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GitHub - orbit-love/orbit-model: A framework for building high gravity communities 🪐

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The Orbit Model is a framework for building high gravity communities. A high gravity community is one that excels at attracting and retaining members by providing an outstanding member experience. The Orbit Model contains five fundamental concepts: Gravity, Love, Reach, Orbit Levels, and Presence.

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People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams

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People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams

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People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams

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Buy People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business, Brand, and Teams Illustrated by Jono Bacon (ISBN: 9781400214884) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

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Overview

This page is a guide for People Experience Associates when onboarding new team members. All onboarding tasks and guidelines for new team members, People Experience, and Managers are in the People Experience Onboarding Issue. Each onboarding issue is structured with tasks for all team members (day 1 to day 5 and then week 2 to week 4) and below those task sections are listed department-specific and/or role-specific tasks. In some cases, specific tasks may link to supplemental issues, created by specific teams, with in-depth training. In case this is a re-hire ping the ITOps team in the #it-help slack channel to ensure there are no blockers, before creating an onboarding issue or any accounts to avoid the re-hire from having system related issues on day 1.

Timing

On Monday and Wednesday the People Experience Associate in the BHR Onboarding Report rotation will pull a report from BambooHR which compiles a list of all new team members starting in 2 weeks and added to the onboarding tracker. This data is pulled from the Greenhouse <> BambooHR sync once the Candidate Experience Specialist team updates the team member to hired.

In the event that a team member has already been synced and a new team members start date changes, it is important that the Candidate Experience Specialist team notifies the People Experience team by submitting a Slack form in order to re-sync the team member and update the necessary systems (Onboarding issue, PEA tracker, BambooHR, etc).

People Experience Associates will create the onboarding issue, and start completing the onboarding tasks, no later than 2 weeks before the new team member joins. People Experience Associates require a minimum of 4 business days (with the new hire timezone as the basis) before the new hire's start date to complete all onboarding tasks. To ensure we create a smooth onboarding experience for new team members, provide enough time for the IT Ops team for laptop orders, and completing the I-9 process (for US-base hires) 4 days is the minimum amount of time needed. Should a contract not be signed prior to 4 working days from the start date, a new start date will be required.

If any changes or updates need to be made to the onboarding template, kindly notify team members of the People Experience team by ccing them in the MR with the @gl-people-exp handle. Also notify other teams if a change will impact them.

All new hires will receive invitational access to their GitLab email, GitLab accounts, and any other work-related accounts on Day 1. No access is permitted before Day 1.

Issue Organization

Labels Associated with Onboarding Issues

Manager: Pre Start Complete
This is used when the new team members manager has completed all of the Before Starting at GitLab Manager Tasks.

Manager: Day 1 Complete
This is used when the new team members manager has completed all of the Accounts and Access Day 1 - Manager Tasks.

Alerts & Announcements

At 14:00 UTC every Wednesday, the PeopleOps Bot slack bot will send an alert in the #people-connect-alerts channel listing any data missing (if applicable) from the BambooHR profiles of team members joining the following week. The People Experience team will fill in these missing details as soon as possible since completeness and accuracy of BambooHR profiles is necessary for all automation.

At 10:00 UTC every Thursday, the bot will send another alert in the #team-member-updates channel with a list of all new team members joining the following week. This list includes names, email addresses, joining dates, and job titles of the new hires along with links to a Sisense graph showing the hiring progress over time. If any issues are detected by the bot, the post will first be submitted to the #people-connect-alerts channel, where the People Experience team will then rectify and rerun the bot (/pops run joiningannouncement) in Slack.

Pre-Onboarding

Converting from Consultant to Full Time Team Member

In some cases, consultants will be hired with GitLab and converted to full time team members. If this is the case, the following should take place:

People Experience Associate should reach out to the manager in the onboarding issue once created to advise them that they need to complete an offboarding access request for the consultant as per this process. The manager should then reach out to the IT Ops team to get it actioned and ensure that the new email address (which the People Experience Associates add to BambooHR) will sync correctly to Okta.

The People Experience Associate should also send a message to the manager in the issue to see whether a laptop has been sent to the team member, as well as that the team member will need to split focus between carrying on role based tasks and completing the onboarding issue.

Pre-Onboarding, US

For all GitLab Inc. and GitLab Federal LLC US-based employees, GitLab complies with all USCIS requirements and laws, including the I-9 and E-Verify process. GitLab uses an online I-9 portal called LawLogix where the process is completed and documents are saved electronically and securely.

Timing of I-9

GitLab requests that team members complete the I-9 process at least two business days prior to their start date. Please note the two business days prior to the new hire's start date timeline pertains to GitLab's internal policy, not USCIS legal requirements. GitLab requires the process to be completed earlier than USCIS to ensure there is no delay in adding the new team member to payroll and other important systems.

If a GitLab team member has not completed Section 1 by end of day on their first day of work (their start date), all access is paused. Their Google Workspace is Suspended, as well as their Okta account, as well as their 1Password account and Slack account if these have been created. Access will be resumed as soon as Section 1 is completed.

If a GitLab team member has completed Section 1 but their Designated Agent has not completed Section 2 by the end of day of the team members fourth day of work (3 business days after start date), all access is paused. Their Google Workspace is Suspended, as well as their Okta account, as well as their 1Password account and Slack account. Access will be resumed as soon as Section 2 is completed.
Note: You can reference what are considered to be "Acceptable Documents" here.
Procedure

There is currently a sync between BambooHR and LawLogix in place where a team member will automatically be added to LawLogix 7 days before their start date.

LawLogix Alerts

When the sync takes place from BambooHR to LawLogix, the People Experience team will receive a log report via email. It is important to check that the sync says Successful. If it reports that there is an error, the People Experience Associate will need to troubleshoot by completing the following steps:

1. Log into LawLogix

2. Click on your name on the top right hand side

3. Select Administration

4. Click on Integrations from the panel on the left hand side

5. Click on the last page arrow at the bottom of the page

6. Click on Log

7. This will now reflect the error reason for the sync failure

8. Correct the error and run the sync/upload for the relevant team member

Most common reasons for failure:

There is a special character in the team members name that is not supported by LawLogix - simply log into BambooHR, fix the character and run the sync/upload to LawLogix.

There is a duplicate team member - check for rehires or whether there was a possible start date change.

If you are unable to identify the reason for the error, submit a Support case to LawLogix via the Help > Make support request option on the main dashboard.

1. Section 1 → Employee personal details. New team members fill out this section online personally.

2. Section 2 → Employee assigns a "Designated Agent" to view, verify and document their government-issued official document(s). The Designated Agent completes this section online personally, but with the new team member and their documents physically in hand next to the Designated Agent.

**If a team member is synced from Greenhouse to BambooHR less than 7 days prior to their start date, we will manually need to run the pops command to sync from BambooHR to LawLogix.

Sending of Employee Instructions

All of the below is done automatically with the sync. Action using the steps below is only needed when there is an error with the sync.

In the event that the automation fails, the People Experience Associate can run the command /pops run uploadtoi9 bambooid in Slack, which will then automatically add the new team member to LawLogix.

The People Experience Associate will complete the following steps:

1. Open Dashboard and locate the team members name.

2. Click on the team members name.

3. Then select the I-9 Forms tab

4. Click on the * next to Electronic I-9

5. Select who will be the responsible party (People Experience Associate)

6. Select Review Employee Instructions

7. Select insert the team members personal email and address and the select Send or Edit Email

8. Select Send Email

Designated Agent Section

Once the team member has selected a designated agent and inserted the required information in the GitLab I-9 Process - Designated Agent Info google form, the People Experience Associate will log into LawLogix portal and follow the steps below:

1. Click on the team members name

2. Select the I-9 Forms tab

3. Click on the * next to Electronic I-9

4. Select Review Agent Instructions

5. Insert the designated agents email address in the To: field (as provided in the Google Form)

6. Select Send or Edit Email

7. Select Send Email

The new hire will complete section 1 of the I-9 and upload documents (optional at this step).

Note: LawLogix does not detect spelling errors, this will need to be reviewed by the PEA.

Approving the I9

Helpful Guide Slide 94 for Approving I-9

1. The new hire's name will show up on the dashboard under "I-9 needs approval"

2. Click on the Date I-9 Created Date (Not the name of the I-9)

1. Review the I-9

2. Open the Uploaded Documents - Review the I-9 to check for mistakes, as well as compare to any uploaded supporting documents by clicking the PDF icons. Editing is locked after it has been approved.

3. If you find any error or issues following the steps here to edit the I-9.

3. Click Mark Approved on the right side of the page

4. Select E-Verify Approval

5. Mark Approve

Review the Documents and Review Section 1 and 2 for errors

Delete any unnecessary documents uploaded by new hire or designated agent

6. Approve this I9 - This will now be pushed to E-Verify

E-Verify Photo Matching

1. Once an I-9 has been approved and submitted to E-Verify, if Photo-Matching is required a new tab will appear - Manual Processing.

2. The photo returned by E-Verify will be displayed on the Manual Processing Tab.

3. Documents previously uploaded are available for review. Click on the appropriate link to compare the document to the image returned by E-Verify. (IE US Passport ID Page).

4. Compare the photos.

5. Select the appropriate response.

6. If the photos match you should receive an Employment Authorized result within 30 seconds.

7. Save the E-Verify PDF breakdown and upload to BambooHR to the team members Verification folder, along with the documents used to confirm identity.

Team member is no longer joining but I-9 process has started

In the event that a team member notifies us that they will no longer be joining GitLab but the I-9 initial email has been sent, the People Experience team will need to manually terminate the team member from LawLogix.

1. Click on the date of the I-9 for the team member.

2. Check that Section 1 has not yet been completed.

3. Select Employee Details

4. Click on Terminate Employee

5. Confirm the warning message that appears.

6. Refresh the dashboard and the team member should no longer be listed.

Citizenship Confirmation

For certain systems and applications, it is required for Administrators to confirm that team members are US Citizens to be given access to these systems.

1. Administrators can email people-exp@gitlab.com and ask for confirmation that a team member is a US Citizen.

2. Any People Experience Associate (PEA) can look in the Verification Docs folder in BambooHR for the specific team member, as that is where the documents used to complete the I-9 process are housed.

3. If the team member has an unexpired US Passport, the PEA may reply: "We can confirm that we have visual proof that this team member possesses an unexpired US Passport, a document only given to US Citizens, therefore they are a US Citizen."

4. If the team member has an expired US Passport, the PEA may reply: "We can confirm that we have visual proof that this team member possesses an expired US Passport. We will reach out to the team member for visual confirmation of an unexpired US Passport." Then, the PEA will reach out to the team member to gather the scan/image of an unexpired US Passport and then update the email thread.

5. If the team member has a US Birth Certificate, the PEA may reply: "We can confirm that we have visual proof that this team member possesses a US Birth Certificate, a document only given to US Citizens, therefore they are a US Citizen."

6. If the team member only has documents other than a US Passport or Birth Certificate, the PEA may reply: "The following team member only provided documents such as a Driver's License and Social Security Card (for example). Since these are available to non-citizens we cannot confirm their US citizenship." Then, the PEA will reach out to the team member to gather a scan/image of either an unexpired US Passport or Birth Certificate and update the email thread.

7. If the team member has a Permanent Resident Card, the PEA may reply: "I can confirm the team member has an unexpired permanent resident card. Is this acceptable for your system?"
Note: This document is not sufficient for SalesForce

Pre-Onboarding, Japan

The PEA team will send two payroll forms for the new team member to complete. This enables our payroll provider to help with the Health Insurance registration.

1. At least two weeks before the team members start date, the PEA will send both forms listed below to the team member to complete using the Japan email.

2. To complete the forms the PEA will

Employee Regisration Form: Select make a copy and save in team members name. Use the hire date as the effective date

Application for change in exemption for dependents: Download and email the form to the team members personal email address to complete.

Be sure to use the hire date as the effective date

3. The PEA will be sure to cc nonuspayroll@gitlab.com in the email sent to the team member so that they can see action has been taken

4. Once both forms are completed, the PEA will save in BambooHR in the Payroll Folder

Pre-Onboarding, Germany

The PEA team will send a sheet for the new team member to complete payroll forms. This enables our payroll provider to set up everything in anticipation of the team member starting.

Send the new team member the GTL008_Monthly_LPI_Template_Germany form before the start date. Remember to make a copy and save it in the team members name. Share this file with the @nonuspayroll@gitlab.com to have access.

Pre-Onboarding, South Korea

The PEA team will send a sheet for the new team member to complete payroll forms located in the onboarding docs folder. This enables our payroll provider to set up everything in anticipation of the team member starting.

Pre-Onboarding, UK

The PEA team will send two payroll forms for the new team member to complete. These forms enable our UK payroll provider (Vistra) to help with their new hire enrollment.

1. A few days before the new team members start date, the PEA will send both:

The new team member the UK email.
This email contains: New Starter Checklist link, information about P45, and notification that UK payroll form will be sent from DocuSign

Using DocuSign, send the new team member the UK payroll form.

To do this go to Template " Use template " GitLab Ltd Uk Payroll Form.

On the drop-down menu on the right, choose use template. Fill in as much information as possible from BambooHR and stage in DocuSign for signature using their personal email.

2. Once the payroll form has been completed and signed by the new team member file the document in BambooHR under Documents/Payroll Forms. If a New Starter Checklist was completed, save it in the same folder. If new team member has a P45, verify that the P45 is for the current tax year and please save it to BambooHR as well.

3. When the Payroll form and P45 or New Starter Checklist are complete, send as encrypted attachments to Vistra Payroll along with an encrypted copy of the team member's signed contract. The signed contract is found in the Contracts & Changes folder in the team member's BambooHR profile.

This information should not be sent later than Day 1 of a new hire's start date. Do not cc the team as this is sensitive information. Once acknowledged, delete your email.

Failure to provide the documents before week one will result in payroll and benefits delays

The People Experience team should be notified of a start date change through the Slack workflow in the private channel changed with the CES team. Once we receive the notification, the People Experience Associate needs to update all the dates to the new start date in BambooHR. This includes all the following items on the Job tab: the Hire Date, Compensation, On Target Earnings, Currency Conversion, Equity, Job Information, Additional Information, Bonus (if applicable), and Employment Status

Pre-Onboarding Issue Creation Tasks

The People Experience Associate will create the Google Mail account first.

Google Mail Account Creation

1. People Experience Associates create email addresses for new team members using the convention of firstinitiallastname@gitlab.com.
Review common naming customs for the team member region. If the team member is from a LATAM country, ensure the email address is aligned with the team members preferred first name and last name(s).

2. To make sure that we create the GitLab Google Mail account according to the new team member's preferred first and last name, we first look at the team member's resume & relevant communications to find their preferred name.

3. Before creating the email account, verify that the proposed email is not conflicting with a current account by searching in Google Workspace Admin. If it is, add a letter for their middle name or ask the team member for their choice in preferred letter addition to their email address. After confirming, check the email again within the Google Workspace Admin. Please note that you will not be creating the email address in Google Workspace Admin.

4. Add the email address to the BambooHR profile under work email. The Okta and BambooHR sync will then create the email address automatically in Google Workspace.

Examples:

If a team member's legal name is "Joseph D. Doe" but their application and emails are signed "Joe Doe", then we create the GitLab email as Joe Doe, jdoe@gitlab.com.

If a team member's legal name is "Nina Fernandez Kola" but their resume and emails are signed "Nina Fernandez", then we communicate with the team member in advance and create the GitLab email as nfernandez@gitlab.com with confirmation from them that is their preferred name.

If a team member's legal name is "Li Ju Zhang" but their resume and emails are signed "Joanna Zhang", then we communicate with the team member in advance and create the GitLab email as jzhang@gitlab.com with confirmation from them that is their preferred name.

BambooHR Profile Data

As part of the Greenhouse<>BambooHR automation, certain fields in BambooHR are pre-filled. The People Experience Associate will check all synced fields have been populated correctly.

If all of the necessary tabs in the new team member's BambooHR profile do not automatically populate, please go to the Job tab, scroll down to the Job Information section, click the pencil icon on the righthand side of the section, and ensure that the Department and Division fields are correctly populated. Save your changes and refresh the new team member's profile. All necessary tabs should now appear. Please also create an issue for the People Group Engineer to investigate why the sync did not auto complete the fields.

If a new team member needs to adjust their start date but a new contract is not created, the People Experience team will:

1. Have the Candidate Experience Specialist team complete the following steps.

2. Check all Hire Dates in BambooHR

3. Update the Time Off Accrual Option to the new start date in BambooHR (applicable to certain locations)

4. Update the onboarding issue (if created)

5. Ensure the email with the updated start date is filed under the Contracts and Changes folder in BambooHR

If a new team member start date falls on a holiday that is observed by the new hire or the People Experience Team:

1. The People Experience Associate will coordinate with the Candidate Experience Specialist to adjust the start date to the next business day. Ensure the Hiring Manager is included in this communication.

2. The BambooHR dates will not be adjusted.

3. Update the Onboarding Issue title to reflect the "New Start Date". This date is used for the onboarding email automation.

New team member rejects offer

If a new team member has already been marked as hired in Greenhouse and the sync has taken place, then they reject our offer, the Candidate Experience team will notify both the VP, People Operations, Technology & Analytics and the People Experience team in the #people-group-confidential Slack channel.

1. Once confirmed, The People Experience Associate will verify that the profile has been deleted and then update the People Experience team onboarding tracker to remove the former team member.

2. If the deleted team member was located in the US, review and delete the relevant I-9 entry for them in LawLogix as per the deletion process.

Personal Tab

1. Name: Verify the team member's full legal name (as much as it is known before seeing legal ID) and preferred name if known has been added correctly as per the custom sync. The sync will import middle name as part of first name, you will need to seperate them if that was the case.

2. Address: Enter full address, including Street address, City, Region, Zip/Post Code and Country. Only the country is pre-filled by the custom sync. This data can be found in Greenhouse under the 'Details' section. Please ensure the country-specific Personal Data Format Guide is followed.

3. Locality: (geo area, country). This information should be visible in the offer details. If you have any questions, please reach out to the Total Rewards team.
Please note the formatting must be entered exactly as outlined in the location factor file with "area, country" or the integration outside BambooHR will fail. Please only choose a locality from the already created fields in BambooHR. Do not create any new localities.

4. Region: If not: the three options are Americas, EMEA, or JAPAC.

5. Work Email Add the GitLab email in the Work Email field. This can not be done by the sync, as the team member is synced before the email is created. Once added, this will sync from BambooHR to Okta and allow the team member to access their Google Mail via Okta.

Jobs Tab

1. Hire Date:

2. Role:

Leader - if director or above

Manager - if has any direct reports

Individual Contributor - all others

3. Cost Center: - it is the same cost center as their manager.

4. Department: - make sure it is the same as their manager.

5. Payroll Type:

Employee - paid through Payroll

Contractor: IND - Independent Contractor agreement

Contractor: C2C - Contractor Company agreement

Employee-PEO - Employe employed via a Professional Employer Org

Contractor-PEO - Contractor contracted via a Professional Employer Org

6. The People Experience Associate sends an email to the team member's direct manager for approval. In the email, the People Experience Associate will include the information that is listed under the PIAA section of the contract and the next steps needed for approval, ie after approval adding their manager/director to the email thread for approval.

7. The manager will ask any necessary clarifying questions. Once the manager is comfortable providing written approval, they will then add the applicable Director-level leader to the thread, for their review and approval.

8. If the Director feels additional review and approval is needed, the Director will add the next level (VP or C-level as appropriate) to the email thread. If not, the Director will respond indicating their approval.
Note: A minimum of direct manager and Director-level approval is required for all PIAA exceptions.

9. The People Experience Associate will respond to the thread stating that they have saved the entire thread to the team member's BambooHR profile.

10. The People Experience Associate will need to save this to the contracts & Changes folder in BambooHR.

11. More complicated requests that seem to show conflicts or projects involving a 1099 might require additional legal approval which will be coordinated by the Team Member Relations Specialists (teammemberrelations@gitlab.com), who may forward the thread to the Functional Leader, or both. Legal may also be added to conversation as needed.

12. Once there is a final conclusion, the manager will relay the information to the team member.

13. The manager will then need to forward the email thread to the People Experience Associate who will save the entire thread as a pdf and filed in the team member's BambooHR record in the Contracts and Changes folder.

Enter No if the team member answered No or None.

1. Candidate ID: This is the candidate's ID in Greenhouse, and is found by looking at the URL for the candidate. It is an 11-digit number listed between /people/ and the ? symbol.

2. GHP_ID: This is the GHP ID in Greenhouse. You can find this on the approvals tab for the team member, then scroll to the Openings table and scroll to the far left to get the GHP ID.

3. Standard Hours per Week: This field enables the PlanSource sync and should indicate as 40.00 for all US based full-time team members.

If any of the below information has not been correctly synced, rerun the sync. Alternatively, you can use the BambooHR calculator to verify the figures that need to be manually added.

The Pay Frequency and the Pay Schedule should be filled in according to this table:

1. On Target Earnings
If the team member has variable compensation listed in the signed contract, verify that the information has been added correctly. If yes, continue.

2. Currency Conversion

Effective Date: Hire date for new hires.

Exchange Rate Effective Date: is either December 1 or June 1, whichever is more recent. Every December and June, the Total Rewards Analyst will conduct a currency conversion for all team members.

The existing Currency Conversion file is used as the SSoT for the currency conversion.

Currency Conversation: this should be entered with the factor from yml file, with all 5 decimal places.

Local Annual Salary with the appropriate currency code and the converted salary in USD.

3. Job information:

Effective Date: Hire Date

Location: Which entity the new team member is contracted through.

Division: Lists the appropriate division the new team member is contracted through.

Department: Lists the appropriate department the new team member is contracted through.

Job Title: This will list the job title as stipulated on the signed contract.

If the title does not exist, ping the total-rewards team in the private Slack channel #people-connect_totalrewards and verify the title is in the correct format before adding.

Once confirmed, scroll to the bottom, click "Add New", create and save the new job title.

Reports To: Check that the manager listed on the contract is listed correctly in BambooHR.

Job Title Speciality: If there is a specialty (this would be found under On Job- Offer Details), this will be inserted in the field. If the specialty is not listed in the drop down menu, create a new one. The Job Title Specialty field has no restrictions) (Examples of a Specialty: Growth, Commercial, DoD, EMEA).
* Note: For Development, the Job Title Specialty field should indicate the Group level within Development (I.E. Package, Verify, Fulfillment, etc). For reference, there is an overview of all of the stages and their corresponding Groups on the Product sections, stages, groups, and categories handbook page.

This will list either Part Time or Full Time, check whether this is listed correctly.

4. Employment Status

2020-06-12

Probationary Period

1-month Probation Period 2020-06-12 to 2020-07-12

2020-06-12

Temporary Contract

12-month Temporary Contract 2020-06-12 to 2021-06-11

2020-07-12

End of Probationary Period

2021-06-11

Temporary Contract Ending

New Team Members from entities mentioned in this file

1. Probationary Period with the start date - Add a comment with the length of the probation period and the start to end date. This is helpful for the reminder emails.

2. End of Probation Period with the number of months after start date.

3. Active number of months + 1 day after start date.

1. If the team member is a member of the People Group, the People Experience Team is unable to view the probation status. Simply the run the following command in a private Slack message to confirm that the probation period statuses have been added successfully for the team member dependent on their location: /pops run probationstatus team member name or GitLab email address. 1. If the status is incorrect, the People Experience Associate will need to request assistance from the Total Rewards Analyst to update the status.

2. If applicable, Ensure the End of Probation Period date is accurate, this date will drive an alert for the People Experience team automatically, 5 days before and on the day the probation period expires. Details of the probation period process can be found on the Contracts, Probation Periods & PIAA handbook page. Please use these probation periods in BambooHR for team members in these specific groups.

Notes Tab

Review the Referral Process Page for adding referral bonus.
Note: In the case that a referral was not added or was incorrectly added to BambooHR, resulting in the bonus not being paid on time to the referring team member, please proceed with the following steps:

If not already added, add the bonus to BambooHR as instructed above. For the bonus date section, the date that the referral bonus should have been paid out should be added (I.E. 3 months after the referred team member's start date).

Email both payroll@gitlab.com and total-rewards@gitlab.com to notify them of the change.

Onboarding Issue Creation

The People Experience Associate will then create an onboarding issue with a ChatOps command in Slack 2 weeks prior to the new team member's start date.

