A value statement isn’t some kind of jargon speak for “what we think matters”. It’s a statement of what your company is, what it stands for, and what everyone can expect from it.

It’s the “soul” of your team.

“Culture is living values.

Values are written words, and your culture is how you actually live [them].” – Jeff Lawson, Articulating Company Values & Living Them Authentically: Jeff Lawson

Whether you need to unite your team around a core set of ideals, show potential recruits what to expect and how to act or resonate with your core audience, these values are an essential part of any coherent company. Without defining them everyone will be working on their own assumptions.

So, how do you create a value statement that’s effective, concise, direct and, most importantly, accurately reflects your company?

To answer that, let’s dive straight in.

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Even tech giants have humble beginnings.

In the halcyon days when Google was making the transition from a bedroom to a rented garage in Menlo Park, it won’t surprise you to learn they didn’t have a tight onboarding process in place.

For years Google ran on a single, sprawling spreadsheet including a ranked list of the company’s top 100 projects. The projects were confusingly graded on a scale between “far out” and “skunkworks”, and the founders handled the process with a ‘who cares’ attitude.

Since that point, everyone knows Google has made leaps not only in the Internet space but also in the workplace. The company is the #3 world’s most valuable brand and the #3 best employer in America. Its made extremely effective tweaks to its hiring process over the years, but what isn’t reported as often is its approach to new employee onboarding — the process of getting a new hire equipped with everything they need to integrate into the company culture, work effectively and succeed.

The wackier aspects of Google’s orientation process are widely known. We’ve heard about the Noogler beanies with motorized propellers, and the Mountain View all-Noogler TGIF meetings where the founders “just come in and make some dad jokes”. The inner workings of the process, however — the parts that make it so notoriously effective — aren’t as obvious.

In this article, I’m going to run through the nuts and bolts of Google’s ‘just in time’ employee onboarding process, and some of the supporting events that happen during.

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Nikos Andriotis. Nikos has two decades of professional experience in education, IT and eLearning. He holds a degree in Informatics and his writing has been featured in dozens of tech industry publications. Currently, he shares tips and insights about online training and other business-related topics for TalentLMS.

Do you think you’re doing a good job with your employee training?

If you do, you’re in the minority; only 38% of organizations think their training is effective, with 62% believing they aren’t doing a good job meeting learners needs.

In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, it is always the employer with the better-trained personnel who gains the upper hand.

Well-trained, highly skilled employees are much more efficient and produce better results. This kind of efficiency and productivity is what gives an employer the much-needed competitive advantage.

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When it comes to hiring staff you’ll go through multiple important stages to vet the candidates and make sure you choose the right one.

For many managers, the interview is the most important step.

The interview allows you to ask questions and interact with the other person; verify their claims, test their knowledge, and start to figure out whether you would be happy working with them in future. This allows you to go beyond simply the information on a CV.

As Ray Dalio, founder and CEO of Bridgewater Associates, phrased it:

Weigh values and abilities more heavily than skills in deciding whom to hire.

Knowing about the human sat in front of you is crucial to a successful hire.

In this article, we’re going to give you a selection of Process Street templates which should help the whole process run smoothly:

• Key tips on how to conduct an interview
• 5 interview processes with questions
• How to connect a job application form to Zapier to automate your hiring
• 5 hiring processes to cover everything else

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It’s impossible to run a successful business without taking the time to track your core business metrics.

If you don’t, then good luck knowing:

• How much pure profit you’re earning
• Where costs can be cut
• Whether you’re selling enough
• How much debt you have
• Whether you’ll be bankrupt next quarter

Having said that, where do you start? There are so many metrics you could be tracking that it’s easy to get stuck tracking and recording everything rather than analyzing and acting on your data.

That’s why I’ve collected 53 core business metrics right here to get you started. Stop wasting time wondering what to track or flicking between 20 different posts going over five stats each – every metric here comes with a brief description and formula or method for easily tracking it.

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No organization wants to keep an incompetent, untrained employee on its payroll.

That’s an obvious fact. However, the benefits of training are much greater than simply avoiding incompetence; trained employees are more productive, loyal, engaged, and profitable.

Those are nice sounding words, but what about the facts and figures?

Take a look:

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Saying “employee feedback” conjures images of awkward conversations with managers and meaningless buzzwords during performance reviews, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Feedback cycles shouldn’t try to force comments out of your team, but instead support them and let them know when and where they can raise any issues they encounter.

Doing this lets you see the flaws in your business and figure out how to take action in order to improve it for everyone involved.

It’s also a great way to get a second opinion on issue that you have lost all context on. Veteran and new employee alike offer vital second opinions and can really help to highlight where your processes are weakest, and that’s not even mentioning other benefits such as helping to make your employees feel valued.

“69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being better recognized” – Lindsay Kolowich, 11 Eye-Opening Statistics on the Importance of Employee Feedback

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One of the key strengths of top companies is the employees inside them.

Who they hire and how they hire them helps determine employee attainment, employee satisfaction, employee accountability, and employee turnover.

Small changes to recruiting processes can have a surprisingly large impact on the day to day life of a company. According to the Glassdoor Economic Research (2015) report, a 10% harder interview process is associated with a 2.6% higher employee satisfaction later on.

Loads of our clients use Process Street for managing their recruitment processes and we know all too well how important it is to get that process right.

That’s why we’re going to explore how 3 top tech giants manage their recruitment and see what gold standard techniques we can pass on to you. We’ll explore:

• The three stage process Google use to make new hires
• How Facebook hire Builders not just regular folk
• What SpaceX do to hire the best of the best

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Effective human resources management prevents company-wide anarchy.

From solving internal disputes, to presenting a united front to customers, to just plain abiding by the law, HR is a vital discipline which is all too often generalized and pushed out of mind.

That’s why today I’ll be going through 12 HR management tips to help you keep your employees engaged and your company running smoothly. From the utter basics such as being open to hearing feedback on techniques like using social media to grow your network, keep reading to learn everything you need to know to avoid being another Michael Scott.

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For your business to survive it will need to evolve. For it to evolve, you need to make changes. Without a change management model, the success of those changes is up to nothing more than hope and dumb luck.

British Airways didn’t successfully overhaul their entire organization by making changes and crossing their fingers – they had a model and strategy to follow.

“Before King began announcing layoffs, he explained his reasons… to prepare them for the upcoming change. Without his transparency, British Airways could have experienced employee backlash and negative press around all the layoffs.” – Laura Troyani, 3 Examples of Organizational Change Done Right

A model which paved the way for them earning $284 million in profit (the highest in its industry) within ten years of the changes.

I’ve already gone over how to form your own change management strategy, so today I’ll break down the change management models you can use to do the same for your business.

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