Hey, new can be overwhelming. That doesn’t matter if it’s a new job or a new school, or just moving to a new town. And new can be overwhelming. And as a company, it’s our desire, and we believe it’s our role to set up our team for success. So we pay attention to the onboarding process. We want to help them acclimate to our culture, to our processes, our team.

And we think that’s puts them on a path for success.

This podcast is brought to you by Fast Slow Motion, a team of expert consultants that have helped thousands of growing businesses build scalable systems on the Salesforce and HubSpot platforms. To learn more, visit Fast Slow Motion.com. Welcome to the Fast Slow Motion podcast, where we teach you how to build a business you love while enjoying your life. I’m your host, Sam Donaghey, and in today’s episode, we’re joined by Fast Slow Motion’s Director of People, Michael Smith.

Michael, it’s awesome to see you today. Hey, great to be here again, Sam. Well, today’s episode is part three of our series on how to find and hire superstars. And as our listeners may know, when I’m not hosting the podcast, I’m Fast Slow Motion’s Recruiting Director, and I work closely with Michael and the rest of the team to find and hire really great people.

So I absolutely loved this series. And so far we’ve talked about recruiting and interviewing. And as we talked about this whole process, we realized that we really needed to talk about a third aspect of hiring well, and that’s the onboarding process. You know, many of our customers are businesses that are in a growth phase. And like them, Fast Slow Motion has grown a lot as well recently.

So, you know, we’ve hired a lot of great people and thousands more of apply to work Fast Slow Motion over the last few years. And we’ve really learned a thing or two about how to attract great people and create a great culture that people actually want to be a part of. If you’re building a business and you want to make it a place where the very best people want to work, then this discussion should be really valuable to you.

Michael, you know, you and I both know how crucial onboarding is, you know, but sometimes it can be overlooked or even rushed. So why do you think the onboarding process is such an essential part of hiring well. Hey, new can be overwhelming. That doesn’t matter if it’s a new job or a new school, or just moving to a new town, and new can be overwhelming.

And as a company, it’s our desire, and we believe it’s our role to set up our team for success. So we pay attention to the onboarding process. We want to help them acclimate to our culture, to our processes, our team. And we think that’s puts them on a path for success. You touched on the importance of setting up team members for success.

So why is intention to onboarding so important? Hey, we want the best for everyone who interviews for everyone we hire. We believe that people matter most and that starts with us even in the hiring process, because self-awareness is very important to us. We want people to understand, be self aware of what they’re bringing to the interview, what they’re bringing to our team so that they can fit in and collaborate with their best inside our organization.

For us, it begins with setting and demonstrating and setting up the expectation of open, honest communication within our team. And that’s a foundation that we like to call vulnerability based trust. You know that focus on open communication is just so, so very powerful. So let’s talk about when the onboarding process actually begins. For many companies it starts on day one.

But I know at Fast Slow Motion it starts much earlier. So can you walk us through that Michael. Yeah, Sam, the onboarding process really starts with our job offer. This is something we take very seriously. It’s not just an email or a quick phone call. We actually spend about an hour with the person we’re offering the job. We walk through what they’re getting into in the company or what the position is and the compensation package.

So we’re setting up expectations of what they can expect from the job offer all the way through their position. And we set up some next steps in allowing a team member to even to set their entry date. We want the transition from where they are to coming to Fast Slow Motion be as seamless as possible, and that includes working with them on the best entry date.

But from there, once they decide on that entry date, we set in place some onboarding that happens before they ever get here. We’ve just started this idea of sending an email about what to expect, so we list out what they can expect over the next 14 to 30 days, depending on what they’ve chosen for a onboarding date. We get them and ordered them computer and hardware and sent to them long before they ever start the job.

We send them a swag box. We get them started on their HR benefits before the first day we get them set up on payroll just a couple days before, so everything’s in place and they’re not rush to even jump into all these things on that first day. So it’s clear that even before day one, you’re setting a solid foundation for new hires.

So what does that first few days, a Fast Slow Motion look like once they officially start? Yeah, we start day one with a kickoff call and actually the CEO of our company joins us on that day. We just welcome them want them to know that again, that open, honest communication, our leadership teams available for conversation even from day one if they have any questions.

But then I walk them through what we expect the first couple of days, and really we’re going to give them some things to do the first couple days that are really self-guided. We enroll them in what’s called an onboarding course, and it’s different for each position. The first thing they start with is actually an intro to Fast Slow Motion.

And this really takes about two days to go through this course. And we go through our culture, our benefits, our processes. And it’s self-guided and there’s lots of videos they can watch, but it just gives them an overview of things they’ve already heard, but things they can expect over the next few days. Then at the end of day two, I check in with them to see how things are going, and I look at their progress and if they have any questions.

And then day three, that’s when they jump in with a team. They get introduced to their team. They start going to meetings, meeting their team mates and meeting our clients also. I think it gives new employees that chance to feel welcome and prepares them to get started on the right foot. So now fast Slow Motion is a remote company.

We’ve also added a unique element to onboarding that I personally love, which is the meet me videos. So can you explain what those are and why we do them? Yeah, we are total remote. We have people, I think, now in 29 states, and there’s no way for us to gather around a water cooler and get to know each other.

So we’ve come up with a unique way, and that is we have every teammate create what we call a meet me video, and we like them to do this within the first week. And they just answer three questions. Are is something they’re passionate about outside of work? What is something they can’t live without and what is one of their pet peeves?

They self record this video and once they self record it, they send it to me. I create an email where I then send out that meet me video along with some other information like their LinkedIn URL, so that people can look at where they’ve been. And we send that out to the whole organization. And this is a way they get introduced to our 125 team members across those 25 states at one time.