1. Before creating the onboarding issue, ensure that all information entered BambooHR is accurate and complete.

2. In Slack, go to your profile as if you were going to send a Slack message to yourself. Type the command /pops run onboarding BambooHR_ID_number (not Employee ID #). This number is found in the team member's BambooHR profile URL, after id=. It is a 5-digit number. An example of the command would be /pops run onboarding 00000. If BambooHR's API is down, this ChatOps command will fail and will need to be created manually.

3. You will be pinged in Slack once the onboarding issue is created, which usually takes 30 seconds or so. The ping will include a link to the new onboarding issue.

4. Check and update if applicable the Name from Legal to Preferred name.

5. If the new team member is on the executive team, or if the new team member reports to a member of the executive team, please also assign the issue to the appropriate Executive Business Administrator(https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/eba/).

6. Update if applicable the title with the Specialty as the bot does not add the Specialty so it must be manually added.

7. If the manager is not automatically assigned and listed in the issue, add them. It could be because the employee's manager uses a name in GitLab that is very different from the one in BambooHR, and they don't use their @gitlab.com email ID as the primary email ID in GitLab. They will then manually need to be assigned.

8. Copy and paste the link into the People Exp/Ops Task Tracker sheet in the team member's specific column on their line. Please note that this document is only viewable to the People Experience and People Operation Specialist Teams due to personal information.

9. Once the onboarding issue has been opened, the Employment Bot will ping the manager in the issue if no Baseline Entitlement Access Request exists. In the event that a manager pings the Bot/People Experience Associate that one does exist (usually providing a link to the correct template), follow the steps below:

10. is the role template title == the team member's role

11. is the role template's department folder == the team member's department

12. is the role template specified on speciality level and == the team member's specility the same

Open the team members BambooHR profile and verify the above

If the Access Request template can be used for the specific team member, add the role to the Shared Components file

Assign the merge request for the shared components file to IT OPs Manager to review and merge. Once merged, this will ensure that the template is created by day 2 (if merged before then)

13. If a Baseline Entitlement Access Request exists, this will be automatically opened by the Bot on day 2.

14. If you are part of the People Experience team, IT Ops team, new team members's manager or onboarding buddy please note there are additional steps to complete directly in the new hire's onboarding issue in the 'Before Starting at GitLab' section.

People Experience Pre-Start Onboarding Tasks

Each assigned People Experience Associate will send their new team members our Code of Conduct 2021, Acknowledgement of Relocation 2021, Consent to Collect and Use Data Regarding Race Ethnicity and Social Media Policy Acknowledgment forms for review and signature.

1. In BambooHR, go to the Files section.

2. Be sure you are in the Signature Templates section.

3. To the right of the Code of Conduct 2021, click on the triangle to the right of the gear icon and click Request Signature.

4. Choose "Send a signature request to: Only some people"

5. Type in the name of your assigned team members. Please note that self-service option needs to have been activated in BambooHR in order for us to request a signature.

6. Message to Signers: Dear new team member, we are so happy you are part of the GitLab team. Please take a moment to sign this document. Thank you!

7. Click Send Request.

8. Repeat the above process for Acknowledgement of Relocation 2021, Consent to Collect and Use Data Regarding Race Ethnicity and Social Media Policy Acknowledgment.Important: Do NOT send the Consent to Collect and Use Data Regarding Race Ethnicity to team members located in the following countries: France, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden for compliance reasons

9. The People Experience Associate in the respective bi-weekly rotation will check to see whether the team members that started during those weeks have signed the Code of Conduct 2021, Acknowledgement of Relocation 2021, Consent to Collect and Use Data Regarding Race Ethnicity and Social Media Policy Acknowledgment forms.

10. Click on Code of Conduct 2021.pdf or Acknowledgement of Relocation 2021.pdf or Consent to Collect and Use Data Regarding Race Ethnicity.pdf or Social Media Policy Acknowledgment and notice the team members who were sent the document and have still not signed.

11. If a team member was sent the document for signature or reminded over 2 weeks in the past, click the Bell icon on their line at the far right. Clicking on the bell will send them a notification to sign.

12. If after 14 business days from start date, the team member has not signed the Code of Conduct, escalate to the appropriate People Business Partner.

13. If after 21 days from start date, the team member has not signed the Code of Conduct, escalate to the Director of Legal, Employment.

People Experience Day 1 Onboarding Tasks

Verify Team Members Legal Name

Once you have seen the team member's legal ID (either through work eligibility confirmation or employee upload), please edit the 3 Name fields (First Name(s), Middle Name(s), Last Name(s)) to ensure that the team member's full and complete legal name is shown in BambooHR. This is critical, specifically for US team members as this data (full and complete legal name) is needed for mandatory reporting completed by the People Compliance team. As a best practice, we ask that this is also completed for all team members globally.

Onboarding Welcome Email

The new team member will automically recieve a "Welcome to Onboarding" email. The People Experience team will be CCd on this process. More information about this email automation can be found here. The team member will follow the instructions in the welcome email to access Okta and their GSuite account (this is no longer a manual process).

New Hire Swag Email

The "New Hire Swag" email is automatically sent to the new hire on their first day with GitLab, with people-exp @gitlab.com cc'ed in the email. The email will state that the team members need to access the GitLab Swag Store, choose goods and use the new hire discount code provided in the email at checkout. New hires must use their GitLab email at checkout.

The People Experience Associates assigned to the respective team members onboarding is responsible for ensuring that the email is successfully sent on Day 1 and will be checked off in the onboarding issue as part of the tasks list.

Okta Issues

In the event that team members experience any difficulties with gaining access to their Okta account when the IT Ops team is not available, the People Experience team are able to submit a reset password option via the Okta Admin Panel as per the following steps:

On the main Okta Admin Dashboard, search for the team members GitLab email address under People, select the relevant email address from the dropdown.

In the team members profile, click on the reset password in the top right-hand side of the page.

This will send a new email to the team member to recreate their Okta login.

Invite to Moo

We expect every team member to be an advocate for GitLab and we offer every team member the opportunity to have business cards, to make GitLab feel real to people around them despite not having an office.

Every Tuesday, the assigned People Experience Associate in the rotation, which will invite the new team members for that week, as per this process.

Business cards should be ordered by the team member themselves using the Moo platform. Self-help instructions are here.

Create Interview Training Issue

1. The Interview Training Issue will be created automatically one week after the team members start date. Information about this automation.

2. This task is only applicable for new team members that are people managers.

Create Becoming a GitLab Manager Issue

1. The Becoming a Manager Issue will be created automatically one week after the team members start date. Information about this automation.

2. This task is only applicable for new team members that are people managers.

Compliance and Ownership

The People Experience Team is responsible for monitoring and facilitating the completion of the onboarding issue.

People Experience Associates will complete the following tasks.

Timing

2 Business Days Prior:

Check that manager has started their onboarding tasks.
If not, ping the manager in the issue.

Check that the Onboarding Buddy has started their tasks.
If not, ping the buddy or manager in the issue.

On Start Date

Check that the manager has completed the "Before Starting tasks".
If not, send a slack message to the manager.

Check that the buddy has completed the "Before Starting tasks".
If not, send a slack message to the manager.

After Day 1

Check that the team member has completed Day 1 Security tasks

After Day 3

Add the Encryption Label - Complete or Missing.
If missing, request the new team member complete the task as soon as possible.

After Week 1

Check that the new team member is progressing through the onboarding issue. Check in with the team member to ensure they are not stuck on any task.

Total Rewards Analyst Onboarding Tasks

1. Audit the BambooHR Entry. Download a copy of the contract from the Documents Tab. Verify the information (start date, title, stock, etc) matches the entries in BambooHR as outlined in Adding a New Team Member to BambooHR. Add US team members to the appropriate Benefit Group.

2. If all the information is correct, mark the new hire as complete on the "Payroll Changes Report" in BambooHR.

3. At the end of each week a Total Rewards Analyst will review all data entered into BambooHR through the Payroll Change Report for audit purposes. Once a month an audit should be conducted from all payroll providers to ensure the salary information matches BambooHR

Onboarding Process for Rehires

In the event that a former team member is rehired with the company, they will still need to go through standard onboarding. There are different factors that need to be considered and actioned prior to the team member joining. For example, the team member will still need to complete all Security and Compliance pieces to ensure that as a company we are remaining compliant (Code of Conduct, Security training, Employment Verification).

Ensure that the team members Greenhouse profile is linked to their original profile to ensure that a duplicate BambooHR profile is not created.

Notify the People Experience team as soon as possible that a former team member has been rehired in the private people-exp_ces Slack channel.

If the team member has not been sync with BambooHR, you may need to run a Resync

People Experience Team

Check when the team member was offboarded previously. Open a new onboarding issue if the team member was offboarded more than 3 months ago, or open a customised onboarding issue if offboarding took place in the last 3 months.
If a custom onboarding issue is created, be sure to include the default onboarding template table as the employment automation relies on the information.

Dependent upon the team members location, an employment verification may need to be commpleted (example: US team member needs to complete I-9 verification).
If an I9 is needed you will need to run a rehire sync with LawLogix if a previous I9 is present. If an I9 is not available then a new I9 will need to be created.

Verify that the team members former email address is still available by searching in Google Workspace. Keep this email address the same as far as possible.

Reactivate the team members previous BambooHR profile to avoid duplicates from being created, as well as update any new employment terms.

Status on Personal tab: set to Active.

Employment Status: add new entry with new start date and set to Active.

Update Job Information with start date and role as per details in Greenhouse / contract.

Verify that a Hire Date and Original Hire Date exists on the Job tab.

Download a copy of the new signed contract from Greenhouse and upload to Documents section in BambooHR.

Enable Employee Self-Service.

Ping IT Ops once the onboarding issue has been created to ensure that no issues are experienced on the team members first day back with any previous systems.

Notify Payroll and Total Rewards team in the onboarding issue on the team members first day in order to be added back to payroll and relevant systems. This should be done at the latest on day 3.

Onboarding Process for Interns

Internships are utilized when we are sponsoring a specific program for students to earn credit to their school/university. Although the interns will not be official team members, onboarding is still required for security and compliance reasons. Once an intern is marked as hired in Greenhouse, the automation in place will sync the intern to BambooHR and the People Experience team will be notified via Slack alerts channel.

Creating the Onboarding Issue

We would follow the same onboarding issue creation process when creating the issue for the Interns. The template has been edited to allow for additional tasks to be added for the interns.

I-9 Process

The standard I-9 process will be implemented between BambooHR and LawLogix for paid interns.

If an intern is in the US on a student visa, additional documentation is required.

Passport

I94

I20 - this must be completed during the hiring process
In Section 2 of Form I-9, the designated agent should enter the foreign passport information in the first area and the I-94 information in the second area in the List A column. Enter the information from the Form I-20, which includes the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) number and expiration date (i.e., the Form I-20 CPT employment authorization end date (Must match section 1 date), not the program end date) in the third area in the List A column.

In Section 2 of Form I-9, the designated agent should enter the foreign passport information in the first area and the I-94 information in the second area in the List A column. Enter the information from the Form I-20, which includes the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) number and expiration date (i.e., the Form I-20 CPT employment authorization end date (Must match section 1 date), not the program end date) in the third area in the List A column.

Unpaid interns are not required to complete an I-9.

If an intern is hired on for a full time position and there is a break in employment a re-verification (Section 3) will need to be completed.

Once the internship has been completed, terminate the intern in the LawLogix system.

If an intern is hired on for a full time position and there is a break in employment a re-verification (Section 3) will need to be completed.

BambooHR Profile

The BambooHR Profile will follow all of the same rules as a normal onboarding with these exceptions:

Part-Time

Compensation Table: Overtime - Non-Exempt

Currency Conversion: Blank

Employment Status: Only add Active Date

Interns do not have a probation period - ensure to delete any country specific probation period information from BambooHR

Offboarding Interns

If the intern is not offered full time employment with GitLab, the same offboarding process will need to take place to ensure that access is deactivated and the intern is removed from all systems.
Talent Acquisition or the CES team will notify the People Experience team via Slack when an intern is not offered full time employment with GitLab so that the offboarding can be scheduled at the date of the end of the intership agreement.
Onboarding Process for Interns converting to Hired Team Members

In some instances, the interns that have been onboarded may be hired on a full time basis after successfully completing their internship with GitLab. This lists the steps required from all the different stakeholders:

People Business Partner / Managers

Check in on feedback with all hosting teams

Performing performance/skills assessments with interns based on the Job Families and Competencies

Sharing feedback with interns

Aligning with Finance/Business on headcount/budget

Making a decision on offers to interns

If team member will be hired, notify Talent Acquisition team

Communicating the offer/no offer to interns

Awaiting final decision of interns

Notify all stakeholders involved via email (including People Experience Team)

End of the internship program

New start date for intern as full time team member

Recruitment

Discuss any changes with the People Business Partner / Manager.

Notify the Candidate Experience Specialist team to create and send contracts to the interns.

Assist with creating the respective contracts for the interns that are offered full time employment with GitLab.

Reconfirm with the People Experience team that the intern is transitioning to full time team member in the private Slack channel.

Total Rewards

As the interns already have entries in BambooHR, an update will be needed with the new employment terms.

Update role to Individual Contributor.

Employment status update from termination status to active.

Locality is important to decide salary - need to be mindful of where the intern is located and where their final destination will be.

Need to check on benefits when converted.

Check that all employee statuses are correct (employment, pay, hire vs start date).

Payroll

Check that the team member's info has been received from a payroll perspective.

Verify employment details.

Enroll the team member into any benefits for their location.

People Experience

Create the customised Career Mobility issue 4 days prior to the start date.

Assist with creating an offboarding issue (if applicable when there is a break between internship and hire date) and having accounts deactivated.

Ensure all information in BambooHR is correct.

Hire Date = Start Date of job (If there is a break in employment)

Orginal Hire Date = Start of Internship

Initiate the relevant payroll documents (I9, UK, Netherlands, etc).

Onboarding Temporary Service Provders to Team Members

Managers

At least 2 weeks before the start date, the Manager will need to complete the Temp Service Provider to Team Member issue. This is to ensure that the IT team and the People Experience Team can complete on Onboarding Issue, as well as ensure that systems get changed over correctly so that the team member does not lose access.

In the issue, please ping the People Experience Team @gl-people-exp to ensure the team is notified

People Experience

Once the CES team has hired the team member in GreenHouse, and the BambooHR profile has been updated, please add in the GitLab email address to the Temp Service Provider to Team Member issue.

Note: Please do not add in the email address to BambooHR until the Sunday before a Monday start for EMEA or Amer team member, or Friday for a Monday start in APAC

Please be sure to ping the IT team in the issue with the email address.

IT Ops

24 hours before the start date of the team member, update the email address of the team member with the one in the Temp Service Provider to Team Member issue.

Onboarding Core Team Members

Core team members are team member that are not employed by GitLab but are part of the wider GitLab community. These team members can be granted access to certain systems at request from the Community Relations team by creating the respective Core Team Member Onboarding Issue.

The Community Relations teamwill ping the People Experience team in the #people-connect Slack channel for assistance.

There are tasks within the issue that need to be completed by the People Experience Team.

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This page is a guide for People Experience Associates when onboarding new team members. All onboarding tasks and guidelines for new team members, People Experience, and Managers are in the People Experience Onboarding Issue.

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Oftentimes we talk about onboarding as a one-off event where we welcome the new employees, play some games to help them network, talk about what we do for business, culture, and values, then we send them off. Good luck! And most of the time, that's what we leave them to - luck. Luck, that they [...]

Oftentimes we talk about onboarding as a one-off event where we welcome the new employees, play some games to help them network, talk about what we do for business, culture, and values, then we send them off. Good luck!

And most of the time, that's what we leave them to - luck. Luck, that they will have a great manager to support and get up to speed and provide them with feedback. A buddy that helps them meet people. An organization that is mature enough, with established processes and ways of working so they will just blend in.

The problem with that - what if that does not happen?

Onboarding purpose

So, let's break it down. The two main outcomes of onboarding (sides of the same coin) are:

Performance readiness.

Getting the new joiner up to speed so they can perform 100% against the expectations and responsibilities of the role. I like to call it the "hard" side.

The best way to help your new joiner is by ensuring they have clear goals and letting them know how success looks like in that particular role as early as they join. Even if those are as simple as "by the end of week 3 you have met all your team members and understand who is doing what" or "by the end of week 5 you have completed the online onboarding modules and understood the business model" (which then they would discuss with their line manager). What matters here is that those goals are crafted in a way that first, covers all the tasks and responsibilities that are part of the job, and second, that they expose the new joiner to collaboration with a relevant network of people, whether those are stakeholders, peers or their direct reports.

The line manager is the key figure in this journey and should be there to check in weekly, make sure the new joiner is progressing against goals, provide continuous feedback and support where needed. Depending on the complexity of the role you would plan for longer vs. shorter periods of time.

Many smart organizations use the pre-onboarding time for many of these activities, even before the candidate has joined. They use this period of time in order to get them up to speed early because... when is the candidate & prospective employee excited the most about your company? Right before they start - and this is why they signed the offer! Use that excitement to start onboarding them early on. Be engaging but not disruptive to their schedule (especially if the candidate is joining in more than 30+ days and still serve a notice period). Some quick wins can include:

A simple email from the line manager to the new joiner (some time before they join) with a quick note of how excited they are for them to be joining soon. Within that, you may include some helpful links, a sample of their onboarding plan, and other useful docs;

A (virtual) lunch break with the team so they can already form connections;

Have a couple of other team members check in on them and ask if they need anything;

Or, if you have an LMS/HRIS or even your career website, why not get them to start to engage with the content about the organization, its values, products/services, people;

Also, if you are organizing a team event and you have a pending new joiner - do invite them too.

All the above is of course optional and shouldn't be mandated.

Employee experience.

How will the new joiner feel, will your EVP stay true to itself, how strong will you make the "social contract" with the new hire. I like to call it the "soft" side.

This is the "soft" side of onboarding yet the hardest to crack. One way to think about it is "how would a 5-star hotel do it?". How would they plan the customer experience journey from the moment someone visited their website and booked the room (pre-onboarding) to actually visiting their hotel, checking in, entering their room. Was there a welcome drink? Were they engaged with all the customer touchpoints throughout the "stay"? Every interaction with your people and your process matters. All these interactions will not only be the key to the social integration of the new joiners but also their understanding of culture and "how things get done", which will ultimately help them do their job.

Lenses for contextualization of the onboarding journey

Once you've got the above elements right, you would want to use some filters or "lenses":

Lense 1

Talent segments you are onboarding: early careers/graduates/interns, mid-level professionals, or senior folks - depending on the seniority of the role, these groups of people might have different needs. E.g. A graduate for whom this is the first entry point to the "world of work" not just your company vs. A senior executive who needs to understand everything about governance, policies, strategy, etc. The rule of the thumb is - the higher the job grade, the longer it takes for a person to onboard.

Lense 2

Are your new joiners Individual Contributors or Line Managers? How could you better support your new hires to understand the needs of their team and what good leadership looks like at your organization?

Lense 3

Which function are they coming from?- A customer-facing job vs. product engineering may have completely different pathways and speed of onboarding.

Lense 4

What is your forecast - How many people are you hiring? (very important for scaling/growth businesses) Do you need to onboard people in a bulk way or you can personalize their experiences and provide bespoke support due to the manageable number of new joiners.

Lense 5

Is your workforce distributed globally or locally, and is it an entirely virtual experience or not (not just because of COVID).

Each of these lenses is important in crafting a relevant onboarding journey that leads to early performance and retention - and this is why good onboarding takes so much time and effort.

Engaging the Line Managers

The best way to engage the line managers is by showing how a good onboarding process makes their lives easier in the long run. Apart from that, many managers might not necessarily view their role as essential to the new joiners' experience so L&D should seek ways of educating line managers on the importance of onboarding (especially in a high-growth company). You can do this through leadership development programs as well as company-wide comms.

In addition, co-designing onboarding journeys with the managers is one of the most powerful ways to get their buy-in. To help the managers maintain the quality of the onboarding experience, L&D should design simple checklists that would help managers track the onboarding process from start to finish.

Measuring the impact of your onboarding experience

Best indicators for the onboarding experience are (up to) 12 months retention rates and time to full performance which also informs your cost to onboard, as well as the quality of hire.

To help you measure the impact of your onboarding journey-here are a few prerequisites.

You need to establish what does it mean "full performance" & a time that you expect someone or a particular group/talent segment to "come to full performance". L&D can do very little to define what "full performance" means because this may differ from function to function, job to job, level to level, etc.

What you can and should do is run a simple 360-degree survey at the 3 months point (especially if you don't have a mature performance management in place that would enable you to track employee's performance after a period of time).

This survey should be as simple as a few retro questions:

What went well? - asked of both the Employee and a Line Manager

What could be done differently moving forward? - asked of both Employee and a Line Manager

Few values/ behaviors that are important for the organization (e.g. culture attributes/competency framework) in order to get feedback on collaboration and how is the new joiner navigating the culture - asked of the employee, peers, stakeholders, manager.

And then a key question for both the lead and the employee.

To what extent is this employee performing against role expectations & responsibilities: 0-25%, 25-50%, 50-75%, 75%-100%

In case you responded with less than 75%, what would it take to get to 100%? What kind of support do you require?

Both the lead and the employee answer the questions. These answers serve as a great development conversation starter which will lead to set specific goals to reach the full performance.

In case you have a performance management process in place, it will help a lot. You would get an idea of how is this employee performing further down the line of their employee journey. If not, you can repeat the same survey again after 3 months. In this way, you will have an idea about how long it takes to have an "ROI" on the employee and when do they start fully contributing to the organization.

Onboarding as an organizational capability

Many organizations still do not invest enough time and resources in onboarding and this leads to negative financial impact. The cost to onboard a particular employee can easily be calculated by summing

Cost to hire;

Salaries of the employee for the first 3-6 months (assuming they are not 100% productive within that period);

cost of training;

Cost of time of all the people involved in the process. Line managers, buddies, L&D, HR, IT, or everyone who has spent time with the new joiner;

Cost to backfill the role or loss of productivity (in case a person leaves). The amount of investment will naturally depend on the level and complexity of the role in terms of time to full performance and the salary of the particular employee group, as well as the location due to different labor costs.

Furthermore, the cost to onboard, especially in high-growth organizations (with huge volume in hiring) can serve as a reminder to the business on the bottom-line impact of onboarding. That said, L&D plays a vital role in influencing the senior leadership to adopt the right mindset when it comes to onboarding and seek time and resources from the business to ensure the best new hire experience.

Moreover, as L&D we should be clear about our role in the onboarding experience. Rather than being seen as OWNERS of it, we can only ENABLE it. A useful "mantra" that encompasses the above is - Onboarding is everyones' job!

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Onboarding - an event or a journey? | Offbeat Works

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Oftentimes we talk about onboarding as a one-off event where we welcome the new employees, play some games to help them network, talk about what we do for business, culture, and values, then we send them off. Good luck! And most of the time, that's what we leave them to - luck.

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Better.com's Onboarding Process for Growing From 350 to 3,000 Employees

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Better.com's Onboarding Process for Growing From 350 to 3,000 Employees

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Jonah Goldstein Head of Learning, 360Learning

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Better.com’s Onboarding Process for Growing From 350 to 3,000 Employees

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Building an onboarding process is one of the hardest things to get right in L&D, especially when you’re in hypergrowth. Here’s how Better.com scaled their process to support their massive growth.

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Reading time: about 7 min

Posted by: Lucid Content Team

The onboarding process is crucial in setting up new hires for success. But it's one thing to successfully onboard one person and another to successfully onboard forty people on the same day. With rapid growth, your onboarding process is put through more trials and these bring more chances for the whole process to break down.

Here's our best advice for avoiding breakdown while maintaining the integrity of your onboarding process, no matter how large your company becomes.

Why it matters

The onboarding process is much more than just first day procedures or a new hire orientation.

Onboarding can and should include:

Paperwork (tax paperwork, employment agreements, healthcare paperwork, etc.)

Going over job expectations and setting schedule for 1-on-1s and performance reviews

Being buddied up with a mentor

Sexual harassment prevention training

Coworker introductions

Processes and software introductions (including getting the new hire set up on their computer and signed into company apps)

New hire orientation

Employee development planning

Benefits training

A strategic onboarding process is the company's first and best chance to make a great impression. It's during the onboarding process that an employee typically decides whether or not they'll be staying with the job for the long term. Considering that employee turnover can be a massive cost for your organization, this is vitally important. In fact, research performed by the Office of State Personnel in North Carolina found that, "employees will decide within 10 days if they intend to stay with the organization or begin looking for a different job."

