The early days of a startup are crazy.

You have a small group of brilliant and adventurous people taking on tasks they’ve probably never done. Tight budgets leave you doing things like building desks out of doors because they’re cheaper. Your whole focus is solely directed at the goal of getting your product out there in front of customers, who probably don’t even realize how much they need your product yet.

Fast forward a couple of years and those brilliant and adventurous people now have job titles and (more or less) set job descriptions. Your engineers are spending most of their time finessing the UI and developing new features rather than building fundamental structures and foundations. You have a solid customer base that’s avid about your product – and just keeps growing.

Except – as brilliant as they are – that small group of people no longer has enough hands to do everything that needs to be done.

It’s time to scale your startup – but you need to do it fast, accurately, and strategically. So where do you start?

To find out, I sat down with Process Street‘s very own head of talent, Rosy Bellorini, to get an inside view on how to get the talent you need to scale your startup.

• So you’re ready to scale your startup…
• The first rule of Startup Club
• The Process Street acquisition process

Let’s dig in!
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Instead of an alphabetic writing system, the Incan Empire used a series of knotted and colored strings called quipu.

Quipu are still used in South America today, primarily by herders recording livestock numbers, but experts still only have theories about how the actual Incans used their quipu way back. Some believe quipu were simple memory aids, while others point to purely numerical record-keeping. The latest trend is the theory that quipu were on their way to becoming viable alternatives to written language.

Looking at that image, I know what you’re thinking: How could a series of knots ever represent a narrative about anything?

To be fair, though, the ancient world had a lot of weird record-keeping methods. You’ve probably encountered the Celts’ Ogham alphabet, Viking runes, and the Egyptians’ hieroglyphs – because scholars have been able to figure out what those symbols mean – but there are still many – like the quipu – we don’t quite understand.

For the most part (we think), these cultures followed a predominantly oral tradition, which is why we don’t have any documents explaining their languages. Even the Romans – who loved to write things down – left us a language (Latin) we don’t actually know how to pronounce. All because no one thought about documenting their systems in a universally understandable way that would stand the test of time.

Now, hopefully, your internal onboarding processes aren’t at risk due to your CEO’s sibling overthrowing their rule or violent colonization by an invading force, but if your organization’s employee onboarding isn’t a documented process anyone could use, it’s about as useful to your company as an Incan quipu is to a 21st-century New Yorker.

HR has gone through so many changes in the past few years that it’s not even called HR anymore. The same old systems that have worked just fine up to now just aren’t going to cut it anymore. People managers need dynamic, interactive processes that are flexible enough to meet the ever-changing needs of both their future new hires and their current workforce.

In this Process Street post, I’m going to show you how to easily level up your employee onboarding so it doesn’t become yet another antiquated system no one remembers how to use.

• Old-school employee onboarding mistakes
• Welcome to the HR People Management revolution
• Next-generation employee onboarding automation

Let’s get started!
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Thomas Forstner is the Head of People & Talent at Juro – a contract management platform on a mission to help the world agree more – where he is building a human-centric, scalable People & Talent function from the ground up.

There are ton of metrics you could measure as a People and Talent lead at a fast-growth company. But tracking them all simply isn’t valuable. Instead, you should be economical and focus on a few metrics that can tell you the most about your function, keeping the rest in the background until you need to delve a bit deeper.

So which metrics do you choose to focus on, and which do you put on the backburner?

It’s a hard choice, there’s no doubt about that. However, some employee metrics are more valuable than others in terms of what they tell you and how important that insight is to your broader business strategy.

Ultimately, you want to grow your team consistently with the best talent, facilitate their development and ensure they’re fulfilled and engaged in their role at your company.

This Process Street post will explore the ten best metrics to track in 2022, including:

• Top metrics for employee retention & acquisition
• Performance metrics: Essential data for employee development
• Employee metrics to improve wellbeing & satisfaction

It’s time to track the data that matters!
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In this post, I’m going to define and explain the benefits of employee onboarding, then give you access to six employee onboarding checklists that you can use on their own or easily import into employee onboarding software like Process Street.

Why checklists? Well, checklists are the most popular way to onboard new employees, and that’s for a good reason.

Checklists help you to follow a process, make sure you don’t neglect anything important and stay compliant. Instead of making you write your own, you can use one of the 6 we’ve prepared for you as a basis, and either take it as it is or modify it for your business.

