Employee Onboarding Secrets from a 500 Person Remote Team CEO with Zapier Founder, Wade Foster

[Music] all right welcome everyone uh my name is blake bailey here from process 3 customer success and rev-ops and i'm joined here today by our ceo and co-founder vinay patenkar and wade foster ceo and co-founder of zapier welcome wade welcome vinay yeah thanks for having us please yeah of course and to start things off wait as a very heavy user of zapier personally and also as a company uh and as i'm sure many in attendance actually are as well i'd love to hear from you about the early days of zapier uh can you take us back sort of why did you initially decide to start zapier and what was it like in those early days yeah we started zapper almost a decade ago now uh september 2011 so our 10 years is coming up here very shortly i started the company in uh central missouri uh i was working at a mortgage company that specialized in sort of online mortgages and working in their email marketing department so you're if you work in email marketing you're often dealing with different tools and different systems all the time and uh wouldn't it was very common to have to do integration work i didn't really think much of it at the time it just sort of seemed like a hurdle that every person who worked in email had to deal with my co-founder brian and i were doing a lot of freelance work on the side we were playing into jazz and blues quartet together and always sort of dreaming up like things we could build together companies maybe we could start together and i remember one day he messaged me on ichat and he's like you know what we see all these integration needs across these different tools i bet we could build a simple system that makes it easy to trigger events back and forth between a thing you know say something happens over here do something over there and that was kind of the light bulb moment for me was like oh shoot that would just be so great for me in my day job i'm not a very good engineer if i had something like this my life would be a lot easier and so that was sort of the the starting point of the idea we ended up building the first prototype at a hackathon during a weekend and then we just kind of kept working on it it was very much a nights and weekends thing we're in the midwest there's not millions of dollars of funding for people there uh so we had to figure out like how do we make progress on this and we decided hey we need to keep our day jobs to fund this thing and so those early days were you know us we would do the sort of the day job thing and then typically we'd snag like some take out chinese and we'd work from like 6 7 p.m at night to midnight one two sometimes three o'clock just to like keep things moving and you know i remember we did that for probably seven eight months before we were ready to launch the sort of first version of zapier can i just ask uh you mentioned you got your 10 years coming up what are you guys doing for the 10-year celebration you know uh i don't know that we have like a really great plan for it we normally uh would be planning our off-site uh this time around and so we had a 10-1 that we were hoping to do uh but uh hovind uh has interrupted this like it's interrupted many things so we're gonna have to figure out like a virtual version of something to do yeah yeah we had our first company off-site booked for like april last year uh which we never got to do so we still haven't even done one yet so we're kind of waiting for the chance to do our first one oh there's there's such an important thing i think for distributed and remote teams but uh you know such as such as life during pandemic i suppose well definitely and uh so moving forward i'd really like to hear from you what would you consider to be some of the big initiatives projects or processes that really change the trajectory of zapier in your opinion one thing in particular comes to mind for me which is the first version of zapier had single trigger and single action do something this app post something there and that was pretty beloved folks came in they started using the product they loved what they could get out of it but pretty quickly we realized that there was a pretty big opportunity to help folks with more sophisticated workflows um there was limitations when all you could do was one action in terms of the types of things that you could help customers with and you would see this in all types of different businesses where folks would want to do um just chain across different apps or they wouldn't want to take multiple actions in a certain app or be able to uh do logic to route one direction or route a different direction and so in 2016 we launched our first version of multi-steps apps which allowed you to take multiple actions from it and i think that's really what changed what was possible from zapier went from this sort of simple personal productivity tool to full-on automation suite that that really empowered a whole host of different things to be used yeah i remember that update i remember like find an update came out and i was like wow like now i can like don't need the record to go and update something i can just like look at look for it with an email address or something and then find that record and then go and update it it was like wow so so much stuff just unlocked like with that release yeah yeah that's i know that uh just everything that you just mentioned there was huge for us in general and also huge for a lot of our customers as well and speaking of that i'd really be interested to hear generally how zapier actually uses zapier itself so can you give us a general lay of the land and maybe even some specific examples of how your team operates on zapier yeah i think there's a few things that are really common in our usage patterns one we run the