But beyond preventing turnover, the onboarding process helps keep your company culture intact, make and preserve loyalty, improve productivity, and avoid burnout.

7 steps to scaling your onboarding process

We've cut through the noise to give you the seven best ways to scale your onboarding process. Each one is great on its own, but together they make a solid strategy.

1. Keep your company's culture at the center of onboarding

Your company's culture is one of your most valuable assets. But that culture can't exist without your employees. At the heart of your company's culture is its purpose. A mission statement outlines where your business is headed. Your corporate culture and values detail how you're going to get there.

When your employees don't understand your company's mission, it's impossible for them to succeed. Make the organization's mission statement, culture, and values the first thing each hire learns. In fact, it's smart to give each employee a written mission statement along with an outline of your values. They can keep these at their desks and refer to them often.

2. Fine-tune your recruitment process

Your recruitment process needs to be documented and stored where everyone involved in hiring can access it. We have plenty of templates that will walk you through creating your own recruitment process and linking to vital documents that can be accessed through a central location.

Since it's difficult to predict upcoming employment needs, we recommend keeping an up-to-date organizational chart handy. Org charts help you immediately visualize the company as a whole, detect current gaps, and anticipate future hires. They can also make it easier to efficiently reorganize the structure of your company in the future.

Data-driven org chart example (Click on image to modify online)

3. Forge connections

Think about assigning each new employee a "pathfinder" so that everyone has a mentor at the company that they can turn to for fast answers and guidance. This peer-to-peer mentoring relieves HR of much of the burden of onboarding.

A pathfinder can help integrate a new hire into the more social aspects of the company, from where and when employees grab lunch to the best places for happy hour. It's important that your new hires feel like part of the team. Having a friend and mentor from day one can be a great way to provide that critical social support.

4. Define your communication process

It can be difficult for new hires to figure out your company's network of communication. Who, for instance, should they talk to about ordering a standing desk? Who is in charge of setting up meetings? Who owns the style guide? An organizational chart is handy for defining ownership, but it may be useful to have a separate document that gets into more specifics about various stakeholders across the company.

Each organization has its own internal methods of communication and accompanying best practices, so you'll need to train new hires on those. Think Slack, Microsoft Teams, company intranet, and other communication tools. If your company uses task management software, plan on spending some time training new hires on how to best utilize that tool, including how to tag coworkers in documents and how to accept tasks in the app.

Onboarding process flow example (Click on image to modify online)

5. Establish a training plan

You'll need to solidify a blueprint for training new hires that can be replicated and scaled over and over again. The onboarding process shouldn't be a mystery to anyone in your organization. Consider even the smallest tasks: where should employees enter their timesheets? How should each step of training be documented so no step is missed?

With an established training plan, members of your organization can be assigned and reassigned to certain tasks as needed. And it's easy to tweak the training plan as needed without upsetting the entire process. We recommend storing this training plan on a cloud server so that everyone across the organization has access to the most updated version at any time.

6. Build self-serve learning courses

Employees aren't likely to stay if they feel stagnant. Document what resources employees will need at each stage of their hiring process, from sexual harassment training courses to leadership courses. Each role will have individual requirements that will set employees on the path of career progression. We recommend filling out a template to keep learning requirements standardized for each role.

Career progression chart example (Click on image to modify online)

Throughout building the courses, make sure that they meet three important standards:

1. They're intentional - Ambiguous courses only aggravate the learner. Clearly state the goals of each course and where the training fits in with the requirements of the job.

2. They're gentle - If you're ever signed up for a training that demands absolute perfection, you know how intimidating that can be. If there are quizzes at the end of the course, show why an answer is correct or incorrect and don't make the experience feel as intense as a university course.

3. They're responsive - Make sure to incorporate tailored feedback throughout your course materials. Your employees can't improve if they don't know where to improve.

7. Focus on retention

A company can't exist without people. Finding a phenomenal employee is hard work and with LinkedIn and job boards constantly sending out recruiting emails, it's harder than ever to keep your best people. That's why retention is a process of constantly evolving.

One of the best things you can do is gather feedback about the onboarding process from recent new hires. What did they like? What did they not like? How could the process be improved? Then, share your onboarding process with current employees and ask them how they would improve things.

These seven steps can help you standardize and optimize your onboarding processes. Investing the time and energy to incorporate them into your existing onboarding program will result in better experiences for your HR team and new recruits alike. One last piece of advice: If you don't have a human resources team, consider building one before you start scaling. Even if you've been doing well enough using an outsourced team, scaling is best achieved by investing in an internal team that can rise to the demands of employee growth.

Now that you've got your onboarding processes in place, the next step is to improve your new-hire orientation.
Read our tips

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Reading time: about 7 min Posted by: Lucid Content Team The onboarding process is crucial in setting up new hires for success. But it's one thing to successfully onboard one person and another to successfully onboard forty people on the same day.

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https://www.hibob.com/blog/onboarding-remote-engineers/

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How do you set up newly hired engineers for success? Start with a great onboarding process.

Research by Glassdoor found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent. When you're an engineering lead, a critical part of your role is helping other engineers grow and setting them up for success. That means making sure they have the tools and processes they need to have an impact from day one.

But how can you make new team members feel supported and included when they don't have any face-to-face interactions? How can new employees experience the company's culture when they work remotely?

While we understand that every onboarding process is unique to an organization, and there's no one right answer, we want to focus on how remote engineering managers can set up a successful process for dispersed teams.

Manager onboarding checklist

First, managers should think about what new engineers and developers need to work remotely in their first eight to 12 weeks. This cohesive checklist can help you onboard new employees and set your entire team up for success.

Week 1: admin setup

Draft a digital contract.

Set up new employees across all internal systems (e.g., payroll).

Create a data-driven review system for developer cultural fit, skills, project work and quality, and timeliness.

Draft a welcome email, including links to the company's intranet, the software required, knowledge and policies documents, first week plans, etc.

Share the new remote team member's details with your existing team.

Have the developer conduct speed tests and test out hardware, and make sure a new employee is set up in their remote office with all equipment they need.

Knowledge sharing

Find a mentor or buddy for the new hire.

Draft company and team workflow documents.

Create an initial project for all new hires with defined success metrics.

Meeting schedules

Schedule one-on-one chats with other team members.

Schedule a weekly one-on-one meeting for the first month with the remote developer.

Send meeting requests for team-wide stand-ups.

Communicate the company's remote culture and set expectations.

Brief new employees on day-to-day expectations.

Brief new hires on review processes, and how their performance will be measured.

Next steps

Now that you have a checklist in place for yourself, here are some pointers to consider when you're figuring out how to integrate your department and team onboarding processes with the company culture. For best results, managers should focus on taking a more data-driven approach to the onboarding process and development of an induction space that's packed with all the information remote workers need. This can be the intranet, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a platform where new hires can log in securely and adapt to the company's culture.

Here are some additional best practices to consider as part of the onboarding process.

Be intentional about company culture

COVID-19 forced engineering teams into remote work, and remote (and hybrid) work are here to stay. To adapt to this new mode of work, engineering leaders are encouraged to migrate all icebreaker events to virtual formats.

For remote onboarding, start with being intentional about your company culture and introductions to each team member. This is incredibly important, as you can't bring a new hire around to everyone's desk and introduce them. For new hires to get the vibe of the company culture, managers need to foster a sense of belonging from the very start."In my 20 plus years experience in the tech industry, it's become clear that when you hire an engineer no matter where they come from it's imperative to help them through your organization's processes. This can be as simple as getting the right equipment and login information for their first day, to educating them on how to review code. It's the simple things," says Christine Wood, Director of Product Engineering, Cox Automotive.

Give everyone a buddy

According to HCI, 87 percent of organizations that assign a mentorship or buddy program during the onboarding process say that it's an effective way to speed up new-hire proficiency. This "buddy" or "mentorship" system guarantees that each new hire has someone they can go to with questions they don't feel like talking to their manager about.

How do you implement a buddy program? Just match a seasoned employee with your new hire. Request that they check in once a week for the first month, and one to two times per month thereafter, to make sure your new hire is acclimating to their new remote workplace.

Which organizations are doing this?

Zapier

On their website, Zapier explains what they "call ... the 'Zap Pal' program. Every new hire is assigned a Zap Pal, who reaches out to them in their first week, sets up at least one Zoom call with them, and continues to check in throughout their first month or so. It gives everyone a guaranteed 1:1 relationship, which is so important when you're spending most of your time alone in your house."

Drop

"We don't expect new engineers to have experience with our precise tech stack and so the first 3 weeks are allocated for ongoing education of architecture, frameworks, programming languages, and more," says Ian Logan, VP of Engineering at Drop. "Beyond a new hire's first 3 weeks, we help define a roadmap and mentor engineers to be increasingly autonomous, self-sufficient, and driven."

Pair together for the first month

Many engineering leaders say the most thoughtful approach to onboarding new developers in a remote setting having them pair with seasoned team members. When employees code together, make sure the veteran employee actively makes time to drive the session for the new hire. "[Pairing] naturally fosters alignment across the team, and largely prevents early performance issues ... this process also empowers happy and productive engineers," says Steve Pereira, CTO at Statflo.

Recommended For Further Reading

Plan a weekly onboarding schedule

HCI states that most organizations stop their onboarding process just after the first week, leaving new hires feeling confused, discouraged, and lacking resources. Agreeably so, a week is hardly enough time for a new hire to become acclimated to their company, culture, and role.

To avoid this, engineering leaders should construct a week-by-week plan that fully supports new hires in a distributed environment.

Ted Goas from Stack Overflow says they comprehensively plan out every new hire's first month in advance:

"We now have an onboarding process that spans a new hire's first month, broken out by week. Everyone now knows what's expected from a new hire after their first week, after their second, and so on. A new hire can skip ahead if they want, but expectations are clear and what should be happening at any given point."

Establish a code review process as part of onboarding

Once new engineers are up and running, managers should establish weekly code review process tasks during the first month. This is an invaluable tool to ensure your team consistently learns from each other and recognizes any minor errors in the process. Code review also presents an opportunity for cross-pollinating information and expertise between team members. And new hires need to be part of this team culture to engage meaningfully with new teammates.

From Shiran Yaroslavsky

Shiran Yaroslavsky is the VP Product US at Hibob. She is the former CEO and Co-founder of Cassiopeia (acquired by Hibob), a startup that helps managers lead teams effectively with data. Shiran is a thought leader in people analytics and remote team leadership. She was featured in 2019 in Forbes' 30Under30 list in Israel.

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How to onboard remote engineers + checklist

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How do you set up newly hired engineers for success? Start with a great onboarding process . Research by Glassdoor found that organizations with a strong onboarding process improve new hire retention by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent.

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When I first joined a company as a developer, I felt like the biggest imposter in the world. I didn't know what version control was, let alone what a server was or how to run code on one. I spent my nights furiously googling, terrified that I would disappoint everyone by not being a fully productive team member from day one. Since then, I've been on a mission to help create a positive and smooth onboarding process for as many people as I can-whether it's their first day at a new company, or their first day as an engineer.

Fast-forward nearly a decade: Today, I'm an engineering manager at Fellow, where I designed the engineering organization's onboarding process, and I've helped teams at other companies create their own, too. I've written before about the basics you need in onboarding (think: goals, 1:1s, and feedback loops, among other things), and I want to show you how you can build upon that foundation and make the experience great for remote engineers so they can have a strong start on their new team.

Successful onboarding isn't about learning the codebase at light speed or pushing out new features as quickly as possible; it's about building a foundation of relationships and psychological safety that allows your team to feel comfortable asking questions and requesting feedback so they can grow. This isn't easy! You need to take explicit steps to foster this culture, which is hard in person and can be especially challenging when teams are remote.

Keeping that in mind, I've put together some strategies based on what we do at Fellow to kick-start your onboarding and help create a solid foundation for your team.

Start with thoughtful basics

Logistically, seamless remote onboarding requires thorough prep work up front so new team members are ready to work remotely right away. Along with making sure any required hardware (preinstalled with necessary software) arrives before their first day, work with new hires in advance of their start date to create a first-day (or first-week) schedule. This step is key to preventing any surprises when your new hire gets access to their new corporate calendar, and allows them to make sure personal considerations (e.g., childcare) are accounted for as they plan their workday. Sending those first-week calendar invitations to both their corporate and personal emails-or, if sending to the latter creates logistic challenges, sending the schedule itself to their personal email-will allow them time to prepare.

Joining a new team brings on a whirlwind of emotions and an overwhelming amount of information-and, combined, that's pretty stressful. To ease the anxiety and information overload, provide new hires with a templated document that outlines the "how-to" of the team (including elements such as links to documentation, code repositories, monitoring and logging tools, and the names of the members), and a company readme with references to company handbooks or official policy documents. You should also give them a personalized checklist of clear and actionable goals for the first one, seven, 30, 60, and 90 days, so your new hire can better understand what's expected of them, how they're progressing, and what their early-days work is building up to.

Whatever onboarding process you create, keep in mind that feedback is a gift. Asking for feedback at the end of your remote new hire's first week to learn what went well, what could have gone better, and what information they felt was missing is a great way to make sure that the process is continuously improving, and that you can support your team member in getting what they need from the outset. Your processes might go through dozens of subtle or even substantial iterations: There's always something good that could be great, a company might evolve between iterations, or someone's learning style might lend itself to new ways to present information. When possible, you might even encourage new hires to update the process themselves as they go through it: You'll demonstrate trust and a collaborative spirit, and they'll have an opportunity to make a meaningful impact on the team experience from day one.

Create a content list

When you join a new in-office team you usually have the opportunity to meet people at lunch, over coffee, and through spontaneous hallway conversations. Remotely, those interactions have to be initiated deliberately. What's more, it's easier to set up virtual coffee chats or team lunch-and-learns than it is to move the conversation beyond awkward small talk. Instead of relying on icebreakers and dreaded silence, set the team up to have real conversations right away by establishing a baseline pool of topics that everyone can discuss. One format I particularly like is a multimedia content "playlist" that the team curates together-a compilation of anything safe for work which showcases the unique personalities and interests of team members. Perhaps folks will add favorite background music for focus time, links to podcast episodes, books, blog posts, pet pictures, descriptions of their remote work setups, and so on. Sharing this in advance helps to break the ice, providing new team members a window into what others on the team are interested in or care about.

Make it fun

Onboarding isn't just a one-week thing-it's a process for the long haul, and it can take months before someone develops a sense of belonging at their new company. When teams are co-located, connections are built by virtue of proximity and the ability to easily strike up or join conversations. Remotely, those same interactions can be challenging because of differences in communication: Writing often takes longer than talking, and starting a call with someone can feel like an intrusion into their work time. At Fellow, we replicate some of these nonwork conversations and continuously get to know each other by participating in a "Friday Funday" Slack thread. Every week we answer questions like, "What is the most unbelievable fact about you?" with pictures. It's an inclusive way to continue to get to know each other, while getting familiar with little ways a company's culture and values manifest. And because it's asynchronous, it doesn't rely on everyone being available at the same time.

Struggle together

Even if you've established a healthy culture of psychological safety, remote new hires may not implicitly feel it right away. They won't be a witness to their infallible veteran colleagues frantically debugging issues and coming to the realization that the issue was something small and obvious. Those day-to-day difficulties need to be visible so that new team members build confidence that it's safe to ask questions and make mistakes (even if they've spent an hour trying to figure out why nothing works after forgetting a semicolon).

To bridge this gap, I recommend pair programming's frustrating (yet productive) counterpart: pair struggling, in which remote new hires shadow experienced teammates, watching them debug issues and navigate challenges. By seeing which tools, services, dashboards, and channels are monitored and searched, new hires can gain helpful insights into the things they'll need to do their jobs successfully, even as they observe that developers who have been working on the company's codebase for a long time still have trouble sometimes. This helps build trust that the team has an atmosphere where it's okay to fail, to not have all the answers, and to ask questions that may appear too "basic."

Establish trust from afar

Creating mutual trust between teammates early on is critical to maintaining a productive and healthy team. Without trust, team members are less likely to share feedback with each other, may speak up less often about issues or new ideas, and may avoid solving problems collaboratively. Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, has described how the company actively assesses the " trust battery " between team members, and how this container of trust only starts off half full. Instead of waiting for mission-critical projects to bring up the trust level when someone joins a team, I like to find other ways to build trust while showing new members the team is invested in their success.

For example, recently, a new remote engineer on my team was relocating from Brazil to Canada. He had a list of potential apartments to rent in Ottawa, but he didn't know the city and wasn't sure which spot would be the best fit. Instead of leaving his housing situation to chance, the Ottawa-based members of Fellow joined a #welcome-to-the-city Slack channel where our new teammate posted real estate listings and we shared our local knowledge to help him find a place he'd love. The sense of collective outreach gave everyone a stronger feeling of belonging. Establishing conventions that promote camaraderie and trust supports the workflow, too, by allowing team members to feel more comfortable with each other, and ultimately more comfortable asking questions and making mistakes.

Celebrate early accomplishments

Recognizing people for their work is always important, but at the start of a new job, it can give a sizable confidence boost that helps push past that first wave of imposter syndrome. When someone joins my team remotely and I see that the first ticket they've picked up is marked as "in progress," I keep a close eye on recent pull requests to make sure that I notice theirs as soon as it's created. When it pops up, I like to congratulate them in the team Slack channel with as many :tada:-style emojis as I can find. Creating a culture on the team where everyone celebrates each other's wins, big and small, brings teammates closer together, and shows people that they are valued from day one.

Be mindful, though-as Lara Hogan points out in her article " Questions for Our First 1:1," not everyone enjoys public praise. If you know this about your team member, sending a personal e-card is a fun but discreet substitute.

At Fellow, my team's weekly meeting agenda includes a section dedicated to showing work in progress so that everyone is aware of what's going on and to promote a culture of seeking feedback from peers early and often. After I've recognized a new hire's work, I invite them to share it during this period, even if a change is minimal. For those comfortable with it, it's a chance to showcase what they've done early on and reinforces that the team cares about their work and impact.

Build a remote buddy system

Onboarding is a time for asking as many questions as possible so new hires can get to know the company and codebase quickly. When co-located, you have the benefit of being surrounded by people available to answer questions, but when you're remote, a lot of the social and environmental cues that help you decide who to go to with questions are gone. It can be intimidating to message someone (with whom you may never have interacted individually) out of the blue and await their answer, wondering whether they're taking 10 minutes to respond because they're out for a walk or because they're annoyed and ignoring you.

Pairing new members with a buddy on the team (preferably one whose working hours line up with theirs) makes the process of figuring out who to go to with questions easier. While you might be tempted to assign the most senior developer on the team to be a buddy, assuming they'll be more likely to have all the answers, I find that early-career and recently joined team members make particularly helpful buddies: They often have their own onboarding experience top of mind, which provides an important perspective when answering questions and filling in information gaps. Plus, helping others learn the ropes reinforces their own knowledge of the code and the team's processes. Similar to getting recognition for that first pull request, spending time helping others grow in the early days of a new role reinforces the buddy's notion of their impact on the team.

Outside of technical know-how, buddies play an essential role in helping new hires understand communication expectations, company social norms, and team dynamics. Ask them to help facilitate introductions to cross-functional teams, give the lowdown on Zoom etiquette, and invite their new-hire partner to social and community Slack channels that connect them to others with similar interests.

Be principled

As you build purposeful solutions to tackle the challenges of remote onboarding, remember that the core of high-performing teams is trust, psychological safety, and collaboration. Wherever your team is working from, you can make these principles part of your team's experience from day one.

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Best practices for remote onboarding - Increment: Remote

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When I first joined a company as a developer, I felt like the biggest imposter in the world. I didn't know what version control was, let alone what a server was or how to run code on one. I spent my nights furiously googling, terrified that I would disappoint everyone by not being a fully productive team member from day one.

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You're Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Because of Poor Sales Onboarding

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You're Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Because of Poor Sales Onboarding

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This article is by Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of and TalentBin (acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014). It's excerpted from the sales onboarding and training chapter in his book, Founding Sales, which tackles everything founders and first-time sales staff need to know about acquiring early customers, building and scaling winning sales teams.
"The lack of rigor around sales onboarding at so many organizations astounds me," says Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of recruiting software firm . Especially considering how much time companies pour into finding the right people.

Once you've pulled the trigger and hired salespeople you like, your entire focus needs to be on getting them up to speed as fast as you can. And the stakes couldn't be higher.

Early on, your biggest cost is the opportunity cost from missed or even just slow sales. In an environment where the salespeople you haven't hired yet are probably losing you $50,000 to $200,000 a month in foregone revenue, time is of the essence and there's no room for error.

What struck Kazanjy as he was building TalentBin's initial sales team was that missed or dissatisfied customers would rob the company of tremendous future value because happy users recur, proliferate, and refer others. The benefits yielded by every sales win are vast and unknown. Consider then the cost of 30 to 50% of your sales reps flaming out (which, believe it or not, is average). He also realized that the best weapon against sunk costs was an ironclad onboarding program that would immerse new sales hires in the right mentality, and all the resources they'd have to draw on to land and close business.

In his book, Founding Sales, Kazanjy looks back at the onboarding tactics that ended up making the biggest difference during his time at TalentBin. Here, he shares the actions he recommends all B2B startups take to build not only the most talented sales team, but the best-prepared sales battery possible.

I have a firm conviction when it comes to onboarding: It doesn't matter how much experience or skill a sales rep brings with them, they need to go through training to work at your company. Cutting corners sets a rotten precedent and will come back to bite you. Every new sales hire should undergo one to two weeks of rigorous onboarding. Depending on how complex your product is, it might deserve even more time.

The most effective onboarding is styled as a boot camp that expedites acclimation to company culture; immerses reps in the product, the business, and the market; gives them a crash course in tools and process; drills them on the skills and lexicon they'll need to use all the time; and aligns them around the same vision for the future.

Listing what you want to get out of training is one thing, making it happen is much harder. I prefer a university-style onboarding program for new hires with a singular focus on imparting the knowledge required for high-impact sales conversations, and running them through enough repetitions that muscle memory takes hold and their confidence grows.

Ideally, you should be hiring and running reps through boot camp in classes or cohorts. It's a similar amount of work to onboard four salespeople as it is to onboard one. You want to force multiply. Also, classes give them a sense of shared identity and purpose right off the bat - you can emphasize this by giving them names like "Gryffindor" or "The Three Amigos" and having them compete with other teams.

An example of pre-work TalentBin would provide to new hires.

Striking a balance between competition and camaraderie pays off. If one trainee misses something, their teammate will be more likely to help them out and fill in the blanks. And when it comes time for drills, you'll have natural sparring partners at the ready. You want to hire in classes and onboard in classes.

Don't stress on curriculum.

As your company and strategy evolve, your sales approach will need to change. The way you train people can't and shouldn't be set in stone, and you should always be fine-tuning along the way. In fact, when you start out, I recommend dumping everything into a big Google Doc and highlighting sections in green as you cover them.

Sure, this may turn into several docs, and maybe a spreadsheet checklist to track the progress of each class, but even that's still pretty scrappy. Too many companies freeze when it comes to training, intimidated by the labor and thinking that has to go into it. Don't let this happen to you, just start populating the knowledge you think your reps should have and go from there.

Below are the general buckets that I've included in every single iteration of my onboarding curriculum, that have gone a long way toward building winning sales teams.

Onboarding starts before a hire's first day on the job. When people are headed into a new role, they have energy and enthusiasm around your organization. Channel that into learning. You can assign a significant amount of reading at this juncture. What do they need to know to hit the ground running? Bake it into the homework.

I usually dole out a mix of reading, presentations and recordings of sales calls. At TalentBin, we had a library of recordings of "awesome calls" and "terrible calls" organized by customer type (enterprise vs. mid-market vs. SMB). If you have a customer support portal with video content, share that too. If there are any books your organization is partial to, assign those. I'm a big fan of to get sales staff into a goal-oriented mindset. Send a list of hyperlinks to these materials, and make it clear you want them to go through each and every one. It's important and non-optional. There will be a test. Don't say something nebulous like, "Review these materials."

You also don't want to send too much. Make sure all of the pre-work materials you share hit a high bar of quality and relevance. If new reps suspect that they've been given busywork or that they won't actually use the information in their day to day jobs, it will damage your relationship. Shoot for 10 hours of work over a two-week stretch. Make it clear that their progress is being tracked - much the same way it will be on the job. This can be as easy as asking them to highlight sections of a Google Doc as they complete them.

