Strategic onboarding

"From the bottom of 280.000 hearts - we are thrilled to have you with us! The hive welcomes you! Congrats on making it into the best company ever! Together, we will change the world! You will grow, you will lead, you will experience what it's like to transcend borders of all kind, most of all the one of your own grey matter - here, Google helps us fuse our brains into something bigger, unlike anything you have ever seen before! You will collaborate past shame of asking, you will teach, you will learn. We will do anything to make your first days easier so you can join us where the future has already arrived. The world can't wait for you to get up and running. So let's get started on basic sharing principles..."

Or so it went, didn't it?

Google Workspace brings benefits to the entire organization - and the entire organization is responsible for keeping it up and running. Let's look at how HR can make or break adoption, why world-class culture starts here and why it is important to be involved at what HR is telling new joiners.

Finally! What took you so long?

This is (in my very biased mind) why you do what you do, which I cannot repeat often enough. Your huge, ongoing investment should start paying off at the recruiting event and permeate onboarding. Onboarding should celebrate the great things to come, because it sets the tone for years to come.

So let's talk about onboarding, from a Google Workspace perspective. Past getting an account:

Answering questions
Telling people where to get help
Telling people what you particularly like about working this way, and how and why it's different (because it is)
Telling people what to look forward to (the negatives they'll figure out soon enough).

So... Did you experience it this way, or is there a chance for you to get involved and make it better?

1. Don't assume people know Google Workspace

The single biggest mistake I see companies make is NOT ONBOARDING AT ALL. Because everybody has a Google account, so everybody knows Gmail and Drive and stuff, right?

Wrong.

First, private Google usage is completely different than professional Google usage - you know this. You probably have not shared documents or used Sheets with anybody past your significant other before, even though you were born with a Gmail account.

Perhaps this is why they changed the name. People don't use Google Workspace at home, they use Google.

Second, your company does not use Google ~~as intended~~ like other companies. You have restrictions. You have a complicated organizational structure where you can do some things, but not others. You have culture and etiquette. You have business rules. You have politics (and Google may still be political in some quarters, unfortunately).

Summing it up, your company has things those people should not miss out on. So no, people don't know Google, and by not properly onboarding you are undermining your previous investments and your ongoing efforts. Worst, you are making it difficult for new people when they need it the most.

Onboarding is a shared responsibility

So perhaps IT would need to sit in one or two sessions and see what (if anything) is really being said about Google Workspace.

Perhaps HR should ask IT what should be said, because the material dates back from when it was still called "Google Apps" and looked like somebody had cried blue water colors.

Perhaps both should sit together and think what a great onboarding experience should look like? And beta-test it with actual users?

Taking onboarding seriously: turnover

In case that was not drastic enough: each year, you shed a certain percentage of your employees. Look up the number for your industry if it is secret in your company. It will likely be in the double digits.

Out go XX% of trained people (perhaps not always the most well trained, some may be leaving precisely for that reason...), to be replaced by potential greenhorns.

Or worse, by untrained leaders who take their team down the wrong path.

20% turnover means danger of falling back.

It also means a chance to do better every day.

2. Don't assume you know who needs training

Industry veterans may need more training than anybody else, because they may be coming from a world where executive assistants did everything for them. Industry veterans may be running rings around everybody else when they come from Google Workspace-using companies. Industry veterans may need the most training when they don't and come loaded with decades of bad habits and would lead a team right back down the path to attaching Office files and audio conferences.

Freshmen may need less training because they used Google Workspace in business school. Or they may need more because they have never used business software at all - the point is, you don't know. What you do know is that everybody needs to hear about etiquette, about the fact that Google Workspace is your default and the guardrails you observe. Anything else you learn in onboarding may be valuable for follow-up training.

3. Certify.

One can dream, right?

In an ideal world, your (multi-day) onboarding experience would finish with a test and a certification - better yet, one that test takers can put on their resumé and take on with them. Also, something that highlights if more training is needed and something that reflects what is unique about our environments.

That certification does not exist.

But you can create it! Just as you create compliance trainings, which are just as important (Google Workspace trainings are compliance trainings). They can be as simple as Google Forms.

Something like this!

HR is busy. IT is busy. But here is an opportunity for you to make it better. You ARE in a position to ask questions. If you're a leader, you absolutely don't have to accept that your new hires don't know what a Shared Drive is. If you're not a leader, you can volunteer to help HR with onboarding, or help your department with onboarding (a post-onboarding? a buddy system?). Help is never rejected and everybody will grow. Your company needs you as underground change agent, more than ever. Thank you for reading!

#strategyPublished 2020-01-23 by Holger Matthies.Republished 2021-02-09 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2020-01-23 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Max Richter - On the Nature of daylight on repeat

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