company the company communication platform is slack and so we dump a whole bunch of alerts into slack for a ton of different things in fact we have a whole naming convention around this where if you see any channel inside of zapier that starts with feed it's usually a bot that's posting key information based on some sort of logic it could be customer events it could be app alerts it could be registrations for an event that we're having uh it could be customer tickets like you sort of name it like anything that's important to somebody they will set up a feed channel that just dumps information into there to make sure that folks are sort of up to date on what's going on for key events that are happening around the company or with our customers or with the product itself i'd say that's probably one of the most common use cases the second set that i see us using a lot is uh oh and before we move on one of the big things around that is metrics uh so specifically understanding hey when are we going outside of like certain standard deviations of what we expect to see and we really want to get alerts around that kind of stuff because it usually means something unusual is happening either unusually good or unusually bad and we want to know when unusual things happen because it helps us figure out how to repeat them if they were good things or how to stop them if they were bad things and so that kind of alerting for us is really really powerful the second set of use cases that is really common inside of zapier is sort of like hybrid communication and project management so a lot of like routing things into uh you know a sort of database type environment and being able to sort of collect that stuff and then creating query environments for folks to come in and review what's in there over time so think like a user research team is setting up surveys forms uh recording of interviews with customers and they want to log all that stuff in a particular place uh in our case a lot of that times that goes into like an air table database or sometimes it'll be like a coda instance depending on how structured the data is or not structured the data is uh and so being able to route all of that material into a home that folks inside the company can come back and reference later and go hey you know i wonder what features uh we're getting common requests for over the last six months great pop in there and see what the user research team has sort of like uncovered for us so that's another set of use cases probably a third thing that's really common then is around scheduling there's a lot of automation around calendar and uh google calendar and uh alerts into um uh email alerts uh or email uh events out to customers to help coordinate a whole host of different things it might be again user research trying to schedule with customers it could be recruiting team trying to schedule with candidates uh anytime you might see us like doing the sort of same job over and over again there's likely a zap or a system of zaps and uh that is probably the another really common use case for us nice bunch of wealth there can i double click on a couple of those sure [Music] how many people are you at zapier now uh we're a smidge over 500. well so um lots of people you're fully distributed right have been since day one are you restricted within a time zone at all we have folks in 35 37 different countries and so we do have folks spread across pretty much every continent except antarctica so we do have time zone challenges inside of zapier um can we talk about your slack then for a second so you got 500 people fully distributed uh okay you mentioned that you're using zapier to push feeds and and different different forms of data in there standard deviation variance data i'm interested to know how you even do that but what are some other methods you've used like get that get your slack under control like it must be pretty chaotic with 500 people and all sorts of stuff going on there's some other best is you've kind of implemented there so i won't pretend that we've perfected this but i do think we've built some things that help us get make it a little more tenable for a team that's growing just for some context we have thousands of channels so we have more channels than we have people inside the company one of the key things is naming conventions go a long way for wayfinding so you know i mentioned feeds are all prefixed with feeds well we have a whole host of these different naming conventions so for example their location channels um you know start with a city so city san francisco city new york city miami whatever and those end up being like channels where people who live or visiting a particular city will join in those and they form like little local meetups and get togethers and things like that so that's like one naming convention we have uh fun channels so these are off topic channels these are not work related so if you see anything like that you can safely assume no work is going on in here uh just good old like uh fashion camaraderie team building water cooler type talk we have uh team channels and these tend to be channels that are uh specific to a particular team uh and so they you know coordinate most of their discussions inside of that uh we have wg which is work group so if there's like a short-term project that's getting together for a particular thing those will sort of pop up and then shut down uh over time we have uh incidents so like any time there's like any sort of incident we're dealing with these things get auto created and you know they have a um uh an incrementing numeral that goes with them so we can route back to them over time so it's like hey incident 2 30 like let's go review like what happened in real time around um incident 230. so these naming conventions really help for wayfinding