Pre-work serves a couple other purposes. By engaging them early, it staves off new hire cold feet and makes them less likely to take counteroffers from existing employers.

Critically, don't forget to do some pre-work on your side too. While your new hires are absorbing this material, you need to make sure they have the technical setup they need to nail their job from Day 1. Order some quality SWAG.

Culture isn't just one conversation. It's how you demonstrate the way your company executes, what is celebrated and what is censured. Kick it off with a proactive, explicit discussion of what your sales org values and what's not okay. Here are three tenets we presented upfront at TalentBin:

You don't have to be an engineer to operate with an engineering mindset.

We are all the product managers of our sales organization.

Intellectual honesty is paramount.

These three were important because they spoke to our broader culture. The sales team at the company was constructed by engineers who valued using technology to maximize their capabilities. This is a value we wanted the sales team to embody and carry on, encouraging them to identify constraints, propose solutions, test them, rinse and repeat.
Market Understanding:
We wanted people to behave like product managers so they would constantly be thinking about ways to improve our workflows. We actually called different aspects of our sales process "features" and asked for people to speak their mind on which features should be iterated on, killed or added.

Lastly, the company itself was born out of an initial failed product. We had to pivot our way to product-market fit. But that never could have happened if we hadn't been brutally honest in our self assessments. You have to be willing to declare failure before you can improve, and we wanted continuous improvement.

These are the types of cultural touchstones you want to relay to new sales reps immediately. They should be couched as foundational and unflinching. Having these tenets in place will help you hire, and will make it easy to spot which new employees are really inspired by them.

A robust review of your company's path and your sales team's evolution are important for cultural onboarding and provide a key opportunity to underscore major themes in how you like people to work.

Ideally, your company is selling a solution that fits into an existing market but is unique enough to stand out. In order for sales reps to positively present a new, less proven solution, they need to be experts on the market they are selling into, what drives business in this area, and the technical realities of your product or service. This is the only way they will be able to interact with customers as equals - not just vendors.

Early on, you may be able to present this information in a series of slides on people's first day. As you grow though, you may want to design a test to make sure that larger batches of people are retaining this information and record classes and materials for staff to refer to.
Business Driver Understanding:
Here are the knowledge buckets we tested at TalentBin and the questions we used to achieve comprehensive coverage:

What field does your solution operate in?

How has that field changed over time?

What technology has made a major impact on that field so far?

Who are the major vendors already out there?

Are they tangential to your solution?

A cheat sheet of technical terms for sales reps.

For example, if you're in sales automation or the CRM business, you want to know which vendors are offering campaign management solutions that will sit on top of your product. Customers will ask about how your product works with other tools they're using. You have to know them to give a nuanced answer. At TalentBin, new hires got a crash course in the history of talent acquisition, job boards, applicant tracking systems, recruiting agencies, and more.

How does your clients' business work?

What are their cost and revenue levers?

What are the metrics used to measure their business drivers?

For instance, if you're selling a recruiting solution, then you need to know what's important to your customers: number of inbound candidates, candidate quality, cost per hire, time to hire, etc. If your product can increase the number of candidates and quality while lowering cost and time, then you're in business. To impart this knowledge, TalentBin held a one-hour class taught by a very talented former recruiter named Brad Snider who had transitioned to sales and intimately understood the business. You can see a video recording of this class here, and the source slides here.

Technical Understanding: While the ideal hire will understand the technology you're working with, many won't. You don't want to have someone out there talking about software if they don't truly understand the difference between Java and Javascript. If you're selling storage, you want your reps to be able to distinguish between hard drives and flash.

The reality is you can't teach someone the ins and outs of complex technology in a week. So you need to focus on the most important terms that they'll encounter. You want to go over the basic lexicon with them, to understand where they need to sound authoritative to close sales, and to act as a sponge in sales conversations, noting which questions and terms keep coming up so they can learn them immediately.

Generally speaking, these are the three areas you should try to cover early on in your boot camp process. Yes, you want to give people short tests to validate that they're absorbing the material after each section - especially if you're speaking to them remotely or if you're speaking to many people at once. But you don't want to require perfect recall. Essentially, you want them to know enough to have a baseline sales conversation, but assume they will continue to build their knowledge as they speak with more and more people.
Provision and configure correctly.
You want to give your new staff a thorough education in your product, how it works, and how they can describe it in a way that makes it clear, compelling and critical. These are the pillars of holistic product and presentation training:

Initial product walkthrough: Give staff a formal walkthrough of all the minute details of the product. Look at all the key elements of the product and connect them to use cases for customers. Touch on the business drivers each feature impacts. TalentBin used an abridged version of its customer-facing demo, for instance.

Sales presentation: Because you've already assigned recordings of your sales presentation as pre-work, reps should be familiar with your approach. You want to break your standard presentation down into "chapters" to explain why and how you say each thing. Make sure new hires understand the intention behind each chapter. This will make it much easier to drill presentation skills later on.

Customer-facing demo: Train reps on the segments of an actual sales demo. This should be a mock demonstration delivered live to the class in the same style you would use with a customer. This demo should also have sections that correspond to the business pain points your solution fixes. Be clear. Say things like, "The point of this section is to demonstrate features A,B and C, which are designed to help the user with X, Y and Z, solving pain points, M, N and O." Do this for each section as the class follows along and can interrupt to ask questions.

Objection handling: Reps will hear a ton of objections from prospects, so you can't possibly review them all in advance. Instead, try to fold in common objections or prospect confusions into your presentation and demo training sessions. Sharing an exhaustive list of common objections with reps is helpful, but it's a waste of time to go over all of them during boot camp. Instead, point reps to your canonical FAQ of objections so they can refer to it later.

Competition review: Tackle this after you teach everything else above. That way there will be a framework in place for reps to understand the differences between what you're selling and what the competition is offering.

The modern sales rep should be extremely software and tech savvy. Their average day includes heavy use of email, calendaring, standards like Salesforce.com, presentation tools like ClearSlide, etc. But you can't assume your staff will immediately know how to use any of the tools you provide. And if they don't, they don't stand a chance. Empower them with the following steps:

Too many companies overlook equipping new employees with everything they need. It seems obvious, but it shouldn't be taken for granted. It's worth making a spreadsheet or checklist of every single piece of hardware and software that they will need so you can replicate the process for every hire. This includes a desk, a laptop, monitor, laptop stand, keyboard, mouse, standing foot pad, headset, pens, etc.

Getting to this level of specificity might seem odd, but it will help you hit the target every single time, and it's way more important than you think.

Having everything at the ready, like it's all been well thought out in advance, sets an expectation of excellence.

For things that can be set up ahead of time, do it. It demonstrates a mindset of preparedness. At TalentBin, this meant that every sales rep opened their laptop to find a Google Apps identity, Salesforce account, Yesware and ClearSlide ready and waiting for them. Similarly, add all new hires to recurring meetings and the proper list servs so they feel like they are immediately in the know.

Configuration can come later, when your hires are already onsite sitting in class. Ask them to set up their work environments together as a group. If you have them set up their email signatures the right way or create new accounts together, they're more likely to do it and understand the logic behind it.

I also strongly recommend creating a spreadsheet checklist for all the configurations you've found helpful. Block off an hour or two with your newly onboarded cohort and walk through the list. At TalentBin, this is the list we used:

Set your bookmarks and set up Google Chrome to your liking.

Create the right email signature and turn on keyboard shortcuts for "undo send," "send and archive," auto-advance, and other Inbox Zero Gmail tricks.
Train people thoroughly on everyday tools.
Add browser and Gmail plugins for lead generation, Rapportive, Yesware, BCC to CRM, etc.

Set up your voicemail for your phone.

Get Jing or Skitch installed for screeshotting and screencasting.

Set up corporate email on iPhone and Android with the proper security mechanisms.

Set up mobile CRM like Salesforce1 on iPhone or Android

Set up a demo environment in the product they're selling.

This is just an example, and it will be different for everyone. The important thing is not to rely on reps to do all of this themselves on their own. Because they won't. Or they'll do it wrong. Just get it out of the way by doing it together.

You never want to assume that a tool is so easy to use or that so many people are already familiar that they won't need some form of training. You need to cover all of the tools your staff is expected to use to succeed from the most basic to the most complex. You'll see what I mean:
Email for Sales
The Browser Especially when you're hiring people fresh out of college, office basics can actually be quite foreign. And if you're hiring more senior staff, there's a good chance they have a lot of bad habits you'll want to iron out.

At TalentBin, we started with the browser - which may seem to basic - but in my experience, it wasn't. We made sure everyone was using Google Chrome because of its speed and plugin support, and trained on the ' Getting Things Done' mindset:

Closing tabs that you're no longer using.

Creating a new window for a new task that may spawn new tabs (to avoid confusion).

Closing windows when a task is complete.

Mastery of keyboard shortcuts.

The idea was to bake in everything that would make reps more efficient, save them time, and cut out distraction.

Email is extremely powerful, but extremely dangerous when misused. In sales, it's a great way to create multiple touchpoints with clients in a scaled way, to deliver collateral, and to juggle many conversations at once. It can also be a massive time suck, and, without discipline, your reps' inboxes will become a mess of unimportant junk ("Come to DreamForce!!!!") mixed in with extremely high-value client communications ("Can you send me that contract?").

The 'Getting Things Done' philosophy is even more important when it comes to email. If there's not a next action on an email, it should be archived immediately. This can be a new concept for a lot of people. Teach it and audit it. If you come up to a rep and see a read, unimportant email in their inbox, ask them about it.

Also, make sure they remove all email push notifications and alerts on their phones so that they aren't treating emails like instant messages. During other work, reps should close their email entirely and work out of their CRM or calendar to focus on the task at hand.

Similarly, you need to show new hires what well-written emails look like:

How to write clear, topical subject lines and ditch common mistakes like,"Hi" and"Quick Question."

How to use CC appropriately and reply all to ensure thread continuity.
Calendaring Like a Pro
How to compose messages that have sufficient white space and line breaks for readability and how to use bold, bullets and headings to identify key sections of an email so that people stay engaged with the content.

How to call out the individuals you are addressing and any action items for others on the thread.

How to write for searchability using words that stand out so you can easily recall a message from your Gmail archive.
Sales-specific Tools
How to proofread - setting expectations around rigor and grammatical excellence in client-facing communication.

Make it clear that all emails sent are being logged in the CRM so they can be audited for quality and format later.

For speed and quality, train people to use templates as much as possible. Common, repeated communications can take up a huge amount of a rep's time. Using templates can be a massive time saver and reduce errors. The best way to reinforce this is to rely on templates yourself as a company or sales leader.

Whenever your company delivers a new feature or product release, provide a corresponding template or tell reps to create their own to keep it top of mind. Also, if an awesome template is created by rep A, make sure it gets stored somewhere central like your wiki or Yesware central template library so it can be used by reps B, C and D too.

In sales, time is precious. Every rep's calendar needs to be a well-honed tool for them to manage their prospects and themselves. Don't assume that people know how to send, decline or accept calendar invitations. Walk through it, and make sure they know how to call out the location of meetings, whether they are onsite or remote. Instruct them to flesh out their invites with agenda items, conference bridge information, and anything else they need to set and meet expectations. The result is much better meetings with fewer cancellations.

Good hygiene in this case means removing items that are not relevant to free up time slots for meetings, proper prep and follow-up sessions, blocking out stretches of pure follow-up time for pipeline management and inbox maintenance.
Enforce your ideal cycle and cadence.
I'm a big fan of "calendar painting" where you book and block off the entirety of your day so you can make sure you're spending your time on the correct things. The same tactic will keep your reps focused on the most important tasks at hand and they'll be less likely to get distracted or be interrupted if they know what they should be working on at any given moment. When you haven't allocated your time specifically, you risk having your work dictated by your inbox.

This is where you may end up with more variation in what you need to cover, but there are some important common denominators in this category:

CRM: This is the basis of any high-performance sales organization. It's the central hub of activity, efficiency and reporting. Every time I help a sales team on the rocks, their issues invariably stem from CRM fragility. From the beginning, make it clear that if information isn't in your CRM, it doesn't count. For instance, if you give a demo - it technically hasn't happened unless it's in Salesforce. If an email is sent that didn't get BCC'd to Salesforce, it doesn't matter. Set the expectation now and demonstrate it consistently.

Data Models: The way data is stored in CRMs can be confusing for even experienced reps. Make sure to go through the basic concepts of accounts, how to create various objects and the fields associated with them - like projected revenue and stage of opportunities, size of total opportunity in an account, contact information for the account, etc. Cover how to properly record notes, retire tasks and represent closed, won and lost opportunities.

Key Reports and Task Views: If you have reports or dashboards that are key to reps' execution, make sure they're bookmarked and thoroughly described to new hires. An example is Salesforce's console viewer, which allows people to view and execute tasks. Reports might include pipeline check-ins or the list of demos that have yet to be done in a given week.

Sales-Enabled Email: TalentBin used the Act-On marketing automation suite, as well as Yesware, which was also integrated into every rep's email. This helped the team track email opens and clicks and call up a variety of templates. All reps should know that rigorous record keeping, templating and mass emailing are part of the job. This is the only way you'll be able to track and gain insight into deals. Emphasize why all of this data is useful and necessary - it shows how effective your messaging is, how people engage with your collateral, and whether you need to make changes.

Power Dialing Software: I recommend setting up power dialing software to get people into the top of your sales funnel or to follow up with mid-funnel customers. At TalentBin, we used InsideSales.com's PowerDialer to help reps quickly cycle through prospects, make calls, leave pre-recorded voicemails and send follow-up emails automatically. During boot camp, you want to demonstrate all of this functionality so people are aware of the full capabilities and how much easier the software can make their job.

While using tools is important, it's even more so to know when and how to use them during your sales cycle. During training, you need to cover the specifics of your sales organization's process and cadence. Different products require different cycles. Here are the questions you should answer for new reps:

How long does it typically take to close a deal?

Is it a bottom-up or top-down sales approach?

Who is responsible for what part of the sales cycle?

Does a sale usually require multiple presentations, or is it more of a "one call close" process?

Do you need to use trials or pilots?

At what point should a rep know that a deal is not going to happen so that they can save their time?

The strongest sales teams have a solid weekly, monthly and quarterly cadence to their work - things that happen regularly on each of those time frames, like team meetings, pipeline meetings, standups, all-hands and happy hours. No matter what these are, review all of them with your new hires and make the purpose of each explicit.

At TalentBin, our rotating calendar included:
Run sales drills again and again - in teams.
A sales team meeting on Monday to review the previous week's stats and revenue progress, and to share product and customer success, team wins and learnings.

Twice daily five-minute standups to check in on activity, wins and learnings during the day.
Set up sparring partners.
A once-weekly pipeline meeting to walk through deals, drive accountability and get feedback.

A once-monthly all hands.
Encourage pair programming.
A weekly happy hour at close of business on Friday.

As you can see, so much of this time is dedicated to distributing information and making sure everyone is on the same page. That's what good cadence gets you.
Bluebirding, ramp and monitoring.
One of the things many sales orgs drop the ball on is giving reps enough time to practice their key actions. The irony is that sales teams are often full of former athletes.
Bluebirds Over Throwaways
Of all the actions reps take, they need to drill their demos and presentations the most. This is something that should be practiced before they get in front of real customers - there's no need to burn through real opportunities. Just like you broke out and ran through each "chapter" of an effective demo, now you want new reps to do the same.

It works really well to do this in a classroom setting with each person presenting a chapter, then stopping to get feedback from the instructor and the rest of the team. It's a slow process - that's why you only do it once - but it really drills the heck out of the material.

When you're done with these initial drills, split the class up into groups of two. Have each pair trade off as presenter and prospect. The interesting thing about this is that the "prospect" is truly forced to think and react like a real one would. They have to inhabit the mind of their eventual counterpart in a sale. In my experience, this makes them better consultative sales professionals.

Sparring is useful for getting people to think on their feet as they practice cold calling for lead generation, presentation calls and negotiations. For maximum impact, run your sparring in full "game situation" mode, using whatever tools reps would be using in their day to day. They shouldn't be sitting in a room looking at each other. They should be using a real phone and real presentation software. They have to get used to that.

I'm not a huge fan of 'riding along' on sales calls to learn. This can be done outside of selling hours with recorded calls during the pre-work period. But there is something to be said for following along as a full cycle is executed. That's why I recommend a type of 'pair programming' where a new hire is paired for a day with a seasoned individual in their same role. They aren't just sitting there listening, they actually participate in the critical work that goes on around calls.
Proactive and Ambient Call Review
For market development reps, this would mean sitting with someone more experienced as they go shopping for prospects, review and execute their tasks for the day, rip down a call list, fire off follow-up emails, or set up a demo. For account executives, pair programming could mean participating in new opportunity demos, and pipeline management or maintenance.

When new reps come into contact with live opportunities, you can't let up on your onboarding focus. It's actually a pretty delicate time, where you have a chance to build up someone's confidence and make them feel comfortable on their own. There are several practices I use to make this happen:

When account executives are getting started, assign them 'bluebird' opportunities - that is, prospects that have a high likelihood of closing. These are usually inbound leads with strong qualification characteristics.
Taking the Training Wheels Off
As the sales leader, you should still team up with new reps on these calls simply to offer backup in the event they run into something unexpected. Though often the pure availability of support, coupled with strong prep, makes it unnecessary.

Another helpful tactic is for reps to have a printed script of their sales presentation and demo on their desks as they execute calls - not so they can lean on them like a crutch or recite them verbatim, just a crib sheet to make sure they're hitting the highlights and to prevent being knocked off balance.

The opposite of a bluebird opportunity is a throwaway - a prospect that is unqualified for a deal. Maybe they don't have the sufficient technical setup, or the right in-house user for your product. Chances are they aren't buying. I've seen a lot of companies train newly onboarded sales reps on these types of customers so there's not as much pressure. Makes sense on a limited basis, but it can come back to bite you.

You don't want your reps to get in the habit of treating calls like they don't matter. This can lead to some bad habits. And also you shouldn't underestimate the positive impact of a new rep getting an early win. That's the experience you should try to curate. Throwaway presentations are an expensive form of practice - they consume rep time that could be spent on valid opportunities. It's also not 100% respectful of client time.

Don't waste an experienced rep's time sitting in on new hire calls. At TalentBin, we recorded all sales calls using ClearSlide's online presentation system ( join.me, WebEx and others have similar functionality). That way, at any point, we could pull a recording and listen to it. To make it easier to surface instructive calls, we had our reps call out and label their particularly awesome or heinous calls and share them with the team. Awesome calls were used for future onboarding pre-work. Heinous calls were played to the whole class so we could discuss what went wrong.

As a sales manager, you should also spend time walking around or sitting close to different members of your sale team. Listen as you work. Your ears will naturally perk up when you hear someone in distress on a call. That way, you're not devoting a bunch of time to babysitting people, but you can swoop in with a helpful suggestion written on a Post-It or a quick regroup conversation after they hang up.

Proactive and ambient review of calls will ensure you catch issues early. Don't worry about dampening reps' morale early on - instead, assure them that the faster they take and use your feedback, the sooner they'll start landing wins of their own.

As your new hires ramp up, you can dial down the amount of high-touch monitoring and coaching and start relying on a core set of key performance indicators. These are things like hold rates for demos, win/loss ratios for account executives, activity levels at the top of the funnel and more.

While your team's recurring meetings should pick up quickly on negative trends or indicators that your approach needs to be adjusted, it's up to management to take extra time to check in on new reps' KPIs and make sure they're tracking correctly. It's not enough to just go over the numbers, either. You need to get rep feedback on how they're actually feeling in your standard (ideally bi-weekly) one-on-one meetings.

Remember, the biggest cost for a young sales team at a scaling startup is the opportunity cost of missed or delayed sales. Rigorous, thoughtful onboarding will minimize these costs and engender a positive feedback loop, faster time to revenue for new reps, and higher retention.

It sounds like a lot, I know, but given how valuable each and every one of these people can be, it's well worth your money and - above all - time.

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You're Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars Because of Poor Sales Onboarding

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This article is by Peter Kazanjy , co-founder of and TalentBin (acquired by Monster Worldwide in 2014). It's excerpted from the sales onboarding and training chapter in his book, Founding Sales , which tackles everything founders and first-time sales staff need to know about acquiring early customers, building and scaling winning sales teams. "The lack of rigor around sales onboarding at so many organizations astounds me," says Peter Kazanjy, co-founder of recruiting software firm .

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How To Measure The Success Of A Mentoring Programme

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How To Measure The Success Of A Mentoring Programme

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Mentoring programmes in the workplace have many benefits, from increasing retention, to diversity in leadership, to supporting mental health.

But a business won't know that they're impacting any of those areas unless their mentoring programmes are measurable.

Learning and Development initiatives like mentoring are traditionally difficult to measure due to their qualitative nature. This can result in them either: getting de-prioritised in favour of more data-driven programmes, or businesses not really ever knowing the success of their mentoring programmes.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

Before any business sets out to run a mentoring programme, they need to have their key objectives and KPIs outlined. In other words, they need to know what success looks like and what the key metrics are that will help measure that success.

💡 If you're starting out with workplace mentoring programmes, take a quick read of our step by step guide: How To Start A Mentoring Programme before getting into the metrics 📊

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Key metrics to measure the success of a mentoring programme

There are multiple things to track throughout a mentoring programme, and some metrics will vary depending on the organisation, and the type of mentoring programme being run.

The key metrics can be broken down into roughly three groups:

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Engagement Metrics

Are people engaged with the mentoring programme? This measurement area would include metrics such as:

Number of sign ups

Number of active mentoring relationships

Number of mentoring sessions

Number of hours mentoring

Number of actions set / notes taken

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Progress Metrics

Are participants making progress in the areas they set out to? This measurement area would include metrics such as:

Number of goals set

Number of goals achieved

Personal satisfaction score

External feedback (i.e a manager reporting an improvement)

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Business Objectives

Has the programme improved the business areas you were aiming to improve? Such as retaining talent, or succession planning. This measurement area would include metrics such as:

Employee engagement

Employee satisfaction

Retention rates

Promotion rates

Performance ratings

Participation rates

All of these metrics are important to measure the success of a mentoring programme, and using a mentoring software will make it much easier to track each of them.

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How to collect data from a mentoring programme

The metrics above require a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. The most practical way of measuring these are with:

Surveys

Utilise surveys to get an idea of personal opinions and perceptions, such as levels of enthusiasm towards the company, or satisfaction with career development. Where possible use scoring systems for these types of questions to make your data quantitative, i.e:
On a scale of 1 to 10 (with 10 being very and 1 being not at all), how satisfied do you feel with your career development over time at [organisation]?
Writing survey questions like this will also make them quicker to fill out, meaning that more people are likely to complete them. The more data the better when it comes to measuring the success of the mentoring programme.

However for certain metrics requiring written data, such as personal improvement, or mentoring relationship feedback, a qualitative survey will provide a detailed overview to accompany the numbers.

Naturally, writing, distributing and collating survey responses in a huge task. And so using a mentoring software which incorporates feedback and surveying into the platform saves programme managers a lot of time.

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Organisational HR Data

For organisational data such as retention and promotion rates, ensure you're collaborating with the correct HR team to track participants journeys within the company.

These metrics naturally take longer to gather, and so it's easy to forget about them after a specific programme ends. But if 90% of new joiners who are assigned a mentor stay longer than those who were not assigned a mentor, that is a clear indicator of success.

Ensuring the long-term organisational data is collected over time is crucial to measuring the success of any mentoring programme.

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Mentoring Software

A lot of mentoring programme engagement metrics, such as number of mentoring relationships and sessions, are difficult to have visibility over without mentoring software.

It would require the programme manager to follow up individually with participants to find out how often they are meeting. All it would take is for a few people to not respond, to throw the figures out and lose sight of the success of the programme.

Guider Mentoring Software will automatically track these metrics, saving lots of time and resources. No spreadsheets needed.

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Reporting success of a mentoring programme

The purpose of measuring mentoring programmes and collecting all of this data, is to report success and demonstrate the impact it's had.

It's also important to report this information in an accessible way. Sheets and sheets of data won't mean a lot to a senior manager who's had little involvement with the programme. Make sure to present this data in a way that's clear and digestible to show ROI.

Loop back to the top objectives of the programme in the first place, such as 'retain graduate talent', and use the survey and organisational data to demonstrate the results. This can obviously be done manually by assembling graphs and infographics, but is much quicker and easier with the use of a mentoring platform that does it for you.

