? Because I think one of the things that we have is a lot of our stuff is self-serve content.

Mm-hmm.

And for some people that's great. They just want to jump in and consume everything. But for some other people that can be a little bit intimidating and we're trying to find the right balance.

Yeah, I don't know that we've nailed the right balance. I think 50/50 is generally where you want to like kind of wind up. The, you know, me personally, I love the self-serve material, but I also know that one of the key goals of onboarding is building connection points and building community. And so you want to have some of these sessions be real life. Where folks can interact with folks. And you can also create dual-purpose tracks out of that. So, for example, if you want folks to meet your executive team, but you don't want to just sort of have like a random like meet-and-greet style thing, you say, "Hey, I want the VP of engineering to come in and talk a little bit about like what are sort of some of our, like how does our engineering team operate in terms of certain like ways and how does it connect back to our core strategy?" Or like, How does our marketing team operate and how does that connect back to our core strategy? So you give them like some reason to talk, but then it also serves as this introduction to the person and the leader so that folks get to know people at the same time. So you can use some of the live sessions to serve a couple different purposes at the same time. Ultimately, I don't know what the like right balance is. You know, I think this is probably probably where you can just lean on surveys and stuff like that afterwards. That's one thing that we've done, um, pretty regularly is every session has a survey that follows it up, a really short one, which was like, what'd you like about it? What do you wish was better? And as a result, the sessions just get a lot better really quickly because we run these every 2 weeks. So we're getting feedback on them every 2 weeks and we send those directly to the person who facilitated the session. So they know, oh, I kind of goofed on this thing, like, I'll fix that up. Or like, this thing isn't landing very well. I wonder if I could take a different approach there. And after like just doing it a few times, you usually find like a pretty good stick. You know, I run two of these sessions and I haven't made a huge amount of changes to them in a while because they just work. Like, people love them. And so like, I just keep doing that same variant over and over again.

Nice. And it's a two-week onboarding program.

That's how long it runs.

So yeah, the first week is like fully dedicated to company onboarding. Week 2 is probably closer to half, and then, you know, the other half is more like, okay, you're starting to get up to speed with your team and what their goals are and what the sort of initiatives you're going to be more involved with are. So it starts to like ramp down a little bit that second week, and then by the third week you're sort of like fully in seat with your team.

Wow. Awesome.

Yeah, well, thank you so much today, Wade Foster. This is about all the time we have for today. So first of all, again, I'd just really like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us. And also, Vinay, I'd like to thank you also, of course, for speaking with us as well.

Thanks for having us.

Yeah, thanks.

This has been great. Really appreciate it.

That was awesome. I loved that conversation. Loved all the conversation about like connecting with the team with 500 people. Robin in the chat shared what they do. They do 7-minute qigong sessions. I'm like, yes, please. That's awesome.

Why aren't we doing that?

Why? I know, why didn't we think of that? That's awesome. Super cool. I think we have another winner because behind the scenes, as the conversations have been going on, Pauline's been entering your names into our little random raffle generator.

That's right.

Spinning the wheel and popping out a winner. What do we got?

So another drum roll. We have Courtney Lester. If you're here, you have won either an opportunity to have a 1-hour strategy call or some Process Street merch. So go ahead and email support@process.st, take your pick, and then we'll take it from there. Congrats, Courtney. Woo-hoo!

Courtney. All right. Awesome. Just a reminder for anybody who's popping on late, just logistically, the conversation is taking place over in the chat section under stage, I think it's called, right? And also there's a little networking button if in between these kind of breaks. Yeah, under stage chat on the left, there's networking in between sessions. If you want to pop in and meet somebody at random who's here in the, at the conference as well, you can do that. Awesome. Cool. So coming up next, we've got a good friend of Process Street. We've got Nick Sonnenberg. He's the CEO and founder of Leverage. So this conversation is just gonna be all about how to leverage systems and tools so that you can be efficient and, and stop drowning in work. So we're really excited about that. There's gonna be a little bit of time for live Q&A at the end of his presentation, so definitely enter your questions as we go throughout, and you can— and Nick will answer your questions live. Oh, dad jokes! Oh my gosh, Erin, thank you for that. Colleen, are you ready?

All right, let's see. I got a couple up my sleeve. All right, so first one. Hopefully you guys can at least get a smile out of this, but so my husband is really mad at the fact that I have zero sense of direction. So what I did was I just packed up my stuff and right.

Oh my gosh. Yes.

All right. Okay.

Okay.

One more.

Jay, if you're here, can you, can you give us a rating scale like 1 to 10?

On a dad level? So this, this is a good one. What do you call a fast saltwater fish? Anybody?

Efficiency. Yes, love that one. Very fitting for Process Street. All right, so we're gonna just get ready for Nick, who's gonna pop on in just a moment, and we will see you in the next session.