“Employees in a well-structured onboarding program are 69% more likely to remain at the company after 3 years.” – Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), 2010 Employee Benefits

1 out of 25 employees leave their new job due to substandard onboarding experiences.

In contrast, a good employee onboarding program can boost employee retention by 69% after 3 years.

Process Street is dedicated to helping our users improve their business operations, and employee onboarding is a prime focus area. On this, we’re surprised to learn that some of our customers have been using Excel for employee onboarding.

According to Harvard Business Review, companies – on average – lose 23% of their new hires after one year. A more thoughtful approach to employee onboarding can dramatically improve this statistic for your organization; and for that, we say, get off Excel.

“…a lot of B2B productivity products are competing with Excel sheets and other products that are totally not built for the specific problem they solve.” – Bram Kanstein, Tech Out Loud, The Product Before the Business by Bram Kanstein

In this Process Street article, you’ll learn why Excel sucks for employee onboarding, and why workflow management solutions offer better onboarding solutions.

Click on the relevant subheader to jump to your section of choice, alternatively scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Scenario: Onboarding using Excel
• 8 reasons why you need to ditch Excel as your employee onboarding software
• Overcoming Excel onboarding limitations with a workflow management solution

Let’s jump to it!
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Mike Nemeroff is the co-founder and CEO of RushOrderTees. An entrepreneur from an early age, Mike and his siblings started a small screen printing business in their garage as teens and RushOrderTees was born. Under Mike’s leadership, the business has grown into the $75 million dollar ecommerce company that it is today with more than 225 employees.

Everyone wants to have a successful business, but getting there can be a challenge. Your team can make or break a project. For that reason, you need to surround yourself with individuals who can provide an added boost to your production levels.

Who should you choose for your team?

It takes all personality types to successfully manage a team and pull them towards your objectives. You need to find the right people who can work together and motivate others to meet your business needs.

The best types of team members give your business the right momentum and direction while providing open communication. Running a business can be difficult, but finding the most qualified people to fill those vital roles is even more complicated. You need to choose individuals who are willing to support, guide, and even challenge your ideas.

This Process Street post will walk through the four best personalities that can help run a successful organization:

• Workplace personality #1: The Leader
• Workplace personality #2: The Task Manager
• Workplace personality #3: The Abstract Thinker
• Workplace personality #4: The Champion

Let’s dive in!
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This is a guest post by Andriy Zapisotskyi. Andriy is a Growth Manager at Mailtrap. He has over 5 years of experience in the field of marketing & loves to network with new people.

Jeff Gardner (Director of Customer Support & Success at Intercom in the early days) on customer communications:

“It’s got to be easy. Don’t make customers jump through hoops to use your product.

It’s got to be effective. Know everything about your product, including its limitations.

It’s got to be authentic. Make sure everyone’s aligned on your fundamental cultural values.”

As a Customer Success Manager, you represent the customer’s interest and your goal is to help them get value from your product. In many ways, they are the link between the user and the company, and that link grows stronger the more acquainted with the product the customer becomes.

CSMs are kind of like a combination of product manager and technical support; one of their chief duties is leading the Customer Success team in handling all communication from the customer about the product, be it questions about service, onboarding, or resolving technical difficulties.

It goes without saying that communication is important. The tone, content, and delivery of any kind of messaging should be refined and optimized to deliver the best possible customer experience. You should consider how to tailor different messages for different purposes, mediums, and customer profiles. A one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to get you very far, and a keen understanding of etiquette around customer success communications is essential.

This means the CSM needs to be able to take into account the nuances of written communication with individual customers and be able to adjust their approach to each specific situation.

In this Process Street post, I’ll detail the core principles vital for a CSM to lead their team to successful communications with all customers.

• CSM communications etiquette: Ground rules
• CSM communications etiquette: Provide a solution
• CSM communications etiquette: Closing a query

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We’re all using multiple apps for work, and we know how quickly this work becomes inconsistent and messy. You don’t always know what’s been done or what to do next.

For years, Process Street customers have been automating work and showing us first-hand the value of integrating Process Street with other tools to create powerful workflows like updating Salesforce opportunities, filing Jira tickets, and sending DocuSign contracts.

Today, we’re excited to announce Automations, a new set of direct integrations helping you create and run custom processes using built-in functionality from some of the world’s most popular software tools.

Anyone who’s ever updated an opportunity in Salesforce or created an issue in Jira knows the power of those applications. It can feel like a world of endless possibilities right at your fingertips. It’s what we love about these tools, and why teams like us use them every day.

But sometimes, instead of endless possibilities, you need a specific set of tasks done quickly and correctly. You need a process. That’s what we’ve helped thousands of companies with, and that’s why we’re so excited to announce our newest feature, Automations.

Automations brings your critical apps together to drive your team’s most important processes. Powering Automations is a new set of native integrations with:

• Salesforce
• Jira
• Slack
• DocuSign
• Google Sheets
• Plus powerful new functionality within Process Street itself

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Brad Smith is the CEO at Wordable and the founder of Codeless (a content production agency). His content has been highlighted by The New York Times, Business Insider, The Next Web, and thousands more.