Reporting will vary depending on the type of mentoring programme. Some have a set timeframe to reach a set objective, while others are ongoing as a permanent feature of the company culture. Consider how this will affect the frequency and detail of reporting when starting your mentoring programme.

In order to make mentoring a crucial part of any organisation, we need data to back it up and demonstrate the value.

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Before running your next programme, make sure you know exactly how you will measure its success, or book a demo to find out how Guider can help.

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How To Measure The Success Of A Mentoring Programme

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Mentoring programmes in the workplace have many benefits, from increasing retention, to diversity in leadership, to supporting mental health. But a business won't know that they're impacting any of those areas unless their mentoring programmes are measurable. Learning and Development initiatives like mentoring are traditionally difficult to measure due to their qualitative nature.

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NEXT STEP and UIF are interested in your feedback regarding this year's Next Step Mentoring Program.

This information will let us assess your experiences as mentors/mentees and help us improve the program for next year.

Please take a few minutes to answer this anonymous questionnaire.

Complete and submit the survey no later than Monday June 11th.

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Next Step Mentoring Program End-of-the-Year Evaluation

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NEXT STEP and UIF are interested in your feedback regarding this year's Next Step Mentoring Program. This information will let us assess your experiences as mentors/mentees and help us improve the program for next year. Please take a few minutes to answer this anonymous questionnaire.

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Inside Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Grow

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Inside Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Grow

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Our Engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has a lot of moving pieces and is composed of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we're keen to make sure no one individual lacks guidance or an opportunity to grow. In this post, I'll share a little bit more about how we've done that through a new program at Buffer that we've already had a lot of success with, our Engineering Mentorship Program.

Why a mentorship program?

Over the years on our Engineering team, we've had great results from engineers pairing and sharing knowledge. We've also seen spontaneous mentorship relationships form and are currently at a point where we have several senior engineers who naturally fill the role of a mentor for a more junior team member.

These relationships proved to be extremely beneficial both for the junior and the senior engineers' growth and have helped the teams be more cohesive and move faster. To extend the mentorship opportunities to more engineers, we've decided to launch an official Mentorship Program in the Engineering team, to add momentum to existing relationships and form new ones between engineers interested in growing as mentors or learning from one.

One of our main focuses on the Engineering Management team is helping engineers grow and advance in our career framework. At the same time, they learn and apply best practices to improve our codebase quality over time.

In the past, we've heard some confusion from our engineers around how investing in code quality and best practices relates to our career framework, and concerns that some technical debts might be making it more challenging to advance for newer engineers. This Mentorship Program feels like it has helped to level up more junior engineers, something we're always keen to do more of.

How we've set up our mentorship program

There are three roles in our Engineering Mentorship Program: mentors, mentees, and mentorship champions.

Mentors

Mentors are senior engineers who have a depth of experience to develop the skills of others. They have regular meetings with their mentees and provide a safe space for the mentee to think out loud and be a sounding board to explore new ideas and innovative thinking.

Mentors can also be the personal cheer squad for a mentee, motivating mentees to achieve their goals and inspiring mentees with a mentor's own accomplishments.

Mentors will share best practices, code quality, testing, refactoring, and how those relate to our engineering career framework. A mentee's promotion is a sign of success! A mentor's goal is to grow mentees technically, and promotions are one (but of course not the only) way that growth shows up.

Mentors will help identify and solve problems and provide practical, timely advice, and pair program to help remove any blockers and share knowledge.
Mentees
Mentees are engineers that feel they could benefit from having a mentor to guide career and skill growth. They don't have to be "more junior" necessarily. A Senior Back-End Engineer who wants to learn front-end could be a mentee, too.

This program is for mentees, so they own the relationship and are responsible for organizing and driving all meetings with their mentor. They shouldn't wait for their mentor to drive this growth. In their discussions, they should prepare tasks they want help with and code examples.

Mentees are responsible for implementing and growing from the feedback their mentor gives them. It's on the mentee to take the advice and run with it.

Mentorship Champions

We've tried mentoring before, but we've had something missing: supporting our mentors. To fix this, we came up with the idea of Mentorship Champions. These are team members who are amazing mentors themselves, have extensive experience with teaching mentoring engineers and are highly experienced engineers.

Mentorship Champions regularly meet with mentors to provide guidance and support on how to be a great mentor. They help with any blockers, challenges, or frustrations that mentors might have and give feedback on the program to the Mentorship Manager to make sure it's successful.

The difference between a mentor and a manager

Although there are some similarities in the mentorship and management relationships, such as helping and guiding team members to achieve certain goals, there are also key differences.

A manager's focus is generally on achieving organizational and team goals, as well as ensuring their advice and decisions are aligned with the organizational vision. With a mentor, the focus shifts to personal and career growth. The agenda of a mentor-mentee relationship is focused on sharing knowledge and experience.

A manager is responsible for reviewing the contributions of an employee and giving performance feedback, while mentor feedback and reviews are personal communication targeted to help a mentee remain focused on their long-term goals.

Open and candid communication is a key element in a mentor-mentee relationship. In fact, the entire purpose of the relationship is to openly talk about mentees shortcomings and learn how to overcome them with the help of an experienced mentor, while it can be trickier to talk about ones technical gaps with a manager.

In short:
✅ Mentors give answers; managers ask questions
✅ Mentors advocate for you; managers develop you
✅ Mentorship is casual; management is formal
✅ Mentorship is personal; management is organizational

To help guide our mentors and mentees, we've defined some key principles of this program:

A mentorship session is all about the mentee.

It's the mentee's time, so the mentor should focus the session around them, their questions, and what they need. The mentor should also be prepared to fill in the gaps that the mentee does not bring or struggles to see for themselves.

Mentors help their mentees grow technically by supporting their mentee's identity and interests.

The program's aim is not to take a one-size-fits-all approach. It provides the tools and support for mentors to help everyone flourish in their own unique way.

Not everyone needs a mentor.

Some people learn best alone, or from casual chats with lots of different people, or they might already be getting everything they need at this moment from their manager and do not require additional mentoring.

An engineer does not need to be a mentor to grow.

There are other ways for engineers to expand in their careers and our mentorship program isn't a requirement in our career framework.

Feedback from the Mentorship Program

Initially, we ran this program as a six-month experiment. After the first 6-months, we asked those who participated for feedback on the program and if they wanted it to continue.

The feedback we got from the program was extremely positive, showing that these kinds of relationships and the support the program provides has been very useful for the growth of both mentees and mentors.

Here are a few highlights:

[...] I believe this mentorship has been the biggest factor in my growth at Buffer

[...] the mentorship syncs are definitely one of the most helpful syncs I have

[...] it's a very positive experience overall, really enjoy building a trust relationship with my mentees, and seeing them progressing, it's a rewarding experience for sure. It's also a good way for me get more involved with different product areas, and problems, outside of my strict day to day work

This program has been an amazing help for me, I've been enjoying every single one of the calls I've had [...], my mentor always challenges me and he has helped me to grow by doing the things I love.

[...] "it's been only a joy full of learning and mutual trust. I felt that we were able to bond together and discuss many things on career framework, personal growth and technical decisions in our organization"

Based on the feedback and individual chats with engineers, we decided to continue the Mentorship Program indefinitely with a few changes.

What we've changed in the program

Adding more Mentorship Champions

One of the Mentorship program's identified benefits was having dedicated support for our mentors through Mentorship Champions. So far, this role was fulfilled solely by our Staff Engineer, Mike San Roman, making it difficult to scale and add more mentorship pairings (support more mentors). Because of that, we decided to add additional senior engineers and experienced mentors as Mentorship Champions.

Introducing regular mentorship chats

There have been important topics that emerged from this experiment, such as ensuring the program is inclusive and diverse, supporting and growing women mentors, and making the program more transparent and collaborative with Engineering Managers.

For this reason, we are now holding once-a-month calls between Mentorship Champions to discuss the above points, chat about any recurring themes in mentorship, and share learnings and updates with the Engineering Management team and wider Engineering team.

Introducing async office-hours

It has been quite tricky to gather mentors and mentorship champions on one call since so many of our team are in various time zones. With the 4 day work-week and leaning more towards asynchronous communication, we decided to introduce async office-hours where, on a dedicated day, everyone will share their updates asynchronously in our private Slack channel. The updates will include any successes, challenges, blockers, and celebrations that emerged during the past few weeks.

So far, we've seen great results from the mentorship program for the Engineering team, and we're excited to keep investing in it and supporting our engineers in their career journey.

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Inside Our Engineering Mentorship Program and How It Helps Our Engineers Grow

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Our Engineering team is the largest team at Buffer. It has a lot of moving pieces and is composed of several smaller teams. As with any large team, we're keen to make sure no one individual lacks guidance or an opportunity to grow. In this post, I'll share

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What is mentoring?

Mentor relationships are an opportunity for individuals to learn from someone's personal experience, background, and perspective. These relationships build trust on a team, provide safe space to make mistakes, and encourage both personal and professional development.

Mentorship is an opportunity for both the mentor and mentee to develop their leadership and communication skills. Mentorship should be led by the mentee, similar to how 1:1's at GitLab are driven by direct reports.

As of 2021-10-25, 125 team members have participated in formal mentorship programs organized at GitLab. This includes 43 people in the Minorities in Tech mentorship program and 82 in the Women at GitLab mentorship program (first and second iteration combined).

The Power of Mentoring

Questions

Share questions in the #mentoring slack channel.

Benefits of mentorship
Benefits for the mentee

1. Be encouraged to prioritize, and be held accountable for, your career development

2. Learn new skills related to your current role, your future career goals, or an area that you're passionate about

3. Set and reach clearly outlined goals.

Benefits for the mentor

1. Serve as a leader in the organization by enabling growth for other team members

2. Practice leadership, effective communication, and coaching skills

3. Establish yourself as an expert in a field or speciality

4. Build trust with team members

Find a mentor

The following team members are available as mentors. Schedule a coffee chat to get the conversation started!

The Expertise column comes from the team member .yaml entry and might not include all subjects they can help you with.

Become a mentor

Team members can designate their availability to be a mentor on the GitLab team page by setting the mentor status to true. This will appear on the team page with a line that reads Available as a mentor. Example MR

Organized mentorship programs

Learn more about organized mentorship programs for team members:

1. Company-wide mentorship program

2. Minorities in Tech Mentoring Program

3. Women's TMRG sponsored program

4. Aspiring Manager mentorship pilot program

5. The Engineering department outlines strategies for mentors and mentees with suggestions on how to host meetings and set and evaluate goals.

6. The Minorities in Tech TMRG organized a mentor program with the goal of enabling GitLab to support its Diversity value.

7. The Sales department organized a pilot Women in Sales Mentorship Program. The program benefits are outlined here.

8. The Support team has outlined expectations and examples on Mentorship in Support Engineering.

9. The Finance team is running a mentorship program.

Consider using the Minorities in Tech TMRG mentorship program structure to organize a mentor program for your team or TMRG.

Expectations of mentors and mentees

Adapted from the NCWIT Mentoring-in-a-Box Mentoring Basics - A Mentor's Guide to Success, section What Are the "Dos" of Mentoring and People Grove resources:

Build Trust
Act as a colleague first, an expert second. Spend time getting to know one another.. Use an open and warm tone to create a safe place to ask difficult questions and take risks. Be open, honest, and fully authentic.

Listen
Establish trust and openness in communication from the start. Give your full, undivided attention. Listen as much as you speak so that their questions and aspirations are always the central focus. Hear concerns before offering advice and guidance.

Respect Diverse Experiences
Recognise that minorities within the organisation sometimes face additional barriers to advancement. Educate yourself about the issues and ask for advice and support via the appropriate Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging channels.

Practice Self-Awareness
Identify your strengths, weaknesses, and biases.. Keep an open mind. Be aware of and respect other's experiences, ideas, and goals. Mentorship requires open dialogue about the ways gender and culture influence your mentee's work in the organisation and the mentoring relationship itself.

Maintain a Growth Mindset
Value a growth mindset of both the mentor and mentee. Both parties can learn and grow from mentorship

Iterate
Mentorship changes with time. Iteration of goals throughout the mentorship is encouraged. Focus on quick wins that the mentee can reach, then keep growing

Resources

Use these resources when participating in an organized mentor program or building your own mentor/mentee relationship in both synchronous and asynchronous formats. Adopt what fits and leave what doesn't.

Mentor and Mentee training

Take the LinkedIn Learning training called How to be a Good Mentor and Mentee. It covers strategies for finding a mentor, setting clear expectations, and achieving goals through mentorship. If you don't have a LinkedIn Learning license, please submit an access request and assign to the L&D team. The team will help either allocate a license to your account or direct you to the Growth and Development budget for reimbursement.

Content from this training has been adapted in the following Google Slides presentation for learners who prefer to read the material at their own pace.

Mentee: What to do before your mentorship begins

1. Set up a coffee chat with your mentor. Take time to get to know them and build trust. Discuss communication styles and preferences

2. Set a specific goal to achieve during your mentorship. It's OK if you don't reach 100% of your goal during the mentorship.

3. Watch this short LinkedIn video on understanding strengths and weaknesses

4. Take the 16 Personalities test and share the results with your mentor/mentee. This can help set expectations for effective communication.

5. Join the #mentoring Slack channel

Set your goal and purpose

In their book Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle, authors Emily and Amelia Nagoski explain the difference between goals and purpose:

Mentees should have a foundational goal and purpose set for their mentorship. Mentee goals should drive the relationship.. Mentors can set goals based on that of their mentee. Both mentors and mentees bring their own original purpose to mentorship.

What is your goal?

Time-bound

When will the goal be complete?

Certain

Is achievement of the goal within your control?

Specific

What is the desired outcome?

Positive

What positive impact will the outcome create?

Measurable

How will success be measured?

Personal

Why does achieving the goal matter? Tie goal to purpose.

Using the matrix below, fill in each empy space based on the descriptions above to draft your goal:
This structure is adapted from Burnout: the secret to unlocking the stress cycle and the SMART goal framework. Learn more about goal setting by taking the Setting Team and Employee Goals using SMART Methodology LinkedIn Learning course
What is your purpose?

Purpose is value-driven and based on GitLab values and personal values. Determine what values drive you to be part of a mentorship and complete the following statement:
I'm a mentor/mentee because I care about value. Value drives me to be a mentor/mentee because your why. Connecting mentorship and GitLab values

Collaboration

Fosters connection and conversation between team members

Results

Driven by specific goals

Efficiency

Focused transfer of experience and skill

Diveristy, Inclusion, and Belonging

All perspecives, experiences, and backgrounds are valued and included

Iteration

Incremental changes to goals are made as relationships develop

Transparency

Trust is built between mentor/menee

Communicate your goal and purpose

A discussion about goals and purpose should be part of the very first mentorship meeting. Progress and iterations on goals should be revisited during each mentorship meeting.

Setting a Meeting Schedule

It's important to set clear expectations with your mentor/mentee about when, how often, and for how long you will formally meet. Below is a suggested format for this meeting cadence:

Establish a window for your mentor/mentee relationship. 3-6 month is suggested

Set up a meeting cadence every other week for a 30-45 minute time period or agree to spend 30-45 minutes every other week contributing to async communication formats

When the mentorship month window concludes, set expectations for how your mentorship will continue. Some options include:

Agree on the cadence you'll meet moving forward either synchronously or asynchronously

Decide to end the mentorship and consider staying connected via coffee chats or informal messages on Slack

Sample sync meeting agendas

Setting an agenda for your mentorship sessions is important for resource documentation and future planning. The mentee should be the DRI for each session and use the agenda to set meeting goals and ask questions. Open a new document and share the document with both the mentor/mentee. Use the following meeting agenda templates as a baseline for each session. The template can be customized to meet the needs of the relationship, and might adapt over time.

Sample agendas below are inspired by resources from Arizona State University and People Grove. Please make a copy of these templates and save to your own Google Drive.

1. Initial Meeting Agenda Template

2. Regular Meeting Agenda Template

3. Final Meeting Agenda Template

Sample async meeting formats

Watch this short video of how you can use GitLab issues to collaborate async in a mentorship:

You can explore the issue shown in this video in our GitLab L&D project. There is also a issue template you can copy and use in your own mentorship project. The text of the issue template is also included directly below.
GitLab Issue Template
## Date: XXXX-XX-XX `Add mentorship goal as the first entry on the agenda. Keep this entry here the entirety of the mentorship` ## Questions and Feedback by 20xx-xx-xx _Mentees should add questions and links to projects for feedback. Include links to issues and MRs that you need guidance on_ 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a ## Action Items _Use this section to queue up action items for the mentee and mentor. Check each box when complete._ **1. Mentee Action Items** 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a **1. Mentor Action Items** 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a 1. [ ] a ## Maintenance 1. [ ] Assign this issue to both the mentor and mentee 1. [ ] Use the comment section on this issue to collaborate with your mentor async. Include links to Loom video recordings in your comments if you need to verbalize or explain something in more detail. 1. [ ] Set a due date on this issue when the feedback and actions items should be complete 1. [ ] Close this issue when all feedback is addressed and action items are checked off

Other tools for async mentorship

1. Template for using Google Docs

2. Slack voice memos

3. Slack recording

4. Loom recording

Career Development

Career development is a major driver of mentee goals during mentorship. Review GitLab resources for career development in our handbook:

1. Self-paced training available in GitLab Learn as part of 2021-08 Skill of the Month on career development

2. Handbook documentation of GitLab career development

3. How to create and use an individual growth plan

4. Use GitLab epics to track and outline career development goals

Additional discussion resources

These resources are meant to provide both mentors and mentees with additional personal and professional development. Consider reviewing these resources asynchronously and discuss/debrief them during a session with your mentor/mentee.

Why the Power of Mentoring can Change the World

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Mentor relationships are an opportunity for individuals to learn from someone's personal experience, background, and perspective. These relationships build trust on a team, provide safe space to make mistakes, and encourage both personal and professional development. Mentorship is an opportunity for both the mentor and mentee to develop their leadership and communication skills.

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Designing Strategy

Unite rigor and creativity to create a successful strategy

Watch Video

Watch a sneak peek

Designing Strategy-A sneak peek of the course

1 Assignment

Identify the problem and frame a strategic question-Outline the current Strategy Choice Cascade for your organization, describe the strategy problem that you're facing, and craft a "How might we" question to articulate the problem.

5 Discussions

What brought you to this course, and why have you chosen to learn the skills of designing strategy?

Which steps of the Strategy Process Map do you feel most and least comfortable with? Why?

Have you ever had a difficult time communicating a strategy or strategic possibility in the past? If so, why?

Did anything surprise you about how Westrock uses the Strategy Choice Cascade?

What choices are you making in your current role? Can you see how this might be considered strategy?

4 Video Lessons

Setting the Stage for Strategy-Define a problem, frame a strategic question

Framing a "How might we..." Question

Invent the Future-Generate strategic possibilities

Shape Strategic Possibilities-Apply "Where to Play" and "How to Win"

3 Discussions

Framing a "How might we" question can sometimes feel tricky, but it shouldn't be the thing that slows your strategy work down. What are some ways that you've found that can help you frame a question?

What strategy possibilities did you come up with for your practice case? Are any particularly inspiring and/or radical that you'd like to share? How did it feel to brainstorm and dream big?

Think about two organizations that compete with one another-how would you describe their choices? What's unique about them?

3 Video Lessons

What Would Have to be True?-The most important question in strategy

Surfacing Conditions-Ask "What would have to be true?"

Identifying Barriers-Choose what to test

2 Discussions

Have you ever been in a situation where it was difficult to gain alignment? Were you able to move past this? If so, how did you get "unstuck"?

Think of a choice that you're facing in life or work, and the different options that you're considering for that choice. How might asking "What would have to be true?" to make each a great option, help you to see them differently?

4 Video Lessons

Prove It-Two words that can kill innovation

Test for the Future-Design and conduct strategy tests

Testing in Strategy

One Example of a Guerilla Test

3 Discussions

What types of guerrilla tests feel familiar to you? What are you most excited to try?

4 Video Lessons

Telling the Story of Strategy

3 Discussions

What do you think will be the most challenging part of deciding on your new strategy? Are you stuck between any possibilities?

What are some ways in which this course has changed your view on strategy design? How will you use your new perspective, or how have you already started using it?

Have you presented strategy work in the past? What is successful? What were some techniques or tips that helped or hindered this work for you?

Jennifer Riel

Global Director of Strategy at IDEO

Jennifer has led strategy processes at large public and private sector organizations around the world. She advises senior leaders at several Fortune 100 companies and teaches strategy and innovation at the Rotman School of Management. She co-authored Creating Great Choices with Roger Martin.

Roger Martin

Strategy Advisor & former Dean of the Rotman School of Management

Roger is a trusted strategy advisor who's worked with CEOs of companies including Procter & Gamble, Lego, and Ford. He has published 11 books, including Creating Great Choices and Playing to Win, and is recognized as a leading management thinker. Roger has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Work with Expert Coaches

Our teaching team has extensive applied industry knowledge. They'll help deepen your understanding and application of the course content by facilitating written discussions, live video moments, and assignment feedback.

Expand Your Network

Join virtual live discussion groups for deeper conversation, reflection, and connection led by teaching team members and available multiple times a week across time zones.

Receive Feedback

Gain tips, techniques, and a downloadable feedback guide; and share and receive feedback on assignments from peers.

Learn more about the IDEO U Learning Experience

Enroll As a Team

The practice and application of design thinking, innovation, and creativity is highly collaborative and team based-which is why we believe that learning is better together. Take a course as a team and develop new skills and mindsets, have deeper discussion during course kickoff and debrief sessions, and build a shared understanding.

How to Enroll as a Team

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Choosing what to do-and what not to do-is the definition of strategy. In this course, you'll learn a process that will help you create and take action on a strategy for your business, team, or organization. You'll follow repeatable steps that are both human-centered and business-focused.

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Leading Complex Projects

An adaptable approach to deliver stronger outcomes in changing conditions

Watch Video

Watch a sneak peek

Leading Complex Projects - A sneak peek of the course

1 Discussion

The Feeling of Complexity: Recall a time when things got complex on a project you were working on. How did it make you feel?

5 Video Lessons

Articulate the Why - Defining the purpose of the project

Mentor Moment - The importance of naming the project

The Power of Simplicity - Guiding principles and their benefits

Leading Through Generosity - Strategies for motivating others

The Project of Self - Becoming a more self-aware project leader

5 Discussions

The Importance of Purpose: Think back to a personal or professional project where you assumed you knew the purpose but later learned that your assumption may have been off the mark. What impact did this have on you and the outcomes of the work?

The Name Game: What surprises you about Shuya's opinion on naming projects, and what feels most helpful about the tips she's shared?

Guiding Principles: If you already use some form of guiding principles in your work, what impact did they have on a past or present project? If you don't currently use them, what opportunities do you have for crafting guiding principles, either individually or collectively?

Emotional Triggers: What was the last strong emotion that surfaced for you at work? Describe the circumstances and the behaviors you adopted in response. How might you react to this same situation or emotion in the future?

A Personal Connection: When was a time someone identified a personal passion or interest in you and created an opportunity for you to connect that with your work? What impact did it have on you and the outcomes of the work?

4 Video Lessons

A Systems View - Mapping and visualizing the project network

Mentor Moment - Understanding different mental models

Collective Communication Techniques - Building a shared understanding

From Obstacle to Advantage - Tips for utilizing disagreement

4 Discussions

Aligning Stakeholders: Think about a project you worked on that involved a lot of stakeholders with different perspectives. How did you try to create alignment and bring people along?

Mental Models That Differ from Our Own When we encounter a mental model that differs from ours, often our natural reaction is to assume the other person is wrong or misinformed. How do you commonly respond to a different mental model, and how would you like to respond differently going forward?

Collective Knowing: We've shared a few ways to create collective knowing through group communication. Choose one technique you've used before. How did it go?

Separate the Person from the Behavior: We have a tendency to label behaviors, but when we label someone as a naysayer, we communicate and assume that they are always that way. We see it as a situation of them versus us. Reflect on a time when you were the dissenting voice or you wanted to be, but couldn't share your thoughts. How did that feel? How were others helpful to you or harmful in that moment?

3 Video Lessons

Beyond Reason - The value of intuition in complex situations

Sensing Opportunities - Strategies for surfacing intuition

Got a Hunch, Now What? - Methods for testing your intuition

3 Discussions

Intuition In Your Own Words: What is intuition to you? Have you ever had an intuition that turned out to be right? Describe what happened and what you learned from the experience.

Welcome Intuition: Look across the seven strategies for surfacing intuition. Have you tried one of them before? What was the challenge you were facing and the result of using this strategy?