Reported by Dr. John Sullivan, recruiting advisor and professor of human relations, the statistics show that:

• 50 percent of new hires are fired or quit during their first six months
• 40 percent of new CEOs fail in their first 18 months
• Up to 60 percent of new management employees fail during their first 18 months

To many companies, the recruiting process has become expensive in terms of lost revenue, expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring, and damaging to company morale.

Luckily, a new employee onboarding process flow can prevent such mistakes from occurring. If you’re looking to put your best foot forward in making new hires feel welcome, a new employee onboarding process checklist can do the trick.
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With 5+ years in digital marketing, Yulia Mamonova is driving Lemon.io’s growth with her spot-on writing and clear messages. A writer and a researcher at heart, Yuliia knows how to engage with the readership and build a story that’ll stand out. Yuliia has written over 1500+ pieces over the last few years reshaping the world of FinTech, startups, and content marketing with her skills.

If you are reading this article, you may have already considered outsourcing some of your work to a freelance professional or perhaps even had some experience hiring a freelancer for your project. Or you may have been on the other side of the fence and taken up gig jobs yourself.

Anyway, the post-COVID world has shown us that we need to reevaluate our approach to ‘normal’ work and that freelance workers or independent contractors have a lot to offer to modern businesses facing a lot of budget constraints in these interesting times.

By hiring skilled freelancers, companies can secure themselves the expertise that would otherwise be hard to afford. They can be more responsive to the ever-evolving customers’ demands and still save money by cutting down on benefits.

However, to bring these perks to life, one must choose a real hero of the business’ story, someone who will understand what your team is trying to achieve and consistently contribute to the company’s goals.

In this Process Street post, we’ll be covering:

• Why do I need an interview anyway?
• 12 interview questions to ask a freelance developer

Let’s get right into it!
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I play video games at work.

It’s the remote manager’s nightmare: A wayward employee who does whatever they want because they lack the strict supervision of the office to keep them in line. Critics of remote work would seize on this very scenario as proof that remote workers are merely lazy and entitled.

Should employees’ web activity be tracked to make sure they’re putting in a solid eight hours of work time?

For those remote workers who don’t have designated space or equipment that is “work use only,” why should they agree to be surveilled in their homes and on their personal devices?

How do you guarantee that both your clients and your employees can feel secure that what is meant to be private will not be made public?

Most importantly, if the deliverables are delivered when they should be, does it matter how they got there?

In this Process Street post, I’m going to (attempt) to provide answers to some of those questions, discuss the issues employers need to consider before monitoring employees, and look at some “soft surveillance” alternatives to hard data collection.

• The case for workplace monitoring
• In defense of employee autonomy
• Creating a sustainable balance between monitoring & autonomy

Read on!
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“Where there is judgment, there is noise – and more of it than you think.” – Kahneman, et al Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

The city I live in is home to a very old, very beautiful, and very famous cathedral. It’s been a hotspot for tourists since the days of Chaucer (of course they weren’t called tourists then) and still plays an integral role in the community.

No matter where you are in the city, you can see that distinctive spire above everything. If you managed to get turned out (not as difficult as you might think with many small, medieval streets), that spire will lead you straight back to the center of town. It’s pervasive and omnipresent in such a way that – ultimately – leads to it being utterly ignored.

The main thing you need to know about this cathedral, though, is that it has bells. Loud bells, and many of them. And these bells toll. A lot. Like a lot. Not that briefly pleasant trill of bells you might get on the hour or quarter-hour, either. Some days, I’d swear the bells never stop ringing at all.

The thing is, much like the spire, I never paid much attention to the bells – until they stopped. For the year+ of varying levels of lockdown during the pandemic, the bells remained silent. Lockdown ended and things started reopening, including the cathedral and the cacophonic celebration of every pigeon coo by those accursed bells.

Yeah, it’s become a bit of a thing.

This, dear reader, is an example of noise – both literally and figuratively. The cathedral has always been there – unobtrusive, in the background, subtly influencing my actions and habits without any conscious awareness on my part. It shapes the way I move through the city, my awareness of time, my mood, my memories; but, before lockdown, if anyone asked me if it had any impact on my life, I probably would’ve shrugged and answered, “Not really.”

Noise is everywhere, and it affects every decision we make – especially because we aren’t even aware of it. We all know to check our biases when it comes to important decisions, but how often do you check your noise?