So, you’re ready to scale your marketing efforts, eh?

You’re not the only one: 70% of marketers are taking content marketing seriously — and sooner or later, they start scaling up, increasing competition in the process.

With all the marketing noise out there, it can be difficult to position yourself as an industry leader. But don’t worry, we’re here to help.

In this Process Street post, we’ll cover:

• How to prepare a scalable content marketing system
• 9 Actionable steps to effectively scale

Let’s jump right in!
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Guest post by Ovi Negrean, CEO and co-founder of SocialBee. He and his team help startups, small businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs reach their marketing goals through customer-informed articles and practical social media content. You can also find Ovi on X.

Every marketing team has a list of ideas it wants to try. A useful content marketing strategy turns that list into shared goals, clear ownership, a realistic publishing rhythm, and enough room to learn from the results. That structure is what gets a team excited: people can see why the work matters, where their contribution fits, and what happens next.

“In the midst of every crisis lies great opportunity.” – A. Einstein

I’ll refrain from attempting to mask something as devastating as the coronavirus with a silver lining. Nonetheless, there’s no denying that while the world goes bust there is one industry that continues to boom: Tech.

Since the first half of 2020, health and fitness app downloads have soared, growing by a whopping 46% worldwide.

What has been the pandemic’s influence on the femtech and wellness app industries? In this Process Street post, I feature an interview with Hélène Guillaume, founder of a femtech platform (Wild.AI), and Reeva Misra, the founder of a wellness app (Walking on Earth).

Wild.AI is a fitness platform that empowers female athletes by providing AI-powered personal trainers that adapt to the user’s needs. Walking on Earth is a wellness app and platform that offers every user access to personalized coaches and treatment plans.

• How it all comes together: The pandemic, wellness apps, & femtech
• Introducing the founders: Reeva Misra & Hélène Guillaume
• Developing a wellness app
• Developing a femtech platform
• Attracting investor attention as a wellness app
• Attracting investor attention as a femtech platform
• Finding product-market fit during a pandemic

Let’s get started.
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Jaron Soh is Co-founder and COO at Traktion, the platform that makes hiring for growth simpler, agile, and more profitable for businesses.

According to a recent survey by The Digital Project Manager, the two biggest project management challenges of 2020 can be neatly summarised as people problems and project problems.

If that sounds a little vague, let’s get specific. 27% of those surveyed experienced challenges with their project stakeholders (i.e. people), while 24% encountered challenges with budgets and deadlines (you guessed it, project).

Thinking about this within the context of a marketing project, it’s easy to get distracted by those project-related concerns, wondering: “How do I deliver this on time and on budget?”

Well, here’s the thing… In my experience, you’re asking yourself the wrong question.

When it comes to marketing, don’t focus solely on the “how”; make sure you look at the “who”, too.

There’s a people problem to overcome. Ask who you should use to help deliver your marketing project on time and on budget; a solo marketing consultant, or a full-blown marketing agency? To answer that, you need to understand how they differ from one another, and the scenarios in which to use them.

In this Process Street post, we help you do just that. Here we explore:

• Agency vs. consultant: Spot the difference (pros & cons)
• Marketing agency vs. marketing consultant: When to use one or the other?
• Which is better for project managers?

Ready? Let’s dive in.
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“Our human capital stock is ready to go back to work.” – Kevin Hassett

In May 2020, White House advisor Kevin Hassett drew public ire by referring to the American workforce as “human capital stock.” US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asserted the term was not only outdated but inherently racist.

This raised a very important question for employers: How do you measure the output of your employees without treating them like cattle?

In addition to questions about the potential for dehumanizing employees, contemporary theorists question whether or not human capital theory – a product of the mid-20th century manufacturing economy – still has a place in our 21st-century knowledge economy.

In a knowledge economy, an employee’s output is intellectual rather than physical. Human capital theory originated during what is considered a manufacturing economy. As a result, it’s optimized for measuring physical output.

At a clothespin factory, a worker’s productivity is judged by how many pins they produce a day. There’s an established length of time it should take to make a faultless pin. That pin is an example of physical output. At the end of the day, you can count that worker’s pins and have a fairly good idea of their productivity.

A knowledge worker, however, doesn’t produce physical output; a knowledge worker produces intellectual output. I’ll go into this in more detail further on, but – in terms of human capital theory – the question is: how do you know how many “pins” a knowledge worker makes per day?

Obviously, knowledge workers are still given a wage, generally factored according to their value to the company (experience, education, etc.); in other words, using the principles of human capital theory.

But is this an accurate reflection of that employee’s worth? Are knowledge workers being undervalued because their productivity isn’t linked to the number of hours they work? Should intellectual and physical output still be measured on the same scale? Can they be weighed by the same scale?

More to the point, if human capital theory has outlived its usefulness, what language should we be using to describe an employee’s value? Is it fair to consider employees part of a company’s assets?

In this Process Street post, I aim to investigate these questions and explore ways in which the 21st-century employer can assess employees in terms of company value without objectifying the individual contributions.

• “Our people are our greatest asset.”
• The problem of a knowledge-based economy
• 6 factors to improve knowledge worker productivity

Let’s delve deeper.
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