When Intuition Misleads: Think about a time when you acted on an intuition without thinking-and your intuition led you astray. Was there an underlying assumption, emotion, or bias that clouded your judgment? What happened and what did you learn from the experience?

2 Video Lessons

Beyond the Project - How genuine relationships elevate outcomes

The Most Complex Project of All - Applying lessons from projects to everyday life

2 Discussions

Relationships and Resilience: Nothing builds our resilience more than relationships. How do you personally foster meaningful relationships with people in your projects?

Life Lessons: Recall a time when you faced uncertainty in your own life outside of work. How did you navigate the situation and what was the outcome?

Katie Soven

Senior Portfolio Director at IDEO

Trained as an architect, Katie understands that a systems approach to problem solving can be applied to complex problems and situations. Her work at IDEO includes innovating with clients across the retail, hospitality, automotive, civic, and financial service spaces. She is passionate about the future of work and supporting organizations on their transformation journey by creating jobs that are fulfilling, rewarding, and sustainable.

Katie received a master's degree in Architecture from Harvard University and a bachelor's degree in Architecture from the University of Florida.

Dwayne Edwards

Executive Portfolio Director at IDEO

As a former intelligence officer in the United States Marine Corps, Dwayne empowers organizations to navigate complexity and engage with people in real and lasting ways that support business and society. This can look like new products, services, or capabilities designed for human needs. Before joining IDEO, he worked as a product manager at Volvo Cars of North America where he helped develop Volvo's subscription model and built stronger relationships between retailers and customers.

Dwayne received his MBA from the Yale School of Management, a master's degree in Criminal Law and Procedure from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and a bachelor's degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Law from Binghamton University.

Work with Expert Coaches

Our teaching team has extensive applied industry knowledge. They'll help deepen your understanding and application of the course content by facilitating written discussions, live video moments, and assignment feedback.

Expand Your Network

Join virtual live discussion groups for deeper conversation, reflection, and connection led by teaching team members and available multiple times a week across time zones.

Receive Feedback

Gain tips, techniques, and a downloadable feedback guide; and share and receive feedback on assignments from peers.

Learn more about the IDEO U Learning Experience

Loved by Learners Across the Globe

Self-Paced Course Start Anytime

Enroll As a Team

The practice and application of design thinking, innovation, and creativity is highly collaborative and team based-which is why we believe that learning is better together. Take a course as a team and develop new skills and mindsets, have deeper discussion during course kickoff and debrief sessions, and build a shared understanding.

How to Enroll as a Team

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An adaptable approach to deliver stronger outcomes in changing conditions Watch Video Watch a sneak peek Leading Complex Projects - A sneak peek of the course 1 Discussion The Feeling of Complexity: Recall a time when things got complex on a project you were working on. How did it make you feel?

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The Power of Mentoring  | Reggie Nelson | TEDxUniversityofEssex

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Why the Power of Mentoring can Change the World | Shirley LIU | TEDxEDHECBusinessSchool

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How to be a Great Mentor | Kenneth Ortiz | TEDxBethanyGlobalUniversity

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One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, recently shared with me a mentorship framework, first inspired by wellness guru, Deepak Chopra, that he's evolved and used over the years. The framework is an amazingly simple-yet-powerful set of five critical questions. As venture capitalists and advisors, we spend significant time partnering with portfolio companies and very often find ourselves in a mentoring role. These five questions, when asked in the order presented, form an effective diagnostic tool that can provide better guidance to mentees, employees, or generally anyone with whom you are playing the role of a counselor. Additionally, they can serve as a self-diagnosis of one's own capabilities and opportunities.

Here are the questions:

1. What is it that you really want to be and do?
2. What are you doing really well that is helping you get there?
3. What are you not doing well that is preventing you from getting there?
4. What will you do differently tomorrow to meet those challenges?
5. How can I help / where do you need the most help?

Let's briefly look at each question:

1. What is it that you really want to be and do? This question is about aspiration and purpose. The reason why someone is doing what they are doing should come out here. The question is also meant to get at the business goals and broader aspirations of an individual - someone wishing to be successful in business so that they can do more to help others, for example. The answer to question one should surface the driving passion of individuals - what is it they do or wish they could be great at doing?

2. What are you doing really well that is helping you get there? This question helps spotlight a core strength and the person's ability to execute towards his/her goal. What is someone naturally good at doing? Detailed and standardized operations? Leading and motivating staff? Numbers? What is it that someone does better than the average person that can help her achieve her aspiration?

3. What are you not doing well that is preventing you from getting there? This is about facilitating an honest and critical assessment of the roadblocks, challenges or weaknesses in a person or company that is slowing their ability to win the game; to meet the goal from question one.

4. What will you do different tomorrow to meet those challenges? Questions two and three help determine whether people are spending the right time on the right things. Progress cannot be measured just by hard work. Someone may have a great work ethic, but if he is not focused on the right priorities, then "you're making good time, but you're lost," as another one of my partners likes to say. People also have a tendency to practice and repeat what they are already good at doing. It is human nature to show off your best side and hide weaknesses. As a kid playing racquet sports, I remember being asked once why I kept practicing my forehand when my backhand sucked. Use this question to probe whether the person has the aptitude to change behavior. Will the person practice start practicing his backhand?

5. How can I help / where do you need the most help? The answers to the first four questions matched against areas where you as a mentor have particular strengths, relationships, or learning resources - should help determine how you can best help someone achieve the goal.

These questions will help you assess where you can really help an individual or a company. Try these five critical questions the next time you are interviewing a mentee candidate, the next time you have a mentoring session, or answer them yourself as a self-diagnostic. The answers can help you or your mentees put together a sensible game plan for forward progress.

This content was adapted for inclusion in the HBR Guide to Getting the Mentoring You Need.

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One of my partners, Mats Lederhausen, recently shared with me a mentorship framework, first inspired by wellness guru, Deepak Chopra, that he's evolved and used over the years. The framework is an amazingly simple-yet-powerful set of five critical questions. As venture capitalists and advisors, we spend significant time partnering with portfolio companies and very often [...]

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The mentor-mentee relationship is a tango between a more senior person and a junior one. Just as in dance, coordination and orchestration between parties is necessary for grace and success. And while we and others have written about what makes the ideal mentor, comparatively less attention has been given to the other partner. This gap is unfortunate because, like mentorship, menteeship requires specific behaviors - without which the mentee's success may be threatened. In this article, we outline six habits of ideal mentees and provide anecdotes and views from our combined years of academic experience. While we focus on the relationship in academic medicine, the takeaways apply to most any field.

Clarify what you need. "I need a mentor" is a plea often heard in the hallowed halls of hospitals, especially academic medical centers that serve as the training grounds for future physicians. As academic physicians, we have responded to this overture countless times in our careers. The first thing anyone seeking a mentor must do is determine what kind of support they need.

While many mentees - people aspiring to become physician-scientists, for instance - require formal, long-term guidance, others may just need support with one-time needs. For example, they may need advice on negotiating a job offer, speaking at a national meeting, or finding a job at another hospital. These latter situations require distinct types of mentors, ones we classify in an upcoming JAMA Internal Medicine paper as coaches, sponsors, and connectors. Some mentees with specific, narrower challenges such as preparing for a speaking engagement often benefit from a coach - someone who helps improve performance related to a particular issue. "Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance," says Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer who enlisted a coach to improve his surgical technique.

Other times, mentees need a sponsor: senior physicians (such as chiefs, chairs, or deans) who have garnered substantial social and political capital over their careers. Sponsors use their cachet to help high-potential individuals join prestigious committees, study groups, or honorific societies.

And finally, some mentees need a connector, a seasoned guide who can help the mentor and mentee unite, or build a mentorship team. In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes connectors as multipliers who help create relationships between people.

Choose wisely. Knowing what you need is the first step; finding the right person is the second. Like selecting a partner for marriage, your choice of a mentor affects 95% of your success and happiness. Begin by identifying highly successful individuals whom you like, respect, and trust. Just as the accomplishments of your mentor matter, so do their personal attributes, such as altruism, work-life balance, and patience. Find a mentor whom you can relate to and who shares your goals and understands your priorities. And remember that someone at the top of their field may not necessarily be ideal. We tell mentees to find mentors they can see themselves becoming - and make sure they are up to the challenge.

Underpromise and overdeliver. Remember that mentors are looking for closers: those that finish what they start. So make sure you know the Golden Rules. Ideal mentees share certain qualities: They are enthusiastic, energetic, organized, and focused. They embrace feedback while remaining honest and responsive. They always behave with integrity and recognize that hard work and sacrifice pays dividends down the road. Ideal mentees thus learn to underpromise ("I'll have a first draft to you in one week") and overdeliver ("I know it's only been three days, but I have a first draft ready to share with you"). And they always make sure their work is high quality. Always.

Mind your mentor's time. Good mentors are successful for a reason: They manage their time wisely, often doing multiple things at any given time in order to ensure success. As a mentee, you must learn to respect your mentor's time. For example, give your mentor enough time to review work products (for example, one week for abstracts and at least two to three weeks for grants). Define goals for meetings ahead of time by knowing what you want to discuss and accomplish during your meeting. Importantly, avoid long, winding emails with little in the form of an answerable question. Rather, frame questions so that they can be answered with yes-or-no answers, while reserving longer concerns for face-to-face meetings. Your mentor's time is a precious commodity, and thinking about how best to use it - both in their physical presence and outside of it - is important for success.

Beware of pitfalls. Just as in the world of management, mentees must learn to manage up - that is, to help their mentor guide them. When mentors go awry, mentees must be ready. " Mentorship malpractice" represents a set of mentor behaviors that - whether intentional or not - will disproportionately affect your success. Recognize the warning signs and know what countermeasures to employ. For example, if your mentor becomes a bottleneck, set firm deadlines and clearly state what will happen when they arrive. Conversely, if your mentor begins to hijack your ideas, more drastic measures might be necessary. Equally, you must be careful to avoid missteps that might jeopardize your success. For example, do not "ghost" on your mentor, keeping out of sight to avoid dealing with a difficult issue. Similarly, don't be a "vampire," draining the life from them by asking many questions or sending excessive communications. Mentee "missteps" are avoidable but require recognition and careful monitoring during training.

Be engaged and energizing. The best mentees are fun to work with. They are energy donors, not energy recipients. They come to work with enthusiasm, excitement, and eagerness to move projects forward. Mentors are more likely to respond positively to a mentee who presents the upside to their efforts rather than the downside. With this in mind, avoid excessive complaining about other people or a particular situation. If problems arise - and they usually do - it is best to frame your problem as a growth opportunity. Present several solutions, and see if your mentor advises one course of action over the others.

Relatedly, maturity is important, especially when receiving feedback about a manuscript, grant proposal, or talk. Avoid being defensive and putting your mentors in the awkward position of having to be responsible for your well-being. We know of mentors who have exited relationships with overly defensive mentees because giving constructive feedback to these individuals became quite time-consuming and emotionally fraught for both parties. Such an outcome disproportionately hurts the mentee. And remember that generosity goes far: Acknowledge and thank those who help you succeed.

Just as in other fields, the relationship between a mentor and mentee in medicine is a two-way street. In addition to producing high-quality results with integrity, excellent mentees know what type of help they need, select the right people to help them, finish tasks ahead of schedule, are mindful of their mentor's time, are energized and engaging, and credit others liberally. Do you have what it takes?

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The mentor-mentee relationship is a tango between a more senior person and a junior one. Just as in dance, coordination and orchestration between parties is necessary for grace and success. And while we and others have written about what makes the ideal mentor, comparatively less attention has been given to the other partner.

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Good mentoring is discipline-agnostic. Whether you’re a mentor to a medical resident or marketing manager, the same six guideines apply: 1) Choose mentees carefully: Although the prospect of having an energetic and personable junior partner for a multitude of projects is appealing, the wrong mentee can be painful. 2) Establish a mentorship team. The exclusive one-on-one relationship of mentor and mentee, long the norm, has been replaced by sharing responsibility with others for the growth of a mentee. 3) Run a tight ship. Establishing firm and clear ground rules with mentees can improve efficiency. 4) Head off rifts or resolve them. Mentor-mentee rifts are common in both business and academia, and they often aren’t dealt with as quickly as they should be. 5) Don’t commit mentorship malpractice. It’s easy for mentors to wield their power inappropriately – even if they’re not fully aware of it. And 6) Prepare for the transition. A mentor’s accumulated wisdom and expertise must be passed on to the next generation.

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When First Round launched its Mentorship Program in 2016, we didn't know what to expect. We'd heard from a number of people in our community that mentorship remained an elusive, missing piece in their careers. Younger people said it was intimidating and difficult to find a mentor. Their older counterparts said they weren't sure if their advice truly mattered. But said they believed in mentorship's transformative power. So we set out to fix it.

The task went to Whitnie Low Narcisse, who leads all of First Round's advisory programs and more. After putting out a call for both mentees (at First Round companies) and mentors selected from tech's most talented operators, she was overwhelmed by the response on both sides (eventually accepting exactly 50/50 female and male mentees). Then it was up to her to diagnose why mentorship usually goes sideways and design something different:

To address informality, she required mentor-mentee pairs to meet every other week for one quarter (leaving the option open for them to continue), totaling 6 meetings.

To improve content of conversations, she charged mentees with developing thoughtful agendas for their meetings and sharing them with their mentors in advance.

To kindle rapport, she assigned mentees to mentors based on their interests and areas of expertise.

To measure effectiveness, she ran surveys and polled not only what mentees learned, but how they were applying it in their everyday work.

The feedback was effusively positive, with high demand for another round. Since then, she's run two more, each one larger and more popular than the last - totaling 100 matches across all three (with a fourth launching this month). Observing this, and hoping to get even better, we wanted to understand what distinguished the most successful mentor-mentee pairs from the pack. What did they have in common? Many people said the experience had changed their careers. What was that secret sauce? We all wondered.

So, Narcisse asked the best mentors. A lot of them. And we've distilled the key lessons they shared for you here. Whether you're creating a mentorship program for your company, looking for a mentor to help you think through challenges, or hoping to make a bigger impact as a mentor yourself, this article is for you. Mentorship can be an incredible career accelerator - here's how to actually make it work.
We recently shared an update on how our mentorship program has grown in the past three years and gathered 25 additional tips on how to be a good mentor - head over here to check it out.
Obviously, out in the world people don't have the benefit of being assigned a mentor. You have to do the heavy lifting of finding and asking someone yourself. Usually, this means choosing from among a number of more experienced professionals in your life - a former boss, leaders at your current company, someone who has the job you hope to have someday, someone who has provided support, advice or championed you in past roles. All of these people could be good, but they also might not be. Not because they're untalented or unhelpful - but because they're not the best match. Asking someone to mentor you is nerve-racking enough. You want to make sure you're asking the right person.
For mentors:
On the mentor's side of the equation, if you've achieved success and mastery in an area, you're probably getting inundated with requests for coffee conversations and regular advice. The more mentees you take on, the less help you can be. They key is to choose just a few people who you can invest in and provide a lot of value to.

To nail the delicate chemistry required, eight questions have proven to be particularly telling, says Narcisse - four that mentors should ask, and four that mentees should ask:

Can I clearly be helpful to this potential mentee? Have they reached out with clear reasons or intentions for why they'd like my help? Are there specific needs they have that I can address?

Can this person be completely open and honest? Are they willing to provide deep context about their problems and vulnerabilities? Will they be able to share data, metrics, goals, slide decks, etc. that will help in the process?
For mentees:
Is this person prepared? Do they tend to be proactive about setting up time and providing enough context or an agenda upfront? Do they direct conversations and ask specific questions? (Be wary of people who want more general help or to touch base without a topic in mind.)

Does this person give me energy? Do I usually learn things from this person myself? Does talking to them allow me to reflect differently on my own business or path? Has talking to them in the past felt like a good use of time? Do they inspire me to think more deeply, even though they have less experience?

Does this potential mentor remember key details about me? Have you had to continuously repeat yourself or remind them about who you are or the context of your job every time you see them? This doesn't bode well.

Will it be hard to explain the concepts or context of my job? You should choose someone who is close enough to your industry and functional area so that very quick, even shorthand explanations will do, and they can immediately dive in and understand your primary challenges and goals.

Can this person give actionable advice? Have they told you something in the past that you've been able to apply right away? Are they a good teacher? Do they share tactics, or do they generalize? If they don't recommend specific actions to take, then pause. They might be too senior and removed from the day-to-day work. You might be better off with a skip-level above you than an executive.

"The ideal experience gap is 5-10 years. That far out, the mentor is experienced but can still remember what it felt like to be in their mentee's shoes."

Does this person seem present and focused? Great mentorship requires undivided attention. Sure, everyone is busy, but in the past, has this person listened to you with intent? Do they give you or others their full attention when they're in listening mode? Or are they looking at their phone? Do they interrupt?

Depending on which side of the equation you find yourself, ask the relevant set of questions. This can help to pare down the list of people you'd consider working with. Once you hone in on a few who might fit the bill, consider sending them a version of the other list of questions (i.e. if you're a mentee, send them the list of mentor questions).

They don't have to tell you their answers. Frame it as some thoughts to consider before entering into a more regular arrangement. It will make you appear and feel prepared - and set strong expectations. It might also disqualify suboptimal candidates who won't make the investment you're looking for. If questions are answered positively on both sides, it's very likely you'll have a productive match.

As mentioned above, the First Round Mentorship Program sets some firm parameters - and for good reason. We know this might be difficult in less formal settings, but there are some rules that we do think you should apply to create more effective connections. These are geared toward mentees:

Kick off relationships around distinct problems or challenges: One of the best ways to get a lot of value out of a mentor is to present something specific for them to help you solve. It might be seeing your startup through a successful launch, releasing a feature, building out a design team, or managing an underperformer. Note: this does not mean you're asking them to solve it for you or give you the answer. Rather, you'd love to get to know them and hear their experience on your path to finding a solution or reaching this milestone.

What's that one thing in your path that you want to overcome or achieve to get to a different level in your career? That's a perfect place to start with a mentor.

You can be detailed in the help you need, and your mentor will know they provided concrete and measurable help. This is far better than asking someone for general or ongoing career advice.

Build in offramps. This goes hand in hand with the rule above. People are much more likely to work with you if they don't see it as a perpetual commitment. A lot of mentees go in believing that they'll ask someone to be their mentor, and then that person will ride shotgun with them throughout their career. While this can and does happen occasionally, it's not always realistic, and your needs are bound to change.

Consider setting a soft deadline on an initial engagement from the beginning: i.e. "Our new feature launches at the end of Q2, I'd love to meet with you every couple of weeks until then." That way, there's a natural exit after value has been provided. If you have great chemistry and want to continue chatting after that, that's awesome. But don't make it the expectation. You'll get more enthusiasm upfront and maximize your chance of finding the right lifelong mentors.

Create a schedule - but keep it loose. Choosing a challenge or problem to base your mentorship around sets you up well to ask for a series of meetings. In order for this type of relationship to truly change the way you work, you need some regularity and predictability. In most cases, people talk with their mentors whenever something comes up or they get stuck. In this situation, mentors generally provide an off-the-cuff analysis and advice that may or may not be their best thinking. Regular meetings empower duos to come prepared and make smarter, incremental progress - while getting to know each other better.

The key, however, is to not impose a rigid or unrealistic cadence. Everyone is busy, particularly very accomplished people. Things come up, fires break out. If you're too dead set on a schedule, one cancellation can throw the whole thing off track. Instead, set a loose guideline - like every other week for a quarter, or twice a month for six months - not "every other Sunday" or "every first Tuesday at 6 p.m." This will sound more reasonable on both sides, and minor rescheduling here and there won't derail you.

Measure progress every meeting. In the agenda you set (and send ahead) for each meeting, set aside 5-10 minutes at the beginning to talk about what's happened in the interim. What progress has been made toward the concrete goal you've defined? If you had to quantify it, what would you say? Maybe you're 30% there? 80%?

Having this type of rough metric to share is helpful for both mentors and mentees. It provides momentum and aids in goal setting. For example, you can discuss what would take you from 25% to 40% by the time of your next conversation. This keeps the work and conversation moving forward.

Carve out time to exchange goals. Likewise, at the end of every meeting, you want to designate 5-10 minutes for both people to summarize their immediate goals. The mentee should use this time to review what was discussed during the conversation and distill it into action items - selecting those that can be accomplished by the next meeting.

Whitnie Low Narcisse

Perhaps more importantly, the mentee should also use this time to inquire about their mentor's goals. What's going on with them at work? What are their short-term objectives? What needs to happen for them to accomplish these tasks? Is there anywhere that you as the mentee can jump in and help? Perhaps you can make a referral or introduction. Maybe you can be a sounding board or second pair of eyes. Just because you have less experience doesn't mean you can't give back starting now. This will make any mentor more inclined to work with you in the future, and is a key part of providing positive energy. At the very least, understanding what they're working on will give you visibility into the job or career you might want to pursue.

Yes, we know that title is cheesy, but there are 10, and they truly should be heeded in order to make mentoring matter. Some are more for mentors, some are more for mentees - but both should keep them all in mind. These battle-tested lessons were fielded by Narcisse from active, successful mentors in our program, including folks like Head of Design Alex Schleifer, Eventbrite VP of Communications Terra Carmichael, and 's first product manager, Kenneth Berger.

A little ironic for an article all about mentorship, but nearly all of the mentors we spoke to identified use of the word as the number one reason they were dissuaded or disinclined to talk to someone. It carries some negative connotations with it: it's a time suck, it implies a very close relationship with someone you may barely know, it sounds like a long-term commitment. Direct asks like, "Will you mentor me?" are a universal turn off.

This type of mentee approach is much preferred: "Hey, I'm trying to get through XYZ specific situation or challenge, and I've heard from several people, [NAME WARM, RESPECTED MUTUAL CONNECTIONS HERE], that you might be able to provide some insight or direction in this area. Might you have time to meet for coffee?" Don't ask for an hour in an initial message like this - instead say 30 minutes. If the conversation is good, it'll last longer, but throwing out the shorter slot demonstrates emotional intelligence and that you won't waste their time. Always buy them the coffee.

You're going to get someone to take you more seriously if you can be really granular about what you want to accomplish - it makes them feel like they have exceptional expertise and are being proactively sought out, says Narcisse. Steer clear of broad requests like, "I'm looking for direction in my career..." but don't get too surgical either, i.e. "I want introductions to these five people..."

To this point, if you're a mentee sending an ask, you want to be very clear and explicit about why you targeted this person. Do enough homework to briefly explain why you're looking for guidance relevant to their experience. That way, you don't have to use the word 'mentor.' Instead, you're inviting them to apply their considerable knowledge on something they'll find intellectually engaging and impactful. That's how people want to feel - not that they're taking on an additional obligation.

If a mentee isn't careful, this relationship can start to feel pretty one-sided. You sit down with your mentor every so often, buy them coffee or a beer, and then download their wisdom. If you treat it this way, you're missing out on the gold you could be getting. The best way to prevent this is to use your first meeting to deepen your personal connection. Don't start with business. Take the time to understand each other's career paths, goals, hopes, fears, and lifestyle. All of this will factor into how the work itself can be approached optimally, and will highlight issues that might need to be worked through.

"Ask what the person's life is like outside of work. What's their family like? How do they spend their time when they're not working? Where do they live?" says Narcisse. "Where does work intersect with life? Where does it cause worry or stress or inspire enthusiasm? That's a better entry point into talking about work, and it leaves both people feeling more bought into further conversations."

There are a lot of areas where knowing someone personally will help them navigate things better. If a mentee is struggling with relationships with executives, hiring decisions, gaps in their skill set, motivating their team - having a more developed sense of who they are as a person will help elicit the best advice for handling it. Personality, introversion, extroversion, how they manage time, and what they enjoy doing will all make a difference. With this information, a mentor can better inhabit their mentee's shoes.

This also sets a more conversational cadence for all future interactions. "Plant the seed of trust right away with a more personal conversation," says one of the mentors we interviewed. "It encourages both people to share their challenges - historical and current. It makes everyone human, emphasizes what is shared in common and is more bi-directional. It also breaks down what might be an intimidating power dynamic, and makes you feel more comfortable as peers."

Every mentor we spoke to said they love mentees to send what they want to discuss in advance in the form of a shared Google Doc (which allows mentors to comment and ask their own questions on what's been outlined), a slide deck (which forces simplicity), or a checklist.