At Process Street, we take good decision hygiene very seriously, so this post will examine the idea of noise presented by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein in their book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, and use those ideas in our very own Noise Audit Workflow.

Feel free to skip ahead for the workflow, or stick with me as I discuss the theory of noise:

• What do we mean by “noise”?
• Noise in action: Be quiet! I’m trying to think.
• Reduce noise by focusing on the process
• Check your noise with the Process Street Noise Audit Workflow

Let’s make some noise!
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Teams are like families.

No, I don’t mean in that cheesy, woo-woo “We are family” way we all roll our eyes at.

Yeah. I’m gonna be singing that song all day.

Teams are like families in the very literal sense that you’re thrown together with a bunch of random people you may or may not have anything in common with, may or may not even like, forced to interact on a daily basis, and expected to – somehow – make that all work.

If you’re lucky, you end up with the Bradys; less lucky, you’d be right at home among the Bluths. Or the Bateses.

Most of us – hopefully – probably end up somewhere in between, but team psychological safety is important even if your manager isn’t hiding in the attic after faking his own death.The fact is, though, you can’t force psychological safety; it has to be something you create organically – as a team. Not everyone’s sense of safety will be the same, and more significantly, each person may not be able to explain exactly why or why not they feel safe in a particular group or situation.

But fear not, dear reader: I have a solution. By focusing on your team’s workflows, you can substantially improve their psychological safety and foster an environment of mutual trust and respect.

Coincidentally, perfecting workflows is what we do here at Process Street, so in this post, I’ll explain five ways you can use workflows to improve psychological safety within a hybrid team.

• What is psychological safety?
• The impact of psychological safety on team performance
• How to improve your team’s psychological safety
• Your 2-minute psychological safety check

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Big Data freaks me out.

Chalk it up to being spoonfed George Orwell at an early age or adolescent heroes like Fox Mulder and Neo. Maybe it’s being one of those darn, pesky Millennials always rousing rabble while perpetually straddling the conflicting worlds of analog vs digital.

Regardless: I do not trust institutions, especially institutions that want my information.

On the other hand, I use Google for everything, Alexa lives in every room of my house, and I get really annoyed when Netflix doesn’t remember that I watched something. 10 years ago. On DVD.

We will live within this dichotomy of acceptable spying and unacceptable spying. “Cyberstalking” acquaintances, colleagues, and future partners is considered the norm, as a consumer, it’s fantastic. Who doesn’t love being shown that exact thing you don’t really need the minute you pop ‘round to your friendly internet megastore?

All of those things depend on Big Data. As data collection methods improve, more and more applications for that data are coming into play. In addition to customer profiles, education, healthcare, and finance are all jumping on the Big Data bandwagon.

While traditionally more art than science, HR departments have also become recent converts to the sway of data collection. Applying hard data to soft skills may feel wrong, but people analytics has a vital role to play in measuring the employee experience.

But with additional metrics, new sources, and faster methods of collection popping up every day, what will the future of people analytics look like? More importantly, what role will Big Data play in that evolution?

In this Process Street post, I’m going to look at exactly what Big Data is and the three primary ways it will affect the hows, whys, and whats of people analytics going forward.

• What exactly is “Big Data”?
• The 4 V’s of Big Data
• The future of Big Data and people analytics

To the future!
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Having an operations manual may not be glamorous, but preventing the disasters caused by human error and bad processes can save your business and even (in extreme circumstances) millions of lives.

If you’ve ever seen Dr. Strangelove, you’ll know it’s ridiculous. You’ve got a mad scientist, a cowboy pilot riding a bomb as it falls, and a nuclear holocaust brought about by a series of overblown human (and mechanical) errors.

Yet, despite being criticized as unrealistic, at the time it was entirely possible for human error to cause a Third World War. Hell, human error has already caused the worst nuclear accident to date.

“A perfect storm of 6 human errors — culminating with staff thinking it was ok to turn off the emergency cooling system — caused the Chernobyl disaster, costing an inflation-adjusted $720 billion, 30 deaths and an extreme amount of unsafe radiation.” – Ben Brandall, How Processes Protect Your Business From Crashing and Burning

The truth is, the only way to prevent such errors is to document workflows and processes, and the only way to make sure your employees know what they have to do, how to do it, and have the resources to do it is to create your own operations manual.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• What is an operations manual?
• Why is having an operations manual important?
• What to include in your operations manual
• How to create an operations manual

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