About 5 — Patreeya — Chief of Staff & Operations Generalist

Building employee onboarding.

The tech startup faced a fragmented onboarding process with manual tasks that made it difficult to scale & took up valuable manager time.

Painpoints

Each team had a different version of employee onboarding, leading to an inconsistent experience and gaps in knowledge. Onboarding fell primarily to the manager, taking up valuable time & making it difficult to replicate.
Few people had joined the team in the last few quarters, and they were ramping up to double in size. The onboarding process needed to be able to accommodate the growth without sacrificing the closeknit feel of the company.
Budget constraints necessitated a solution that balanced cost with functionality.

Significantly reduced workload for managers by introducing a standardized onboarding process across the company with customizability.
The new process allowed the company to onboard new hires quickly, going from a 3-week prep period to a 3-day turnaround.
New hires began contributing meaningfully to the company within the first three weeks and reported feeling empowered and welcomed. There was a notable increase in employee retention rates to 93% YoY.

Met with all managers and stakeholders to document current onboarding processes across teams and collect feedback on measures of successful onboarding.
Integrating the needs of company/HR onboarding & role-specific onboarding, I created a standardized process that was clearly documented.
Transformed this process into an Asana template that could be used by managers & HR to collaborate on onboarding with clear timelines & owners for each task.

Integrated Zapier in order to automate onboarding tasks & data collection, thus decreasing the hands on time needed for onboarding.
Progress tracking via Asana triggered additional actions that prompted involved parties to complete necessary tasks.
Built into onboarding were 2 touch points for new hires to share feedback at 1 week and 30 days. This allowed managers to quickly adjust course if necessary, and feedback was incorporated into future versions of the onboarding process.

Created opportunities for customizability — for example, managers assigned one “core project” for employees to complete within their first 30 days allowing for an early sense of accomplishment.
While the team was scaling, we also wanted to maintain the closeness & camaraderie that defined the culture. We implemented an interview question during final rounds that allowed us to select a personalized gift for each new hire based on their interests & hobbies. This was a delightful touch that was one of the first things commented on during onboarding feedback sessions.

Tools