They highly encourage mentees to treat meetings the way they would 1:1s with their boss, where they set the agenda and own the content of the meeting. Mentors can then read through the day before and come armed with their own questions, more prepared thoughts, and a sense for how they want to contribute.

A good rule of thumb is for mentees to come with one topic they definitely want to address, and a short list of questions (3-5) that will get them the clarity they need on that topic.

"You should never be sitting there thinking, 'Gosh, what should we talk about?'" The exercise of planning makes sure time is used wisely. When communicating this to mentors, consider framing your questions as: "Here's what I've been wrestling with since we last met, can you please think about how you've approached this kind of thing in the past?" That way, mentors have time to scan their history and pull out the most instructive examples and tactics.

"You can always depart from whatever agenda has been set if something more relevant or pressing pops up, but the fact that it was created gets everyone thinking and aware of what the big issues are," says a mentor. " Generally speaking, mentees who put a lot in are able to get a lot out. "

One of the hazards of mentorship meetings is that there can be far too much to discuss. Very few startup professionals only have one major challenge or problem on their plate. It can be tempting to unpack everything that's going on lately. This will only limit how deep your conversation can go on the issues that matter most. Be really intentional about picking the 2-3 questions you really want to solve in the space of an hour.

"Try not to veer into big, conceptual thinking or conversation," says Narcisse. "If you take on something huge like how to manage, it's easy for your time to run out without actually tackling the practical stuff that's coming up the next week or month. Try to keep things really tied to the decisions that need to get made, or the solutions that need to be found."

One preventative measure to try: If a meeting agenda is too jam-packed, or if things start with the mentee listing too many concerns, call a timeout and rewrite that agenda. Mentor and mentee should take five minutes to co-create a more realistic and focused punch list. Don't try to do too much, be ruthless in paring topics down.

Experience gives mentors a different vantage point to see a lot of what you, as a mentee, may not. Ideally, they have been in your shoes earlier in their career. They've seen how things play out and can recognize patterns more readily. For example, one sales mentor saw that her mentee had trouble closing deals. The mentor had been in this position before, and knew that it was actually because she was reaching out to the wrong type of customer. But it's not always negative - mentors can also help illuminate everything you're doing right and help you visualize opportunities you would have never seen for yourself.
One of the best meeting progressions Narcisse has seen is:
"A lot of people don't have anyone at their job acknowledging the small, interim successes," says Narcisse. "Having a mentor to do that is like hanging diplomas or awards on your wall. You're able to reference them when you need to muster the confidence to do something new."

Mentors who are good at sharing their wisdom from experience, rather than just being didactic about what to do next, can help their mentees validate whether their assumptions or actions are correct. They can help leapfrog obstacles that won't matter down the road. They can tell you how the story is likely to end to save you time going down roads yourself.

Mentee explains challenge they're facing.

Mentor explains how they've tackled a similar challenge.

Mentee explains how conditions might be different based on their business or situation.

Mentor suggests what to replicate from her experience based on her mentee's specific context.

It's also recommended for mentors to ask questions like, "Why is that important?" instead of straight up saying something is or isn't. Or "How do you feel in meetings like that?" This gives mentees the prompt they need to develop their own insights.

Some of the greatest value a mentor can provide is identifying themes in what their mentee shares and providing broader, organizing principles from their experience that can solve many problems at once.

"I had a mentee ask about how I would operate internal board meetings, which led to us talking about specific ways to gain buy in from stakeholders - which he needed to do across the board," says one finance mentor. "Another asked about modeling revenue, which led to us talking about how to work with benchmarks in a number of situations."

Sometimes mentees ask about X but they really want Y - a new way to think about their work. This is an area where mentors can provide pretty unique value.

Consider looking across agendas for your meetings, and any notes you take. What situations continue to emerge? Can they be batched into themes? Is there a type of problem that's giving a mentee more trouble than others? Is it possible to take on all at once? For example, one mentee was having trouble making staffing decisions. Every week, he'd be concerned about filling a different role. His mentor was able to share a framework for easing these types of decisions across functional areas.

This is critically important on both sides. If either person feels like they can't share key information, the relationship won't work. Everyone has to be comfortable being vulnerable, admitting that they don't know (especially on the mentor side). Mentors have to be able to say, "Yeah I went through that and I failed spectacularly for these reasons," says Narcisse. "Mentees need to be okay bringing as much actual data with them as possible - candidate pipelines, deal flows, metrics they're trying to hit, roadmaps. This is what will make mentors effective at tackling real situations. Great trust and respect need to be established immediately."

When a mentee is tight-lipped, it can be frustrating for a mentor to read between the lines and give advice based on incomplete information. To alleviate this, mentors should aim to be very transparent themselves upfront, sharing something that highlights their vulnerability or that they are willing to share something fairly sensitive. "You have to be willing to lean in on some personal disclosure," says one mentor. "Right away share something that went really wrong or that you still regret."

Remember, nothing engenders trust faster than giving someone your undivided attention. Both mentors and mentees want to feel 100% listened to, like their counterpart is present, and that their time is being wisely spent and valued. Set a loud timer on your phone so you don't need to have it on the table, and time won't be a distraction. Remain engaged and committed to bringing your full intellectual horsepower to each meeting, and the trust will follow.

None of the mentors we interviewed gave homework to their mentees. While it could create accountability, they acknowledge that everyone's too busy for extra work, and mentees might start dreading going to meetings. Instead, you want to gauge progress by checking in regularly on what a mentee has accomplished between meetings. "The goal is really just making sure that your mentee is executing," says one mentor. " I calibrate how seriously a mentee is taking things by what they say they delivered between meeting 1 and 2. "

At the end of each meeting, mentors should say explicitly: "Okay, you should try to get to 'X point' by the time we talk next" - be clear about what that point is and what getting to that milestone means exactly. You don't want any fudge factor. Then at the beginning of the next meeting, immediately check in: "Where did you net out on reaching X goal we set out two weeks ago?" If not much progress was made, spend time diagnosing why. For mentorship to make a difference, a mentee needs to commit to executing what they say they will.

To set up what can reasonably be done by the next meeting, Narcisse recommends that mentees choose their most pressing challenge and say: "I'm going to tackle this problem. Here's what I'm thinking I'll do and why. How does that sound to you?" That way, mentors can help enforce realistic scope. She warns against mentees directly asking mentors what they would do. Replication doesn't reinforce learning.

Mentees creating agendas should build in time at the start of each meeting to review what was done and how it worked out. For example, maybe they said they'd apply two tactics. What was the outcome? This is where mentors shine - unpacking why things went the way they did.

Keeping both parties energized about the relationship depends on mutual learning. It's important for mentors to be proactive about asking questions when they see the opportunity to learn from their mentees - and about connecting the dots after their sessions to see what they might glean that's relevant to their own work. Mentees can do their part by asking mentors what they want to learn or know more about to see what they can contribute. Here are just a few of the things First Round's mentors said they learned during their sessions:

How to better explain concepts and tactics. "You're not a master at something until you can teach it," one said. "That's harder than you think."

Becoming a better manager by spotting gaps in communication or wrong assumptions.

Visibility into a different kind of business model than they're used to. In this case, the mentee was working with a subscription model, forcing her mentor to think through how he'd adapt his approach in that situation.

That he wanted to be an executive coach. "Whenever my mentee had an accomplishment, I'd be so thrilled she was kicking ass. It made me rethink my career."

Industry trends and intelligence. "When you both work in the same industry, the exchange of what and who you each know is pretty valuable."

How to run a better beta program based on how a mentee was doing it.

How to think more deeply about relationships with their own bosses and reports. "I got a front row seat to how people hear direction from their managers - and they're working for someone just like me."

Where their gut impulses come from. One mentor has intuition about what to do, but having a mentee forces him to unpack and explain why he thinks it's the right decision.

Lastly, at the end of a mentoring engagement - or when you reach a milestone like three months - have a check-in where the mentee shares how much of their mentor's advice they took, how it was applied, where it's helped and where it hasn't. It's a mini post-mortem that yields insight that will help both people get more out of mentorship going forward.

It's important to have a number of perspectives to bring to bear on the biggest challenges you face. You might not have full-on mentorship engagements going with a handful of people, but it's good, as a mentee, to have two to three other seasoned operators in your life to consult. You want to socialize important questions, collect responses, and then triage.

You might call this your Personal Board of Directors, and consider treating these relationships the way a company might interact with its board. Narcisse built a personal board of directors for herself over the last several years, and it's become a major source of insight and strength in her career.

The handy thing is that you can ask your primary mentor for introductions to others in their network who might be able to illuminate different topics, angles or solutions for you. For example, one mentee had three areas she wanted to tackle with her mentor, and one was management. Instead of trying to offer advice himself (as a relatively new manager), he introduced her to a woman who was a tier of leadership above him to provide greater perspective. As a mentor, don't hesitate to open doors for your most prepared and promising mentees. They'll always remember you for it, and it'll reduce their dependency on your point of view.

"Everyone has blind spots, not just those who are less experienced," says one mentor. "I always ask my mentees to have a couple other mentors who specialize in areas where they need to succeed but where I'm weak. I also have a list of 4-5 folks who I always recommend. It's also a good idea to ask several mentors the same question to hone in on the right answer or you."

We hope this gives you a guide to make mentorship an exceptional tool in your career. Finding the right match and nurturing the connection can lead in any number of directions - to new jobs, new disciplines, and to lifelong friendship. But it requires diligence, preparation and continually asking yourself the questions that will keep you on track with forward momentum.

Across 100 pairs of mentors and mentees, we've seen the full range of outcomes. The advice presented above is designed to help both sides make a positive impact on one another. So whether you're currently applying for First Round's next mentorship round, or looking to start a similar program or relationship in your own life, keep these commandments and frameworks in mind.

"Making mentorship work for you isn't easy - even though most of us believe it should happen organically when we're in the right place at the right time," says Narcisse. "The truth is, we have to create these opportunities for ourselves. And once we do, we have to treasure these relationships as something rare and precious. I can think of few better professional resolutions as we all head into 2018."

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We Studied 100 Mentor-Mentee Matches - Here's What Makes Mentorship Work

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When First Round launched its Mentorship Program in 2016, we didn't know what to expect. We'd heard from a number of people in our community that mentorship remained an elusive, missing piece in their careers. Younger people said it was intimidating and difficult to find a mentor.

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<aside> 👋 Everything you need to build a scalable onboarding program.

This is a resource for People Operations and HR teams looking to turn their onboarding from ✔️a checklist to 💫 an experience.

The toolkit includes onboarding templates, tools, inspiration and best practices from people-first teams - curated by your friends at **Gather.**

</aside>

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It takes money, time, and resources to successfully bring on new hires. Invest in an onboarding program that delivers.

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You care about putting people first in your workplace. That all starts with a great onboarding experience.

Every element you should have in your onboarding process:

<aside> 👉 Below are the most common elements of an onboarding program. For each, we've included: ✨ What it is ✨ Why it matters ✨ Examples (if applicable) ✨ Recommended tools / resources(if applicable) ⭐️ = Gather favorite ✨ Best practice FAQs

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Complete Onboarding Toolkit for Startups

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Everything you need to build a scalable onboarding program. This is a resource for People Operations and HR teams looking to turn their onboarding from ✔️a checklist to 💫 an experience. The toolkit includes onboarding templates, tools, inspiration and best practices from people-first teams - curated by your friends at Gather.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The go-to response for organizational issues is typically some form of reactionary training. The mantra goes like this: Design the training. Deliver it. Move on.

Unfortunately, successful training doesn't actually work that way. Although it might make you feel like you're doing something, this method rarely solves the underlying problems. Rather, it becomes an expensive line item. According to Training magazine, companies set aside 16% of their budgets to train staff. This is a huge percentage considering that most organizations don't measure the effectiveness of their training efforts.

Still, training remains many organizations' first line of defense because it's easier for senior leaders to authorize it instead of spending time evaluating core issues or mentoring colleagues. But a Band-Aid isn't a long-term solution. Without proper ongoing treatment, the wound won't heal - and your problem will persist.

Why Training Alone Doesn't Work

According to a Forrester report, about 40% of employees and managers are unsatisfied with on-the-job training. As a leader, it's your responsibility to ensure every program is relevant and achievable. If your employees have enough on their plates to keep them busy every day, they might view training as an interruption and pay less attention to it. Similarly, participants won't be engaged if you're reusing the same dated videos from years back. Ultimately, training won't be effective unless you address the root of the problem directly, set clear performance objectives, and prompt managers to reinforce desired behaviors.

While most training does include performance objectives, resulting in designs with lots of information and skill-building exercises, these objectives typically focus on the competencies needed to fill a gap only. What's missing is the component that creates the motivation to use the skills employees develop.

At HPWP Group, we address this by defining what we want people to competently do, what we want them to think post-training, and how we want them to feel post-training. Additionally, it's essential to reinforce any new skill or behavior. This includes providing constructive feedback if mistakes are made (so they don't turn into habits) and encouragement to drive more of the desired performance.

As an example, one large company had its managers and directors attend our High Performance Leadership Workshop. The COO met with those participants immediately post-training, arranged for refreshers, and included the desired behaviors and competencies as part of their feedback and development process. This training, along with the supporting reinforcement, substantially changed the culture of the company.

To Train or Not to Train?

To begin revamping your company's approach to training, the most important thing to consider is whether it is even necessary. Here are three questions to consider before sinking resources into a training program.

1. What is the gap you think training will bridge?

Typically, training occurs due to a difference between a desired and actual performance or behavior. You'll want to define that gap before searching for solutions. For example, if the gap has been caused by new processes, upgraded equipment, or revised policies, formal training could solve the issue.

Just remember that people need to want training for it to be effective. If they're not affected by the gap you point out, they won't be invested in fixing anything. The participants must be curious and want to learn. When they are, they're more apt to listen carefully, ask questions, and apply knowledge.

2. What's causing the gap?

After identifying the gap, explore it further. Not all gaps are performance issues. Consider the case of overcomplicated workflows, which is a big concern among remote and hybrid workers. As this Harvard Business Review article explains, employees who telecommute often lack the resources, infrastructure, and information enjoyed by their in-office colleagues. You can throw all the training you want at that problem, but you won't fill the gap because it has nothing to do with worker knowledge.

Remember that many gaps happen because of a breakdown in communication or a flawed working environment. A mere 7% of respondents to a Gallup poll strongly agreed that the corporate communications they received were reliable, on time, and transparent. Similarly, other Gallup research suggests that fixing employee engagement by retooling rewards systems can have a stronger effect than just putting managers through training.

3. Is training necessary to fix the gap?

Training is always expensive, even when it's the best way to solve a problem. In most situations, there are more effective solutions that can be implemented.

Case in point: Our team members advised a general manager who wanted training to tackle pervasive bullying, favoritism, and a lack of teamwork. After diving deeper, the general manager realized the obstacle wasn't that supervisors didn't understand how to lead; the obstacle was that the right people weren't in the right seats. Rearranging duties stopped the brunt of the dysfunction. Further training could add a bit of polish, but it was no longer essential.

Critical thinking takes time, which is a limited resource for busy leaders. However, investing in an unnecessary training program can cost even more. Before you jump on what you think is the right solution, break down the problem. It's always best to address the core issue.

Get Managers On Board

If you do decide training is necessary, it's vital to get the support of managers. Recently, our team worked with the chief human resources officer of a large company. The executives wanted managers to actively develop the next generation of leadership, so the learning and development department moved forward with creating a training plan. But nothing in their plan focused on managers allocating the time to make this task a priority.

So, before taking action, you should also ask:

Why aren't our managers doing more to further develop employees for advancement? It's probably not a priority based on their current workload.

Why isn't it a priority? It's not what their managers ask them about.

Why don't their managers ask them about what they're doing to develop employees? They assume managers are doing it and know that it's important.

Even if providing an employee development process through training is a good step, it will not result in major implementation unless senior leaders clearly and repeatedly express it as a priority. You must always encourage managers to schedule follow-up meetings with team members who've attended the training. Have them ask questions to prompt reflection and implementation, such as "What have you learned?" and "How would you apply what you've learned?" When it comes to training for professional development, these conversations must revolve around career progression.

In the past, senior leaders habitually thought, "Training can fix that." However, in most cases, training isn't the answer. As a senior leader, you need to do some probing and critical thinking to uncover what the real problem is. It may not be a performance issue - it could be due to poor staffing decisions, unclear directives, or other business concerns. Because training is costly in terms of time and money, managers should look at it as they would any other investment: with an expected ROI.

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More Training Won't Solve Your Company's Problems

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The go-to response for organizational issues is typically some form of reactionary training. The mantra goes like this: Design the training. Deliver it. Move on. Unfortunately, successful training doesn't actually work that way. Although it might make you feel like you're doing something, this method rarely solves the underlying problems. Rather, it becomes an expensive line item.

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Voltage Control + Psychological Safety Worksheet Template

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A visual tool to create a safe team culture - one step at a time

It's no secret that psychological safety makes or breaks teams. As more and more organizations get familiarized with the research and concepts, the idea of safety is taking on a new meaning. Leaders have realized that psychological safety is the secret sauce to high-performing teams. Safety is no longer perceived as the opposite of risk-taking, but as an enabler of experimentation.

The big question still lies in how to actually increase psychological safety. That's where most organizations and teams struggle. Executives get the principles, but the recommendations usually feel too abstract. So how can you move from concept to execution?

I've written numerous articles with exercises to increase psychological safety in your team, the workplace, and virtual teams. Although it has provided people with actionable tools and practices, they kept asking for a tool to help them tackle the topic in a more visual and organized way. So I decided to share the Psychological Safety Ladder - a canvas I've been applying with my clients.

In this post, I will share the principles behind this tool, introduce the canvas, and explain how to facilitate it with your team.

The Three Levels of Psychological Safety

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as the " belief that one won't be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes."

Unlike trust, which happens between two people, psychological safety is provided by the entire team. Most importantly, it's not about being nice, but respectful. Psychological safety provides the right environment for receiving candid feedback, admitting mistakes, and learning from your colleagues.

People tend to approach it in binary terms - either you have psychological safety or you don't. However, in my experience consulting organizations, people experience it at different levels. We have to approach psychological safety as a spectrum from low to high rather than something that is either present or not.

This idea of psychological safety as something dynamic inspired the metaphor of the ladder. It helps visualize the aspiration to climb to higher levels. It's also a reminder that what comes up can come down. In the same way that you can increase psychological safety, bad behaviors can make you go down the ladder - or even fall from it.

Another important aspect of this progression is the different levels. Inspired by Timothy R. Clark's 4 Stages of Psychological Safety, I came up with three levels: Belonging, Diversity of Thought, and Innovation. Each level is comprised of various 'steps.'

Belonging is a critical element for building high-performing teams. It's about feeling safe to build strong interpersonal relationships, bring your whole self to work, address wellbeing issues, and actively participate in meetings or conversations. This is the foundation of Psychological Safety or Level 1.

Many people confuse "feeling safe" with risk-aversity. That's because they get stuck in level 1. The purpose of developing an environment of high psychological safety is to promote diverse thinking and innovation. It's an invitation to continue climbing the ladder.

Diversity of Thought is critical for teams to perform at their best. Cognitive diversity and cognitive friction neutralize groupthink, integrating different perspectives. It's about feeling safe to contribute with your unique skills and talents, speak up about tough issues, disagree or think differently, and ask for help. Level 2 invites team members to constantly reexamine facts and remain objective. It also encourages greater scrutiny of everyone's actions, improving information processing and decision-making.

The paradox of psychological safety is that the higher you climb the ladder, the safer you feel to take risks.

Level 3 addresses the end result of high-performing teams: innovation. I'm not talking just about just developing new products or services, but also coming up with new solutions to help people work better. Level 3 is about feeling safe to challenge the status quo, using questions to explore what's possible, making mistakes, and experimenting.

The Psychological Safety Ladder Canvas

Psychological safety has become a crucial component of my work helping organizations build strong workplace cultures. Not only is it one of the building blocks of the Culture Design Canvas, but it's also a key module of our Build a Fearless Culture program. Lately, one-third of my client engagements - including consulting, talks, and workshops - have involved psychological safety, especially in remote and hybrid teams.

It's no surprise that I continue to experiment with new tools and exercises to help teams build a safer workplace culture.

As part of that process, I developed the Psychological Safety Ladder Canvas to help organizations map and understand how they are faring, identify areas of opportunities, and prioritize action. Basically it's to map how safe the culture feels for you and your team to bring your whole selves to work, speak your mind, be curious, try new things, and not be penalized for making mistakes or taking risks.

The Ladder Canvas has three sections:

Let's address one by one.

1. Face the ladder:

Using a set of statements, team members assess each step of the ladder.

List of Statements Per Each Psychological Safety Level

Level 3 - INNOVATION

Experimentation: "I feel safe to take risks in this team"

Mistake tolerance: "We openly share and learn from our mistakes"

Challenging others: "It's okay to challenge the status quo"

Exploration: "Questions are always welcome on our team"

Level 2 - COGNITIVE DIVERSITY

Disagreement: "The team encourages me to disagree or think differently"

Ask for help: "It's easy to ask my colleagues for help"

Speak up: "We can bring up problems and tough issues"

Unique contributions: "My unique skills and talents are valued and utilized"

Level 1 - BELONGING

Relationships: "We know one another personally, not just professionally"

Wellbeing: "It's okay to talk about health issues and burnout

Participation: "I'm not afraid to ask questions and share my thoughts"

Inclusion: "I feel welcomed by my team"

2. Assess each level

As a result of the previous assessment, you can identify how well your team is doing level by level.

By consolidating the assessment results, you can determine which levels are strong, weak, or broken. This analysis will help you prioritize where to focus. Logic shows that you can't do well at level 2 if you have issues at level 1. You have to improve the lower levels before going up the ladder.

3. Repair the steps

It doesn't matter how many steps are broken. Focusing is critical. Fix one at a time. Start with one crucial step or an area where you can achieve a quick win and build momentum.

Do you want to increase participation in meetings? Do your team members need to know each other better? Do you need to make it okay for people to ask for help?

How to Facilitate the Psychological Safety Canvas

Before you get started, download the template in PDF format or virtual template for MURAL.

Set up the right environment by preparing the team ahead of the session. Have everyone read this article to familiarize themselves with the Psychological Safety Ladder. Make sure there will be no interruptions so everyone can focus on the task at hand. Most importantly, share the purpose of the session: to assess how safe the culture of the team is and identify specific areas to tackle.

1. Face the ladder

Have each member assess the level of psychological safety within the team. They should evaluate each of the statements using the following color code:

Yes = ✅ Green

Maybe = ⚠️ Yellow

No = 🔴 Red

There are many ways to complete this part of the activity. If you are doing it in-person, people can 'vote' with color post-its. If you are running the session virtually, the MURAL template has sticky notes in yellow. Participants can keep them in yellow or turn their color to red or green, depending on their assessment.

Another option that works both for in-person and virtual sessions is to use Mentimer or Slido, where people can vote anonymously and the final results are captured live so everyone can see the final assessment.

Regardless of which approach you choose, always provide time for individual reflection before sharing it with the entire team.

Before moving to the second step, discuss the following:

- What steps are green, yellow, or red?

- Green steps: What success stories do we have? What can we learn?

- Red steps: What's preventing us from doing better?

- Yellow steps: What will it take to make these green?

- How can each team member contribute?

2. Assess each level

Use the results of the initial activity to assess each level: Belonging, Diversity of Thought, and Innovation. Which one is strong, weak, or broken?

As a rule of thumb, considering the face the ladder activity results, 75+% is strong, 50-75% is weak, and <50% is broken.

Facilitate a group discussion.

What are the observations? What are the surprises and contradictions? What doesn't make sense? What do the results say about the team? How do people feel about it? What makes them feel excited to help improve psychological safety? What makes them feel demotivated to tackle the issues at hand?

It's important to avoid finger-pointing or feeling guilty. The purpose of this conversation is not to rehash what's broken, but to identify areas for building a stronger team culture.

3. Repair the steps

It's impossible to fix everything at once. Choose one step and focus the conversation on how to repair it.

Taking risks requires knowing that your team will be there for you. Imagine that they provide a safety net so you can take the leap without the fear of getting hurt. To create that feeling, team members need to agree on which behaviors they want in and which ones they want to get rid of.

Introduce this activity by setting the scene. Psychological safety is promoted by every team member; everyone plays a part in building the culture. This is an opportunity to reflect on both individual and collective behaviors - which ones do we want to start, stop, and continue doing?

First, allow time for self-reflection. Have each individual write what behavior they think they and others should have inside the safety net. And then ask them to capture which ones they don't want.

