In my early 20s, I worked as a shift manager at a well-known pizza chain. On my second day, every manager above me was fired and I was told to keep things running until the district manager could arrange someone to take over in “a week or two”.

Not only did I absolutely not know what I was doing, my team knew it.

Chaos ensued. Compliance regulations, SOPs, and basic safety measures flew out the window because the team didn’t trust that I knew what I was doing (which is fair: I didn’t).

It ended up taking three months to get a temporary manager to come over from one of the other stores, and by then I was frustrated beyond belief. The moment she walked in the door, I handed over my keys, put in my notice, and refused to discuss the possibility of staying on in any capacity for any longer.

Back then, I was only 20, this was one of my first leadership roles, and I was clueless. Since then, I’ve held other leadership positions, had some attentive mentors, and gotten to develop the leadership skills that they don’t tell you about in the job description. Today, I could walk into that same situation and roll with it, no problem.

Without those opportunities, though, I would still be that clueless kid failing to get his team united, failing to develop their skills, and failing to see his job as anything more than a means to an end.

Not prioritizing employee development is a bad look, people teams. But – as I’ve said many times before – Process Street’s got your back. Check it out:

• Employee development: Back to basics
• In a world without employee development…
• …one HR department decided to change everything
• Employee development plan: Easier than an IKEA bookshelf
• Go forth and upskill

Let’s do this thing!
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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. They’ve made extremely effective tweaks to their hiring process over the years, but what isn’t reported as often is their 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.

• Google’s ‘just in time’ onboarding checklist
• Why Google’s checklist is laser-focused on company culture
• Hosting a series of intense lectures
• Educating about company culture
• Adopt Google’s onboarding process in your own culture

Let’s jump right in!
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You’re an HR department of one (and a bit). You have a PEO (professional employer organization) for support, but basically, it’s just you handling the day-to-day.

The CEO says he needs a new role filled ASAP with a list of qualifications. Filling the role will be a challenge, sure – but it’s not the main problem.

How are you going to get this new hire up-to-speed thoroughly in as short a time as possible when you don’t have any sort of standardized structure for doing that?

Simple: Build one.

Easy for me to say, right? It’s my job to build processes; I do it all the time. And that’s true. At Process Street, we do build processes all the time. Sometimes just for the heck of it. You might even say we’re pretty darn good at it.

This means – that’s right – we’ve already built the process you need. You can thank us later. Meanwhile, check out the rest of the post and exactly how you can optimize your onboarding so everyone has a good experience:

• A cautionary tale of one company’s onboarding woes
• Be the HR they need…
• Employee onboarding: Everything’s impossible until somebody does it
• For once, I’m stuck without a punchline

To the process mobile!
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Despite many managers understanding the importance of employee onboarding, Sapling has found that 88% of companies don’t onboard well.

This is a troubling revelation when you take into account that offering an excellent onboarding experience enhances employee retention by as much as 82%.

Want to ensure you have high employee retention while also maintaining job satisfaction? I’ve got you covered.

In this blog post, I’m going to walk you through exactly why good employee onboarding matters, the magic of automation, and what makes up a good employee onboarding experience. Check it out here:

• Start using our new employee onboarding Workflow now!
• Why does good employee onboarding matter?
• The benefits of automating your employee onboarding checklist
• Elements of a good employee onboarding process
• Start onboarding efficiently today with Process Street!

Let’s dive in!
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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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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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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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“I really must go to the third floor,” Renfield insists over the other employees’ protests. “I’ve been asked to consult with the head of people management about creating an analytics team. They’re expecting me.”

One of the nearby workers grabs Renfield’s lapels and pulls him close. “You don’t understand,” the man says. “We here in the office believe that people management is…” He glances around, nervously, leans closer and whispers, “We believe they’re really… human resources!”

“Oh, that’s just assistants’ gossips,” Renfield says. “Now, really, you must let me through. I have an appointment.”

“Wait!” The office manager pushes through the crowd, waving a form above her head. “If you won’t listen, then take this W-2. It’ll protect you.” She thrusts the form into Renfield’s hand and adds, “It’s riddled with mistakes.”

The third floor is dimly lit, offices still only partially constructed, furniture still draped in plastic. No signs indicate where he should go and a sense of abandonment clings to the scent of still-wet paint. “Hello?” he calls.

A figure appears, the light flickering around them. “I bid you welcome,” they say, and Renfield notices the tappity-tap-tap of many fingers rushing over keyboards. “Listen to them, the collectors of data. What music they make! Come along,” the People Team leader instructs, gliding down the hallway toward a single shaft of light Renfield can swear wasn’t there a moment ago. “Data is the life, Mr. Renfield.”

Wait. Why are you talking about vampires again, Leks?

There is a reason, and I assure you it’s not merely a way to shamelessly shoehorn my side interests into work-related topics. (Mostly.)

For contemporary businesses, data really is the lifeblood of your company. It’s what keeps everything moving from making sure there are paper clips in the supply cabinet to getting your product into the hands of the right user. Without accurate, up-to-date data, your organization isn’t even in the running to be a successful company.

While gathering quality consumer data is essential for the contemporary organization, data analytics has another equally important role to play: people management.

There are four main categories you need to think about for an effective analytics framework: Enablers, Deliverables, Stakeholder Management, and Governance.

In this Process Street post, I’ll explain what they are, how to use them, and how to not be creepy about it. Before you know it, you’ll wonder how you ever made HR decisions before people analytics came along.

• Will you be an HR hero or an HR hooligan?
• Is it time for you to form a people analytics team?
• Isson & Harriot’s 7 Pillars of People Analytics Success
• The 4 ingredient categories of the People Analytics Effectiveness Wheel
• Power tools for your people analytics team
• A word of caution on people analytics procedures

Let’s analyze some data!
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