Everybody could go watch everybody’s meet me video because we are a smaller company now in the onboarding process, I just say, hey, look, as a new team member, you’re going to record one, but everyone else has done this, so you can go look at everyone else’s meet me video, and I have them concentrate on the team they’re going to be on.

This is a great way for them to get a printer reduction to their team members. So the Fast Slow Motion meet me videos are definitely a creative way to help spark more meaningful conversations with colleagues when you finally do meet them in person. So now, shifting gears slightly, our Chief Operating Officer, Matt Dyar, once said that if your team can’t articulate why the company exists, it’s probably a sign that you’re not communicating your purpose clearly.

So at Fast Slow Motion. Michael, how do we ensure that our team understands our purpose and values from the start? Well, it starts in the interview process. It is reiterated in the job offer. And then we continue that conversation from day one. Part of that onboarding course I just mentioned is reviewing our values, even some information about our why, our company goals.

And it’s something we talk about on a daily basis because you never can talk about your mission enough. But we take it one step further and that every team member is put in to really a four month onboarding process once they get through the initial onboarding courses, which really take about a week to do that, then we leave them alone for that the rest of that first month.

But month two, three and four, they’re enrolled in what we call our culture onboarding courses. And it’s kind of a cohort. You join this conversation or these training sessions with people who have joined the company. And the month that you joined and either the month before or the month after, people will come in and out of that and we review in that time, what do we expect of you as a team player?

How do we expect our teams to operate, and what are some practices that we believe will set you up for a success. If you follow these, it will be just be easier to operate inside of our organization. So each one of those takes a month. I meet with them three hours each of those months, months two, three and four.

And we unpack those topics. We also dig a little deeper into that self-awareness part, because we go over what we’ve call our behavior insights assessment. And then also we introduce our working genius assessment. And everybody in our organization has taken those. And it just helps you understand what you’re bringing to the team. So I really love how intentional, Fast Slow Motion is about embedding both culture and practical skills into the onboarding process.

Michael, Once a new hire has settled in, how do we continue supporting that growth and development long term? We believe in continual coaching, and that is real time feedback, which the foundation of that is that vulnerability based trust, that open, honest communication. We don’t have six month reviews. We don’t have year end reviews. We believe in that real time feedback.

But what we do is we also once a quarter we review everybody in our organization. How are they doing? How are they progressing? How can we help them when we take notes on that? And then their leader leans into that conversation with the individual team members to help them become the best person they can be. And we’ve designed a program called a monthly one on ones.

Every leader meets with their their team on a regular basis daily, really. But once a month we sit down and have a coffee conversation and say, how can we help you become the best person you can be? And those conversations lean into life and health and work and just encourage everyone to be that best person. You know, we’re really big here at Fast Slow Motion

on process improvement. So when it comes to onboarding, Michael, is there a system in place to gather that kind of data where we can improve the process? Yeah, I say in our job offer, it said, you don’t have to wait to voice your opinion or help us get better. We really want to empower you from day one to help us get better and all of our process that includes this onboarding process.

So a couple things we do at the end of the intro to FSM online course, they’re actually asked to critique this course and give us feedback. And each month we really get great feedback and we adapt and change that course on a monthly basis based on their feedback to that course. But we want that. So that sets us up so that we just desire everybody to help us get better.

So we’re always asking what can we do better as we move through? Michael, you have given us so much insight into Fast Slow Motion’s approach to onboarding. So what advice would you share with businesses that are looking to build a healthier and more effective onboarding process? Well, I think we need to be intentional. Setting a team member up for success is important, and I’ve seen a lot of worst case scenarios where people have just been thrown into a job and have to learn things as they go.

But any organization can be intentional to set a team member up for success. What I’ve gone through in this conversation, we’ve had, Sam, is what Fast Slow Motion does. But what I want everyone to know is this is something that has evolved over time. This didn’t happen overnight. We just had this desire to be intentional, to set someone up for success.

So there’s some dangers and not doing it because they won’t know and won’t feel acclimated about processes and people and culture. No matter the size of your business, you just need to be intentional. Make that happen. I’ve been in other organizations where we didn’t have this detailed plan, but we were very intentional about making sure that we could set that person up for success.

So some things to think about were, hey, start the process early. Make sure that whatever you do can help create a sense of belonging for that team member, because you want to set them up for success. And as we say at Fast Slow Motion, I hope anyone would agree we want team members to come in and stay for a long time.

We want to grow them up to stay and onboarding really is the beginning of that. Michael, as you know,, we like to close out each episode by asking our guests for one piece of advice or a quote, the ties in to the discussion we’ve had. So do you have something that you’d like to share too? Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is from Andy Stanley and it says direction, not intention determines destination.

The idea is it’s great to have great intention to create anything or do something, but you got to take the first step. So as you’re thinking about as a business leader, how to create a great onboarding process to set a team member up for success, have great intention to do so. But take that first step. You can start small, take that first step and set something in place because you want to keep those team members as long as possible, especially as much as you’ve invested in getting them on the team.

Well, that wraps up today’s episode of the Fast Slow Motion Podcast. We hope that it’s sparked some ideas about your own onboarding processes, and how they can ultimately help you attract great people, set them up for success, and keep them around long term. Remember to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform and check out past episodes of fastslowmotion.com/podcast.

If you’ve got any topics that you’d like to hear more about, or questions about what we’ve covered in an episode, let us know. You can send your requests and questions to us at fastslowmotion.com/podcastfeedback.