Once everyone has finished, invite all team members to put the "behaviors we want" inside the safety net - what you want 'in.' Then they should put the "behaviors we don't want" outside the safety net - what everyone wants 'out' of the culture.

Behaviors we want in and out to increase psychological safety

Facilitate a group discussion. Ensure the team is aligned in what they want 'in' and 'out.' This is a moment for everyone to be honest and sign a team contract.

Define specific ways, psychological safety exercises, or activities to help the team achieve the desired behaviors and get rid of unhealthy ones. Monitor progress and once one step is repaired, move on to fix the next one.

Mapping Psychological Safety - Key Watchouts

Promoting psychological safety is a two-way street. The same way that you can climb it, you can also move down - or fall.

Mapping your team culture is a crucial step to understanding what levels are strong, weak, or broken. I hope this framework helps you address psychological safety in a more structured, actionable manner.

Facilitating the Canvas is not difficult; the problem is creating a psychologically safe space to address fundamental issues affecting the team. Having a professional facilitator can make or break the conversation.

Think about the worst meeting or workshop your team had. What went wrong? What was missing? Maybe the team leader dominated the conversation, or someone got defensive when you tried to address a hot button topic. Did you solve the problem? Or did the team avoid having a candid conversation?

Creating a psychologically safe space is critical to address the ladder, especially if you have level 1 issues. An expert facilitator can make a huge difference. Hire an external one, tap into trained facilitators within your organization, or equip your team members to lead difficult conversations.

Reach out with any questions about the Psychological Safety Ladder or if you need help to facilitate candid, effective conversations using the canvas.

Download And Licensing Terms

The Psychological Safety Ladder Canvas was created by Gustavo Razzetti (©2021) it's licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

You are free to use, copy, and distribute it but have the obligation to give appropriate credit (author name, branding, website url, and link to the original material/ license - this article) and must indicate if any change was made.

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The Psychological Safety Ladder Canvas | By Gustavo Razzetti

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It's no secret that psychological safety makes or breaks teams. As more and more organizations get familiarized with the research and concepts, the idea of safety is taking on a new meaning. Leaders have realized that psychological safety is the secret sauce to high-performing teams. Safety is no longer perceived as the opposite of risk-taking, but as an enabler of experimentation.

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Newsflash: it's the 20s. Today's tech-savvy, remote workforce expect more from their employers than just classroom training or eLearning. Your staff are forming informal communities anyway. Why not support them, whilst adding value to your business?

Learning communities are a great way to promote a learning culture, encourage knowledge sharing and support formal learning. Giving employees somewhere to share and discuss the things they care about accelerates learning and most importantly, improves workplace performance.

Now, before we all laugh at those companies citing email as a method for knowledge sharing (can you think of anything less productive?), let's remember these statistics should be taken with a pinch of salt.

Why?

The 30% of organisations claiming to have no forums or communities did have communities. Just because they existed outside of the organisations doesn't mean they don't exist.
(Hands up if you have a WhatsApp, Slack or Facebook group with colleagues or coworkers? Me too. It's what we do).
So, if these communities exist anyway, why not design them intentionally?

By building a platform with intention, we can optimise for inclusivity and user experience. And proactively align with business goals.

Background

I wrote about the benefits of corporate learning communities in this recent article. With that project gathering steam, in this article I'll focus on how I'm supporting my client with the implementation of a corporate learning community.
Quick disclaimer: What I'm sharing here is a reflection on past experiences and the documentation of ideas, rather than a tried and tested strategy. I will post further updates once more progress has been made. Whilst I've successfully designed and managed communities outside of the corporate space, this is the first corporate community I've built.
Goal and purpose

Why are we building a community? What is our goal? And what are the goals of employees who might join? Answers to these questions affect both design and operational decisions.

From the organisations perspective, goals might include encouraging knowledge sharing, supporting formal learning or creating learning culture.

You can definitely have more than one, but it makes sense to articulate the priority before you begin.

But we also need a shared purpose that members care about.

"True communities are simply groups of people who keep coming together over what they care about. The most vibrant communities offer members a chance to act on their passions with one another."
Bailey Richardson, Come Together

You probably have a pretty good idea, but why not ask them?

Send a survey explaining what you're looking to create and find out what keeps them up at night. Setup some small focus groups and get people talking. Watch for the most impassioned moments.

Avoid picking something small that can be achieved quickly. Instead choose something grandiose and altruistic. Getting this right will attract the right members and make people feel part of something special.

Community culture

Whilst the community culture will develop organically, there are certain things you can do to set expectations.

A good way of doing this is with an orientation upon sign up. Work with your early members to create ground rules to describe what the community is for and more importantly, what it is not. Ask all new members to read these as part of your onboarding process (see below).

Whilst you can't guarantee anything, most people do read these because they want to behave appropriately and "fit in".

You'll also want to consider how your community plans to address conflict. One approach is to appoint moderators and establish a code of conduct. Be specific about what will be tolerated and your process for dealing with bad behaviour.

The culture will be driven by the community champions (see below).

Technical considerations

Choosing the right technology for your community is critical. It's easy to fall into the habit of thinking "we already have Slack or Microsoft Teams, so let's just use that".

But it would be naive to avoid specialist community tools. After all, these have been designed intentionally to grow sustainable communities.

Syncronous or asyncronous conversation? (i.e. do you want people to be able to chat in real time, or post messages that can be responded to later?)

Web, local and/or mobile platform?

Integration with your current tech stack, possibly including LMS?

Start by asking a few questions. Do you want:

I've had experience in communities using many different technologies. However, the most successful I've been involved with were hosted on Circle.

Circle is an incredible platform, designed intentionally to build and grow engaged communities.

Launching your community

Start small and grow organically. Pick a sample group of employees who have a common interest and start there. Make that the focus of your community and design for their success.

If you get that right, your community might look radically different in 12 months to how it looks now.

And that's a good thing! It signals traction.

The most successful communities have communities within communities (am I allowed to use the same word 3 times in one sentence?)

Once the basic structure and format is working, you can look to invite others. You might consider incentivising founding members to encourage others to join.

Onboarding new members

Joining a new community can be a bit like going to a party where you don't know anyone. So, designing an onboarding experience where new members feel welcomed and don't feel overwhelmed is critical.

One idea is to create a new member challenge. Simply prompt new members to go through a series of steps which will make them feel comfortable and confident in using the platform.

I learned this technique from Jill Benbow who runs the SPI Pro Community.

Complete profile with photo, headline and bio.

Register for a live event (you could schedule one new event per month)

Read the community guidelines ad comment "I agree" to show you understood and agree

Subscribe to the Events Calendar

Post an intro in the Say Hello (bonus points if you post a video hello)

Join at least 2 topic spaces

Take our virtual tour of the space

Add email addresses to your contacts

Fill out this form once you've completed the checklist to request the "New Member" badge

Suggestions include:

Finding and nurturing community 'champions'

All successful communities rely on having a core group of engaged members or "champions". They engage regularly, lead by example and demonstrate the correct community etiquette.

In a typical community, it's a small group of passionate members who will do the majority of the work to drive the community forward and expand what's possible.

Identifying your champions and involving them in decisions to shape the community will give them a sense of ownership and accountability. This will increase their motivation to be involved.

Our goal is for them to take on the responsibility of managing the community - whether that's in a formal capacity or simply as a leader.

"The secret to getting people together is this: build your community with people, not for them."
Bailey Richardson, Come Together

One great example of this was a community manager who made each champion a moderator of their space. They were responsible for keeping an eye on the comments, fostering relationships and coming up with ideas to improve their space.

"Approach community-building as progressive acts of collaboration."
Bailey Richardson, Come Together

Ongoing management

In my experience, it pays to have an ongoing thread to keep the community-focused and invested.

In the communities I've set up and managed, regular live events have worked well. They're a chance to get everyone together on a recurring schedule. Pick some of the most important topics and focus each event on that topic. Get the conversation flowing. Make the recording available on the community platform to keep the discussion going between events.

I've seen success with both a bi-weekly and monthly cadence. And using tools like Zoom might seem like an obvious idea, but getting everyone's face on screen makes a big difference to the connection people feel towards the community.

Other ideas might include regular challenges, face-to-face meetups, guest presentations, members presentations, group training... you're really only limited by your own imagination.

You can also incentivise contribution. You can do this with digital badges. For example, members who achieve a certain level of participation may get a badge to show that.

Peer recognition is another powerful way to make members feel great about being involved. Create a space where members give kudos to others for their contribution to the cause. You could have a member of the month campaign which celebrates contribution.

Again, you're only limited by your imagination.

Conclusion

Learning communities is an exciting area of growth and I expect many companies to proactively embrace this as the needs of employees change, remote work becomes the norm and powerful community tools become more prevalent.

Following some fundamental steps will give you a better chance of success.

Once you have those bases covered, you can get creative. The best communities develop because they try things out, keep what works and get rid of what doesn't.

We have yet to formally launch our corporate community, but I plan to continue documenting our progress via this blog.

Click here to continue the conversation or leave a comment.

If you'd like to chat about setting up a learning community for your business, please book a consultation at this link.

Additional resources

Building communities for learning in the corporate environment is a relatively new phenomenon and there aren't many resources focused specifically on this.

However, I found the following resources very useful:

Authors Note

If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy these too:

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Building a Corporate Learning Community - Ant Pugh: Learning Design Consultant

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Newsflash: it's the 20s. Today's tech-savvy, remote workforce expect more from their employers than just classroom training or eLearning. Your staff are forming informal communities anyway. Why not support them, whilst adding value to your business? Learning communities are a great way to promote a learning culture, encourage knowledge sharing and support formal learning.

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In our Mentor Moment series on the Creative Confidence Podcast , listeners share a challenge they're facing at work and we match them with an IDEO mentor with relevant experience so they can explore possible solutions together.

In our latest episode, Kathleen asks:
How do I onboard several new team members and set the stage for a collaborative and successful team dynamic?
IDEO U's Lead Learning Architect guides a conversation with Heather Currier Hunt , IDEO's executive talent director and global head of learning and development, where the three explore ideas and human-centered activities for onboarding Kathleen's team. Learn more from Heather in our course Cultivating Creative Collaboration , where she's an instructor.
Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts 3 ways to encourage collaboration when onboarding new team members

Be the bridge - Create connections between the new people and the existing team by honoring the skills and expertise each person brings to the table.

Co-design team rituals - From high investment (team agreements) to easy lift (a quick ice breaker in a meeting), rituals help to activate each individual and create moments of alignment and acknowledgement.

Reduce uncertainty wherever you can - Define the collective goal you have and the roles that everyone will play towards that goal. Don't leave anyone wondering about their purpose.

Heather shares tactical ways to approach each of these topics in the podcast episode.
Submit your challenge
Are you struggling with a challenge at work and wish you could get some words of wisdom from someone who's been there? We'd love to hear from you! Send a voice memo to hello@ideou.com with details on your work challenge and include "Mentor Moment" in the subject line. Or call us at (415) 615-5020 and leave a voicemail.

Please include:

Your first name, role and company description (leave out the company name). Give us a little background on what you do.

A description of your work challenge.

Is there a specific instance where this challenge showed up for you?

How is this challenge limiting your impact at work?

What kinds of things have you tried to overcome this challenge?

If you could ask an IDEO mentor one question about your challenge, what would it be?

We're looking for real stories from our community on topics like:

Pushback on new ways of working

Difficulty collaborating across distance

Desire to have more impact at work

Other challenges related to creativity, leadership, growth, and innovation

We'll be in touch if we're able to feature your question on the podcast series. If you submit a recording, we may use the audio in a podcast episode.
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What did you like about this episode? What would you change? Share your thoughts in this quick survey .
Subscribe for more
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Mentor Moment: How Do I Onboard New Team Members To Encourage Collaboration?

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In our Mentor Moment series on the Creative Confidence Podcast , listeners share a challenge they're facing at work and we match them with an IDEO mentor with relevant experience so they can explore possible solutions together. In our latest episode, Kathleen asks: How do I onboard several new team members and set the stage for a collaborative and successful team dynamic?

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Why do people pay to go to Ivy League universities?

It's not for the content. Paying six figures to go to Harvard doesn't give you access to any teaching materials that you couldn't find yourself right now for cheap or for free. You can read all the same books that Princeton students do from the comfort of your own home. MIT has even made most of their course materials available online for free to anyone who wants them.

People spend six figures for the pleasure of putting an elite school on their resume, but also for the experience - for the professors, the study sessions, the late-night dorm room philosophy chats, the lasting alumni network. In short, for the community.

Content is cheap; community is valuable. It's so valuable people will pay huge amounts of money to learn alongside their peers. So why do modern course developers expect people to pay for online courses that are passive video content? Lectures are only a part of what makes a valuable learning experience, but they're the part that online courses double down on.

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Online Students Are Being Short-Changed

As online courses have become easier to produce, designers have put too much effort into creating video content and too little effort into community building. The rise of for-profit ed-tech companies and massive open online courses (MOOCs) played a major role in the proliferation of the stale, yet common "video, video, quiz" format.

This heavy reliance on video content isn't just psychologically isolating; it's also not all that conducive to learning. A recent study by MIT found that MOOCs have failed to live up to their promise to democratize higher education and instead suffer from low-retention rates and a decline in enrollment over time.

As they currently exist, most MOOCs simply cannot compete with in-person learning, where many valuable learning experiences are derived from collaborative activities. A student studying marketing at university, for example, will attend lectures on the theory of marketing, the history, and the different models of marketing. Those are all important components of understanding how to be a marketer, but there are many other components that can't be taught through lectures, like how to manage stakeholders, how to communicate and present ideas effectively, and how to create compelling campaigns. These skills are learned through discussions, group projects, and meaningful feedback on their work.

So why are most online marketing courses just a series of videos illustrating various marketing concepts? Students are missing out on all those creative and social skills that you can only get via social interaction.

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The Internet Has Democratized Access to Content

The internet has made finding quality content easy and inexpensive. While this is great for anyone who wants to find information fast, on a higher level, it has also had the effect of devaluing good content.

Fifteen years ago, there was a lot less content online. If you wanted to learn about a specific subject, you had to intentionally seek out a dedicated online course. People were pretty easily satisfied: if the content was good, they were happy.

But today, the internet is flooded with content. Blogs, social media, Wikipedia, and, of course, YouTube. You can learn to cook an egg, do your taxes, or become an expert on the history of early medieval Spain with the click of a button. Everything you want to know about everything is already available on YouTube. For free.

As a result, people are much less disposed to pay to learn when they can find the same materials online for free. If you want to make a really good course and even charge money for it, you need to be better than YouTube.

Of course, when content is free, it's also easy to take for granted. Most MOOCs have an average completion rate of just 12.6%. You can attribute some of that to tourists who are just signing up to check it out, but there is also very little incentive to see the course through. People start the course, find the information they were looking for, then take off, never to return.

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The Real Value Is in Communal Learning

Creating opportunities for person-to-person learning is the most effective way to make online courses more worthwhile.

Collaborative learning, where students learn with and from one another, has huge benefits for individual learners. Students retain more, develop a deeper understanding of complex subjects, and are more psychologically invested in completing their course work when they learn in a collaborative environment.

It's difficult to learn complicated concepts simply by listening to a lecture. It helps to ask questions, discuss concerns, and hear the concept explained in multiple ways from different people. In the book The Skillful Teacher, Stephen Brookfield wrote that small peer groups act as a filter through which the students have their assumptions checked and perspectives reconsidered. "It seems that students experience critical thinking primarily as a social learning process," he says. "They say they don't get very far on their own in trying to uncover and check their assumptions."

In a university setting, this learning happens not just in class but also between lectures, during study groups, and even in the cafeteria. None of that is happening in an online course, where students may not speak to one another without prompting.

So how do we encourage student interactions remotely?

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What Community Looks Like in Online Learning

In an online learning environment creating community has to be more purposeful and structured to make up for the lack of organic collaborative opportunities. Here are some examples of how it can look like when you encourage community among students online:

It looks like Teams or Group Projects

When students have the opportunity to work together towards a common goal, they have a powerful incentive to stay engaged with the material: social motivation. Studies have shown that social presence and collaboration can boost the effectiveness of online learning far more than relying on a student's intrinsic motivation.

It Looks Like Incentives and Friendly Competition

One easy way to amplify this commonality is through competition. Divide students into small groups and have them compete against each other to earn points by completing assignments. Or award a prize for the best group project. Even a simple incentive can spur students to help one another succeed.

It's important to note though that these competitions should not be set up so that doing worse than a peer will hurt your final results - that leads to poor collaboration and community. Instead, award prices for exceptional work, and no penalties.

It looks like online forums for discussion

A simple way to encourage students to interact more meaningfully with the materials is by giving students a platform to discuss course materials, ask questions, and chat about unrelated subjects. Free tools like Slack, our discussion activity, or even closed Facebook Groups, make it more simple than ever to set up and moderate discussions.

It's not enough to simply provide a forum and hope a fruitful discussion happens; it's the responsibility of the instructor to set clear expectations for use, provide thoughtful discussion prompts, and moderate comments to prevent abuse.

It Looks like Peer review

Collaborative assessment, where students trade and review each other's work, allows students to learn in multiple ways: by creating content, receiving feedback on that content, and giving feedback on other students' content. It can even be used in very large classes to make sure that students get individualized feedback.

It looks like Alumni Networks

Alumni networks are a valuable part of the university experience that can be harnessed online to play off people's group loyalties. Course graduates could be added to a group Slack channel, where they can interact with other alumni and ask for help or professional connections. An online alumni network benefits students long after the course has been completed.

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Online Courses Must Evolve to Stay Competitive

Nobody has ever said their favorite part of university was sitting in their room alone, doing homework. Yet somehow we have managed to distill a great deal of online learning to basically that: thousands of people sitting at home alone, staring at a screen.

By fostering online communities, we can help bring back all of the good stuff - deep discussions, friendships, and community-based learning - that make in-person education so valuable. Only then can online learning truly compete with a six-figure education.

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Content Doesn't Matter, Community Does · Eduflow blog

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Why do people pay to go to Ivy League universities? It's not for the content. Paying six figures to go to Harvard doesn't give you access to any teaching materials that you couldn't find yourself right now for cheap or for free.

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https://hrblog.spotify.com/2022/04/20/the-great-retention-culture-community-experience/?utm_source=Offbeat&utm_campaign=2df6a40a3c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2022_04_24_03_55&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a0168247be-2df6a40a3c-204216178

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With there being lots of movement on the labour market currently, let's talk retention. There's a lot of talk of The Great Resignation, but we'd rather talk about The Great Retention. What is the key factor to having people join and stay with your company? What's most important to retention? We'd dare say it's... culture!

Your leadership team can wish for a certain company culture and it can be cultivated by setting foundational values and having company approaches and policies that govern them. The foundational values can also be role-modelled to exemplify behaviours that help strengthen and shape your culture. But a culture can't really be managed. Culture is the key to attracting and retaining the people that find your values and purpose meaningful and who would like to contribute to and help shape the existing culture - by being a culture add. Therefore, your culture will evolve with every new band member. It's organic.

Although culture can not be managed, it can be cultivated and fertilised with things such as your people-first principles, incentives that support behaviours according to your values, and the Employee Experience. Working with these things will help create an inclusive, innovative, exciting and challenging culture. As Katarina recently explained, to keep your organisation's engine running, you need to think about Employee Experience (Ex). Ex is ubiquitous and it needs to be taken into account in everything you do. Your culture is the ultimate litmus test on whether you are doing Ex right.

The Biggest Predictor of Attrition

A toxic company culture is one of the biggest predictors of high attrition. I bet many of us would agree that this is one of the most relevant factors that makes us question our whereabouts in our career journeys. In recent research we can see that a toxic company culture overrides compensation concerns as a reason to leave. It's actually 10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover!

Culture does not have to be toxic for people to leave. If your culture is only on the "meh" side of the scale, it can be enough to prompt your employees to look for other opportunities. What we mean is a culture that is simply not very exciting. For example, it can be an environment where your band members are not learning anything new, or where your purpose is bland or unclear, or where you are not building any fun memories.

In the current times, having a culture that's exciting is certainly more of a challenge. Society has been living with uncertainty and fear for so long, that we have become numbed. We are living in the 'boring apocalypse', and our emotional responses have become subdued.

At Spotify, we are focusing on continuing to build a great culture where employees feel that they belong, they feel excitement and engagement in our path forward while at the same time working in a distributed environment. A culture that stands out to our existing band members, one where they know that the company cares about more than their performance, but about how they go about their work, the experience they have, and about their wellbeing. We're taking a holistic view of life and work.

The Biggest Paradox in Culture

The key for us to create this culture is to build a sense of belonging and feeling of connectedness. Enter one of the biggest paradoxes in individual motivation that will affect our company cultures: The paradox of people wanting flexibility and individualization, as well as a stronger need for a sense of belonging and community in this volatile world.

At Spotify we are serving the flexibility of Working From Anywhere, letting our band members choose a flexible schedule and working arrangements that suit them individually. This contributes to both attraction and retention, but it also creates a risk of a weaker community and sense of connectedness at work.

We can no longer rely on those memorable 'together' moments when meeting face-to-face, with coinciding working hours, a shared office, joint fika breaks or any of the opportunities that were previously presented to build relations and create mutual memories at the same time. All these things create a sense of connectedness, and the feeling that you really belong and make a difference. This is the glue that decreases the risk for attrition, so in a new flexible model we need to reinforce and find more and new types of 'moments' that bring people together to maintain a strong glue, and drive The Great Retention.

Community Experience in a Distributed World

So, how do we, and will we, balance the paradox at Spotify? We will continue offering flexibility for our band members in the future, maybe even more than today, which means we'll have to work even harder on the connecting glue! Leading a distributed workforce is challenging us to become experts in how to build community when we don't have the traditional levers to pull anymore.

It's worth mentioning that we have a fantastic Diversity Inclusion & Belonging (DIB) team that works around the globe to ensure all our band members feel that they belong, feel seen, heard and respected, no matter who they are, and which highlights cultural moments and history from all corners of the world. This is the team, and work, most people think of when we say community.

We also have another fabulous team called Community Experience (Cx) who are focused on all things community from a broader perspective and work hand in hand with the DIB team. This is a team dedicated to creating the best experience ever in building positive connections between band members and the company, and with other band members through fun and play! The CommunityX team's ultimate mission is to amplify the Spotify community and create an environment for connections that elevate the employee experience. It's about building community and a sense of belonging for Spotifiers wherever they are - especially in a distributed setting - as we have band members working from pretty much anywhere in the world.

The team are true community builders, in-office, on-, and offline. They are engagement experts and they are "certified celebrators", bringing the fun back into our lives. They run initiatives that differentiate Spotify as a workplace, that add 'sparkle' to the band members' life at Spotify and enable our band members to feel included, excited and happy to be part of the Spotify journey.

Never Underestimate the Power of Fun

And this is where the secret sauce comes into play: we never underestimate the power of fun. We all need to find the fun again, to stop languishing. We need to build what Catherine Price calls True Fun, which is really the combination of playfulness, connection and flow! Having some fun makes everything easier, your stress goes down, your thoughts fly freely, and if you're having fun together with someone else it creates real connection. Having fun brings 'flow' (being fully engaged and focused on something) and is a true antidote to languishing. Fun is energising, it's contagious, and even if it feels that you're not being productive in the moment when you are playing, you are re-charging, building connections and experiencing flow.

Remember that you can't be efficient all the time, to be effective in the long run. If you are constantly trying to optimise for efficiency, the risk is that you lose sight of the 'why' and there's no room for creativity and serendipitous thinking. Those moments of fun, silliness, or play is where we will build more energy, bounce back from failure, feel connected, and re-charge together. Simply put, it's good for your health. And what's more, we know that positive work cultures are more productive. So, if we can create more of the fun and connecting moments, it will build memories that will always bring a smile to their faces, encourage them to stay around for longer as well as keep them healthy.

The Magic Combination

Building community through a combination of expertise in diversity, inclusion & belonging and expertise in fun, celebration and engagement, will be a differentiator for companies going forward. In our industry today there are so many companies with great compensation and benefits packages, with good learning opportunities and exciting growth plans ahead, but if they don't figure out how to bring some fun and belonging into their culture, they won't build a strong culture, people will leave, and innovation will suffer.

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The Great Retention: Culture & Community Experience

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With there being lots of movement on the labour market currently, let's talk retention. There's a lot of talk of The Great Resignation, but we'd rather talk about The Great Retention. What is the key factor to having people join and stay with your company? What's most important to retention?