As FastCompany said, the three-month mark is a common refrain among HR leaders as a point at which a new employee will either feel ingrained in their role and the company culture enough to stay—or they won’t. Even if you’ve already established an onboarding program, given the shift to hybrid work, now is the time to revisit it.

Pipedrive has an impressive global general onboarding journey for all our new employees that set’s them up for success in settling-in and getting off to a great start. We have made our onboarding multileveled with keeping it a seamless experience from general onboarding week to role-specific. For us a global experience, creating connections  and making it equally accessible both in-person or virtually is a default. 

If you are wondering how I am so audacious to use words as “impressive”, “experience” and “journey”, then it comes from us tracking our performance on delivering it.  As I like to say, if you do not measure you do not know. Therefore we established goals for the first week and metrics that we track to understand how well are we delivering on those goals. And as we are hiring all the time (check our openings here), we have a biweekly onboarding program. Meaning we have enough new pipedrivers to join us each month, for us to need to have a biweekly schedule. This means all pipedrivers start on 2 specific Mondays agreed on a global level and get welcomed by a unified experience. 

Pipedrive 101

Our general onboarding is a week called Pipedrive 101. It has the traditional and must have first orientation day where we step by step guide newcomers through setting up their computer, to getting a first glimpses of our culture. The first day is followed by a 4.5 day program that masks a multitude of goals. And all pipedrivers know that onboarding is sacred, as in managers, buddys and new colleagues let the newcomers take fully part of the first onboarding week - no conflicting meetings, no job related tasks, no getting lost in their tasks. This is a week that newcomers can experience the culture, the people, find their footing in a new environment and not feel that they have just been pulled into the daily aspect of their role. It is like traveling to a new country and before anything else you sign yourself up for a free tour to get guided and supported in understanding the high level of your new surroundings. 

The fun part is that majority of new Pipedrivers go through the same Pipedrive 101 program which is a shared memory and connector. From there each newcomers will go to their own department for role-specific onboarding. In some departments it could be a month long guided program, in others it might be on the job learning: we trust our people to craft and design the most meaningful and impactful onboarding experience for their new colleagues. 

Metrics

Next to ensuring our newcomers feel well welcomed and introduced to the organization and company, the Pipedrive 101 program has set 4 main goals that are delivered over the first week by layered learning experiences. In short, all newcomers will get to explore Pipedrive, the tool, independently during hands-on learning, have discussions with their Pipedrive colleagues during trainer-led sessions, meet a small sample of other teams during guest presentations, and connect with fellow newcomers on solving group assignments.

At the end of your week, they'll have a fun individual learning project to complete. The project gives them an opportunity to solve common real-life cases about Pipedrive from our customers' point of view, so we really get to wrap together all the knowledge of for why and who are we coming to work. 

Meaning we do not hire only sales or marketing experts, nor do people have to know before hand what Pipedrive as a tool actually does. With the first general onboarding week we will fill the gaps. The 4 goals we track with a newcomers survey where people evaluate how well did the program achieve:

In addition we track our 1st week's eNPS: the general one, per department, per location. The newcomers of 2022 have so far rated the experience as 82 which means we can describe the experience as excellent. 

Additional elements

I might sound now like TopShop, but wait, there is more! Starting a new job and joining a new organization is a big life change. To make sure you feel right from the start that you made the right decision, we have crafted more additional elements to the onboarding process. Let’s take a look at a few examples. 

Awesome parts of the onboarding experience is for example 

• the newcomers getting their own buddy for cultural and team settle-in. That is a more experienced colleagues who helps to make connections, with who to reflect on questions, someone to be your anchor in new uncharted waters. For example here you can read what Mykhailo described about buddy system in our engineering department.

• In addition, we have our traditional Boot- or Webcamp that brings together last few months newcomers into a shared adventure week - where they get to be surprised by team events and get to learn more about different parts of the organization.

• To help speed-up cross organization connections we have set up Pipedrive Donut. It matches all participants with a match for a in-person or virtual get-together and helps to form new global connections with fellow pipedrivers.

• And of course everyone has their own People Partner - to support you in all matters of People & Culture, to have regular check-ins with you to map the progress on your settle-in, to understand how are you really doing. 

That was a quick high-level overview of how all our newcomers in 10 offices start their Pipedrive journey: connected globally and guided with first understanding fully what is the company about.