for new folks who are joining the company second thing then is slack etiquette so when you join the company we have an etiquette guide on here's how to participate inside of slack at zapier these are things that you could just borrow and like steal ours right away but you could also choose to have different etiquette it's not a right or wrong it's just you know our way of going about it to help sort of tame the the chaos of slack so this includes things like how to use threads how to use emoji how to use uh how do you how do you communicate like what sort of um what is sort of inbounds and off bounds in terms of like how you show up code conduct type material things like that uh so that helps as well too um guidelines around use of public channels versus dms versus private channels so all this sort of stuff helps people who are joining the company get acclimated to what is a quite large slack instance awesome do you have that etiquette guide published uh i think there is a version of it uh on our site somewhere yeah nice take a look yeah we definitely go looking for that um so that actually reminds me of something else there which is the fact that zapier historically and even famously has been remote from the onset which process street does as well but zapier's been around for a little while longer which means that you've had a wealth of experience working with a remote team that a lot of people over the last year so are realistically just discovering for the first time what are some of the big tricks or tips or even strategies that you've implemented over the years that you found to be really successful to help people to go remote sure the first thing that comes to mind is not actually specific to remote it's specific to team building in general which is to treat your company culture in the same way that you treat your product so when you're building a product you ask for user feedback you try and know what your features are what your bugs are uh why people love your product why people might not be a good fit for your product all that sort of stuff if you do the same thing for your culture uh you're gonna create a better and better culture for the types of people that can be successful inside your organization so that means survey your folks interview your folks like talk to them regularly about what's working what's not working decide what the most important bugs of your company are and like how you're gonna fix them over time uh figure out which are the ones that you're you know just not important to you and communicate that out to your employees and say hey i hear you on xyz we're not going to address it because of you know we're usually we're addressing these other things instead we feel like these are more critical so just being really transparent about that helps and as a result i think that really gives you a lot of ideas for how to make the company better and relevant material as well so that's probably the starting spot then for the remote specific advice i think there's probably a couple categories of things that are really important one is uh loneliness is a real challenge in sort of distributed teams like feeling a sense of connection to a bigger mission a bigger purpose a bigger cause so how do you make that connection happen uh i think there's a couple things you can do to really improve this one is spend a lot of time thinking about what your company onboarding process looks like you want to make sure that folks on day one are finding ways to plug into your company in ways that are going to be effective over time some things that have worked for us are onboarding folks and cohorts so every two weeks we start a group of people together and they go through onboarding very intentionally together through a mix of lives like sort of in live learning on zoom and um asynchronous learning via other tools uh and this allows them to sort of forge bonds with each other and these bonds tend to last for the tenure of their time at zapper you see folks sort of giving shout outs to like they're different crew teams they're all they have a crew channel inside of zapper so that's the name and convention for these folks and you know when they're uh presenting at our honey all hands someone might be like shout out crew you know july 2019 or whatever right as a way to just sort of celebrate like each other and these folks can be all across the company they just on board together and you create that sense of community right away the second thing then is finding places for folks to build those connections in like not super working environments so that those fun channels that i talked about are really important for building camaraderie uh we use donut chats so there's a slack bot called donut.ai that will match people up that's a place where you can forge bonds uh offsites are great in non-pandemic times i would definitely encourage folks doing that um then even in like work settings like team meetings and things like that i think it's useful to add non-work discussion items uh it might feel a little like forced at first but you know our exact team does a tuesday ice breaker for a tuesday meeting every week and so we start with a kind of sometimes silly like off-topic channel or off-topic question and it's a way to help people realize that we're still working with other humans because what i found is in remote environments things tend towards the transactional you know it's hey when are you going to have x for me uh what's the status of why uh why or when is this getting done and so it's always about the work work work work work work work and if that's all work is it really starts to feel lonely disconnected you start to feel unimportant and so finding ways to just sort of put the humanity into remote work i find to be really really important so onboarding process