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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We chat with Zapier CEO Wade Foster, who shares how one of the fastest-growing remote companies in the world onboards their employees, manages Slack, organizes communication, and more.

Employee Onboarding Secrets was the third segment in Process Street‘s Highway 2021 event. Check out our playlist of the full event here.

Here’s the Employee Onboarding Secrets segment with Wade Foster in full:

• The early days of Zapier
• What changed the trajectory of Zapier?
• How does Zapier use Zapier itself?
• How to manage a Slack HQ with 500+ employees
• Successful strategies for going remote
• Zapier’s onboarding process
• Self-serve content vs. structured lessons

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Adam Schweickert at Wetmore Consulting Group uses Process Street to help their clients document, improve, and automate their processes.

Out of Wetmore Consulting Group, we’ve built a company that now focuses solely on identifying, documenting, and then building our clients processes within Process Street. So, that’s how our company came about. That’s what we do. – Adam Schweickert

This article is based on a segment from Process Street‘s Highway 2021 virtual event, where Adam gives us a detailed walkthrough of his onboarding process for new clients.

Client Onboarding 101 with Adam Schweickert of Wetmore Consulting Group was the fifth segment in Process Street’s Highway event.

You can check out our playlist of the full Highway event here, and make sure to sign up for free with Process Street!

Here’s the Client Onboarding 101 segment with Adam Schweickert in full:

• Wetmore Consulting Group’s client onboarding problem
• Supercharge your client onboarding workflows with these Process Street features
• Client onboarding process building tips

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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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Every company needs HR, but not every company needs an HR department.

For those who aren’t looking to set up the traditional HR team, Payroll Processors has the solution: an entire HR department stuffed into a single platform so you can streamline all your payroll and employee management needs in one place.

Much like us here at Process Street, the folks at Payroll Processors believe: let us take care of things so you can focus on your business.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Payroll Processors wanted to focus on its business, it came to us, and so began a beautiful relationship.
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“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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In this post, I’m going to define and explain the benefits of employee onboarding, then give you access to six employee onboarding checklists.

Use them on their own or import into Process Street, so you can track and automate the work in Slack or Microsoft Teams.

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

For too many companies, the recruiting process has become expensive causing lost revenue 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 checklist can do the trick.
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