Lessons

Lesson Info

The CoCommercial Onboarding Process

Alright let's take a look at how we do it. There we go. So this is back to our fabulous Asana board. (laughing) So one of our projects, that Rosie set up is our CoCo team guide. CoCo is how we affectionately refer to CoCommercial, in shorthand. So it's our CoCo team guide. And also Natasha Vorompiova who's the founder of SystemsRock and Amplify Your Impact. She helped Rosie get this all set up too, so I want to give credit where credit is due to both of them. And then we've evolved it a little bit over time. So this team guide lives in Asana, is a public project that people can access anytime. As well as most of it is copied into their HQ. I showed you that in the previous lesson where we were talking about systems. So this is essentially our employee handbook. You know how you had to, when those retails jobs you did, you signed off on the employee handbook? Yes I get it, the policies, how everything works, what those mission, vision, values are for those companies as well? This is our...

employee handbook, it's just digitized in this fabulous Asana forum. So obviously we're going to start off by talking about who we are and where we're headed. Then that day one and beyond section, there in toward the middle? That's all the the practical stuff. Things like, our day one document, it's linked in that Google Doc there. That's all of the stuff, like where to find, you're going to start off on Gusto. Here is LastPass, all that stuff. There's some redundancy here too. Sometimes redundancy is terrible and sometimes redundancy is awesome when you're looking for information. And you just want to find it instead of thinking like, where is that again? So we've got some redundancy built in here. We've got our policy around passwords. We do use LastPass, I highly recommend it. There are other options as well. It took me a while to get the hang of it. And I don't manage it, Marty manages it for us. But it's a great way to just make sure everybody has what they need. And it's a reminder here too that, protecting our passwords is a really important part of the security of our company and if you want us to continue existing, please respect our passwords. So that's part of the onboarding process. We share with them our team drive, so where other documentation might be on Google Drive. Rosie has, this is actually documentation from Asana, if you are not familiar with Asana and you're just getting started with us, here's where you can go to find out how you can actually use it, and she'll talk through like, this is how we use it, these are the conventions that we have. And just really introduce them to the nitty-gritty, as it says. We give out emails, ooh, I just put my email everywhere. Let's get off of that one. No, (laughing) we make sure everyone knows how to get in touch with people. Important policies that we have. Security obviously, passwords, social media policy, right? If you've got team members, if you've got employees, their social media profiles that they are public, reflect on you as a company as well. And so is it absolutely within your rights to say, don't say racist things online, don't say sexist things online, don't use hate language. You know, just all the things you would not want someone who works for you to do, make sure you're explicitly stating that and going over that with your employee. Same thing with code of conduct and workplace behavior. You now have employees, you now have a workplace, and you want to make sure people are behaving in that workplace, whether it's a virtual workplace, or an in person workplace, in the way that employees are supposed to behave, so that everyone's safe, everyone feels comfortable, and that all of the laws are being followed. Right? You want to protect yourself there. And then we get into more of the culture pieces. So now at the top those CoCommercial core values, why we exist, what we do differently and best, those are our capabilities, our promise and kept promise indicators. This isn't one that we've talked about yet here today, but in terms of onboarding, it's really important to us. Our brand promise is that you can bring CoCommercial your most pressing business question or challenge to our community and our members, and we'll help you move forward on it in the next 30 days. We have a 30 day free trial. We have to make sure people are happy and getting real tangible benefit in that first 30 days or they're not going to pay for their first month. And then we talk about what our kept promise indicators are, our KPIs. And make sure that all of our team is on board with those and making sure that everyone has a role to play in keeping those promises kept. And then we have some other cultural things and work expectations. We aim to deliver 11 star experience. That comes from an episode of the podcast, Masters of Scale, where Reid Hoffman interviews Brian Chesky, the founder of Airbnb, about what it took to actually get Airbnb to take off. One of the things he said was that, we made it our goal to hand craft an 11 star experience. Like four star experiences are good, five star experiences are exceptional, but it takes a six star experience or higher to get people to tell other people about the business. And so he went through literally, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 star experiences, and how he thinks about the intangibles that go beyond the five