camaraderie building and you know treat your culture uh like you treat your product if you do those three things that probably gives you a leg up on most folks i would wager awesome yeah we do we do some of that stuff like i try to encourage that the first five minutes of a 30 minute meeting or the first 10 minutes of an hour meeting are kind of like not work time so just give you a window where it's like yeah this is like a you're you're allowed to like not talk about work for that beginning of that meeting and it does kind of two things one it gives out you that that window to actually just chat about whatever how was your day and and people don't feel pressured to kick off and start the agenda but also what i find is like in remote teams a lot of people are running back-to-back meetings and um when you're running a back-to-back meeting and you're you know you're out of an interview and you're into another meeting or whatever there's no room to go to the bathroom or like you know take a take a moment for yourself so having a little bit of a kind of buffer in each meeting too means it's okay if you drop in five minutes late to that meeting as long as you're within the buffer and we're assuming you're back to back or you're in a bio break or something and the people that are there can kind of just hang out and chat but it takes a bit of that pressure off and gives people that window to hang out i actually want to stay on employee onboarding for a second though because um employee onboarding is one of the top use cases of process street that's like we have salesforce and all sorts of crazy companies with their employee onboarding uh workflows and so ways to optimize that's been a very important process for us internally and it's helped a lot with us in terms of building our remote culture um but uh it's also something a lot of our customers are are focused on and and uh is is one of their their key workflows so can you talk to can you break that down a little bit more you mentioned that there's like um some in-person live training sessions there's some asynchronous sessions what what does the onboarding ramp look like in a bit more detail yeah so we we cram a lot in that first week and there's a set of there's sort of like a few thematic things that we want to spend time on one is getting to know uh the onboarding cohort and people sort of that they need to know inside the company so uh you know the founders do a get to know you for these folks um we have you know various execs lead different sessions on particular topic areas and um we have opportunities for the people joining to get to know each other and like their hr reps and things like that so that just sort of you know these key connection points uh really help them like establish a sense of like okay i know sort of like i have some routing spots to go to when i have questions so that's important then i think there's a few other categories of knowledge that you want to share so there's a lot of context that a new person needs to know in order to be effective inside of a company one i think they need to understand the core strategy of the business what are you trying to achieve here uh broadly no matter what function you serve how can you uh like what is the company trying to do what is our goals as a company and i think if you if people really really know that that helps them make decisions uh over the long haul two uh as an extension of what uh is the strategy of the company it's who are your customers like what are your customers what do they care about like what do they don't care about um really having that also helps them make decisions over long haul i find that that's really useful uh inside of a company too then you have a lot of your like cultural um pillars that people need to understand so this is uh you know if you have like a set of values or leadership principles or things like that you want to help people understand uh what is sort of like the rewarded behavior inside of the company what is the things that aren't rewarded how are you maybe the same or different from other types of companies that they may have worked at in the past uh things that are just going to help them get a leg up in terms of how they show up uh etiquette also kind of i i bake into that as well too so how do you utilize things like slack how do you utilize things like zoom when do you have meetings when do you not have a meeting how do you communicate how do you use emoji all these sorts of things might feel small in the grand scheme of things but there are things that really shortcut the learning curve and help you reinforce your culture rather than disperse your culture over time so those are a few of the things i think are really key uh during onboarding and you want to find times to reinforce in addition to the you know sort of more uh table stakes like hr type of stuff like how you get paid what your insurance gonna look like all that sort of stuff is obviously key but i'm gonna assume everybody is doing that anyway because you kind of just got to yeah how do you um how do you decide like what to deliver via kind of self-serve content versus what to kind of like push into more of a structured session because i think one of the things that we have is a lot of our stuff is self-serve content and for some people that's great they just want to jump in and consume everything but for some other people that that can be a little bit intimidating and we're trying to find the right balance uh yeah i don't know that we've nailed the right balance i think 50 50 is generally where you want to like kind of wind up the um you know me personally i love the self-serve material but i also know that um one of the key goals of onboarding is building connection points and building community and so you want to have some of these sessions be re life where folks can interact with folks and you can also create dual purpose tracks out of that so uh for example if you want folks to meet your executive team um but you don't want to just sort of have like a random like meet and greet style thing you say hey i want the vp of engineering to come in and talk a little bit about like what are sort of some of our like how does our engineering team operate in terms of certain like ways and how does it connect back to our core strategy or like how does our marketing team operate how does that connect back to our core strategy so you give them like some reason to talk but then it also serves as this um introduction to the person and the leader so that folks get to know people at the same time so you can use some of the live sessions to serve a couple different purposes um at the same time ultimately i don't know what the like right balance is uh you know i think this is probably where you can just lean on surveys and stuff like that afterwards that's one thing that we've done um pretty regularly is every session has a survey that follows it up a really short one which was like what'd you like about it what do you wish was better and as a result the sessions just get a lot better really quickly because we run these every two weeks so we're getting feedback on them every two weeks and we send those directly the person who facilitated the session so they know oh i kind of goofed on this thing like i'll fix that up or like this thing isn't landing very well um i wonder if i could take a different approach there and after like just doing it a few times you usually find like a pretty good stick you know i run two of these sessions and i haven't made a huge amount of changes to them in a while because they just work like people love them and so like i just keep doing that same variant over and over again nice and it's a two-week onboarding program that's how it runs so yeah the first week is like fully dedicated to company onboarding week two is probably closer to half and then you know the other half is more like okay you're starting to get up to speed with your team and what their goals are and um what the sort of initiatives you're going to be more involved with are so it starts to like ramp down a little bit that second week and then by the third week you're sort of like fully in seat with your team wow awesome yeah well thank you so much today uh wade this is about about all the time we have for today so uh first of all again i'd just really like to thank you for taking the time to speak with us and also vinay i like to thank you also of course for speaking with us as well thanks for having us this has been great really appreciate it that was awesome i loved that conversation loved all the conversation about like connecting with a team with 500 people robin in the chat shared um what they do they do seven minute qigong sessions i'm like yes please that's awesome why aren't we doing that why i know why didn't we think of that that's awesome um super cool i think we have another winner because behind the scenes as the conversations have been going on pauline's been entering your names into our little random uh raffle generator that's right getting the wheel and popping out a winner what do we got so another drum roll we have courtney lester if you're here you have one and either an opportunity to have a one hour strategy call um or some process street merch so go ahead and email support process.st take your pick and then we'll take it from there congrats courtney woohoo courtney all right awesome um just a reminder for anybody who's popping on late uh just logistically the conversation is taking place over in the chat section under stage i think it's called right um and also there's a little networking button if in between these kind of breaks yeah under stage chat um on the left there's networking in between sessions if you want to pop in and meet somebody at random who's here in the um at the conference as well you can do that um awesome cool so coming up next we've got a good friend of process street we've got nick sonnenberg he's the ceo and founder of leverage um so this conversation is just going to be all about um how to leverage systems and tools um so that you can be efficient and and stop drowning and work so we're really excited about that there's going to be a little bit of time for live q a at the end of his presentation so definitely enter your questions as we go throughout and um you can and nick will answer your your questions live oh dad jokes oh my gosh erin thank you for the colleen are you ready um all right let's let's see i got a couple up my sleeve um all right so first one um hopefully you guys can at least get a smile out of this but so my husband is really mad at the fact that i have zero sense of direction so uh what i did was i just packed up my stuff and write oh my gosh um yes all right okay okay jay if you're here can you can you give us a rating scale like one to ten on a dab level um all right so what this this is a good one what do you call a fast salt water fish anybody efficiency yes love that one very fitting for process tree all right so we're gonna just get ready for nick who's gonna pop on in just a moment and we will see you in the next session [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Process Street

Views: 192

Keywords: standard operating procedure, sop, process, bpm, business process, saas, b2b, remote team management, team management, remote team management tips, team management tips, how to manage a remote team, remote team, remote work management, how to manage remote work, remote team management strategies, managing remote teams, leading remote teams

Id: dJrpT1vyQgY

Length: 29min 42sec (1782 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021