star experience. And so we want our employees to be thinking about that as well, and we want them to be thinking about that on day one. What does it take to create an 11 star experience? Our work expectations, you can see we've got a, keep it transparent and make it better policy here. So everything is public, everything is transparent, or as much of it that we can make it. So what that means, if someone's working in a particular project or working in a particular system and they see a way to make it better, we want to know about it right? We want to keep them, make them a part of the iteration process. And then we also have a suggestion box. Leave a comment, shoot somebody an email. Your input is really, really valuable to us. We also have a communication policy. And I think this is really important, because I don't know about you, but I don't need anymore emails, right? And obviously sometimes emails happen, (laughs) but we've designed the systems that our business works on so that we can reduce email as much as possible. So we have two main ways that we communicate, Slack, well I guess three. Slack, meetings, Zoom Meetings, and Asana. And we use each of those three things in different ways. Slack is like a chat room, like a message system. If you tag me in a Slack post, it pings my watch, so it better be important. Not in that I don't want you to ask me stupid stuff, but in a, I'm going to respond to you right away. So keep in mind that that message, whether it's to me, whether it's to Shannon, Rosie, Megan, Marty, Kristin, that message is going to interrupt somebody's work. Now there are absolutely scenarios in which we want you to interrupt our work. The other way I like to think about it is, it's the cubicle drop by, right? So if this is something that you would get up from your desk, and go walk over to somebody else's desk for a quick question and feel comfortable interrupting their work, then absolutely tag me on Slack. Do that, do that. But you wouldn't ask a huge, big picture question. You probably wouldn't bring a huge, big idea to a cubicle stop by, right? So that's not what Slack is for, that's what meetings are for. Bring a big idea to a meeting, don't bring it to my Slack because we're not going to fix it there, (laughs) right? Or we're not going to be able to address it there properly. On the other hand, we also think of Slack kind of as the water cooler. So we'll chitchat there, we'll say hey, I gotta run out for a little while, so I won't be on. You know that kind of stuff happens on Slack. We also tend to reach some decisions on Slack. Or we might say, hey can you go do this thing? Or I'm working on this project, would you be able to fill in this particular role in that project? And when that decision or delegation gets made on Slack, which is where it naturally happens throughout the week, our policy is that then immediately gets moved to Asana. Otherwise we lose track of that communication because Slack is not great for keeping, like you can go back and see messages, but it's really hard to find what you're looking for, especially if you have a really communicative team the way we do. And it will get lost in the gifs and all of that good stuff. (laughing) So that's why any kind of delegation, any kind of decision-making, needs to immediately go to Asana. And then any communication about specific tasks or moving a particular project forward, that needs to happen on Asana as well. So I personally think it's really important that you make that clear to your new employees. Because they want to feel comfortable talking with you. They want to feel comfortable asking questions. And you want to feel like you're not being constantly interrupted all the time. So make that communication policy really, really clear. We've got some Slack best practices as well, just because not everyone's used to Slack. Do you guys all know what Slack is? Okay, no. Okay so Slack is sort of the leading chat system for workplaces. So imagine it as a chat room that's specific to your work, to your company. And it's not something that everybody needs. But as soon as we got beyond like two people, I was like, we're going to get Slack because I like chatting. Remember I like hanging out on the internet all day? I grew up old school with the chat, and so Slack makes a lot of sense to me. So yeah, that's what Slack is. Oh and then, ooh, yes password is in there. So it's okay that we're sharing this. We also have a CreativeLive account where we share classes with our team members for their professional development, right? And professional development should be part of what you offer your employees, your team members, as well. And so because we have this amazing relationship with CreativeLive, we've got a CreativeLive account where I've handpicked classes that I would love for my team members to dip in and out of, or maybe they need to actually reference one of my classes for an employee. I'm sorry not an employee, a customer. That's in there as well. So there's all sorts of opportunity to play with this. This is how we do it. We literally take people through, from the top to the bottom, maybe not in the course of one day or one initial meeting, but over the course of that first week we are covering the whole CoCo team guide so that they understand how they're operating and also so they know what to reference back if they don't know how they're supposed to be operating at any given time.