EO27: The Human Element Missing in Employee Onboarding w/ Jen Bergren

Join Erin Rice from Process Street and Jen Bergren, an expert in knowledge management and onboarding strategy, as they explore how to create human-centered onboarding experiences that set new hires up for success.

In this episode, Jen shares insights on why human connection is the missing piece in many onboarding programs, how to structure a 90-day onboarding plan, and why visibility into a role’s past work is crucial for new employees.

Learn how to balance automation with personal touchpoints, create a structured yet engaging onboarding experience, and ensure new hires feel confident, connected, and valued from day one.

Transcript

Erin Rice

Welcome to the Employee Onboarding Podcast, where we are unpacking great onboarding ideas and best practices from the world's top HR practitioners and thought leaders. At Process Street, that starts with our mission to make work fun, fast, and faultless for teams everywhere. My name is Erin Rice, and I'm the People and Operations Specialist at Process Street. Today, I'm joined by Jen Bergren. Jen's work involves creating and delivering educational experiences to help people grow their careers and businesses. Using the lessons she learned from building an agency from the ground up as employee number one. She also creates plans, processes, and programs such as a knowledge management program, and award-winning comprehensive employee onboarding program, and an award-winning referral partner program that generated 45% of company revenue. She is currently creating courses for Maven, Teachable, and HubSpot Academy and also writing a book on revops to combine a love of research, writing, and lifelong learning. 

Thanks so much for joining us today, Jen.

Jen Bergren

Thanks for having me, Erin.

Erin Rice

So before we dive in, I'd like to ask an icebreaker, what is your biggest bucket list travel destination?

Jen Bergren

This is a great question, and my answer is Paris. I actually have a background behind me. I know you can't see it because we're on the podcast, but there's the background behind me of the Eiffel Tower. I think it's taken from the Arc de Triomphe.

Erin Rice

That's amazing. Well, I hope you get to do that. Were you able to watch the Olympics this past summer?

Jen Bergren

Yes, I'm enjoying the scenes where they have bike racing through Paris and other places they show Paris. They show Versailles for the equestrian. It's really fun to watc.

Erin Rice 

That's amazing. Awesome. Well, what we really came here for employee onboarding. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit about this course that you've been working on and the research that's sort of started with.

Jen Bergren

Sure, I'm still in the very early stages of research, but I wanted to chat with you about it. I created an onboarding program for the last company I worked for was called Remote-ish. It was an agency. But when I was making all those resources, making the program, it was really hard to find any kind of resource that said, what is a good employee onboarding program, especially for smaller companies.

I was trying to create the resources I wish I had, just sort of like I said in my introduction, thank you. And so I've started with a survey that I've put out. I've only gotten about 10 answers so far, because again, very early stages, but it's already interesting to see some of the answers to people that people have of things they might want to learn about, things that haven't been successful, things they've experienced that were not good, that they want to teach people to avoid with their onboarding programs.

And so similar to the course that I've made about documentation, I'm starting with like a live course that you get feedback first about like what's helpful for people, what did they want to learn more of? And then I'll probably be making the recorded course after that, after I've iterated a few times and made it really helpful.

Erin Rice

So what have you learned so far in terms of what makes a great employee experience?

Jen Bergren

So a great point experience from the program I made, I'll try to give both sides, the research side and then my experience. I think a great employee onboarding experience looks like helping that new team member feel confident that they can do their job, like not wondering what they should be doing, not overwhelmed from being thrown into the fire to figure everything out on their own with urgency, thinking they're going to get fired if they don't figure this out on day two. It's more like supported education of the company, the role and learning about other team members and giving people enough time to process that information and put it to use, while also feeling that belonging part of a team, connecting with other humans, treating people as humans, not treating them like a piece of software you're installing and expecting to magically work by itself, which is not even true for software, but it's definitely not true for people. And for the survey.

Results, I saw I had to scroll to make sure I'm saying them correctly in my notes, but some of the top results about what makes a successful onboarding program that they've experienced at least is meeting people, like meeting team members, meeting leadership, either video calls or in person. And a key part someone mentioned about that is making sure those other people have time for those meetings and getting on their calendars is actually possible.

In having a suggested agenda for some of those meetings. So both sides get the most out of that time. And another person answered having an onboarding buddy, which I think I've heard you mentioned on the show before. Other guests have mentioned having someone to shadow and ask questions of or an onboarding host or onboarding guide, a human that helps the new person daily and not like promo for myself, but somebody actually did say documentation to refer to so they don't have to remember everything and they can self -serve answers. I know my audience that has answered the survey so far is kind of prompted to talk about documentation because I talk about it a lot. But another person said, a documented and clear onboarding plan so they feel like they're cared for. They know it's well thought out. They know what's next, what's coming up, what's expected of them. 

And one final thing was learning from other teams, not just their day -to -day people that they work with, like what are other teams doing? What are their roles? How does everything fit together into the company? And I would love to hear your thoughts. I know you've had numerous interviews. You've probably picked up on patterns and trends as well. What stood out to you, Erin?

Erin Rice

Yeah, I feel like the most important part of onboarding is reinforcing what they learned in the recruitment process. It can be really overwhelming when you start a job and you were so excited for your first day and all the people that you met in the interview path. And maybe you got to do like a test assignment or something like that. And it made you really excited about the product or whatever it is that you're working on. And then you show up on that first day and they're disheveled, they're disorganized and they don't deliver on all the things that they promised. And you're kind of like in shock of like, what did I just get myself into? Did I pick the wrong company? And so I definitely think just that reinforcement. And sometimes I think at Process Street, especially we get feedback that's like, this almost feels too good to be true. Is everybody really happy? And it's like, yeah, it really is real. And they are that happy and they are excited to meet you because, you know, we do have documentation around our own boarding. So everybody is prepared, everybody's aware of the expectations, and I think that sort of sets everybody up for success.

Jen Bergren

Great, thank you for sharing your insights as well.

Erin Rice

I'd love to hear a little bit more on the flip side of that. What do you feel like, maybe in your research or your own experiences that employee onboarding experiences are missing?

Jen Bergren

Sure, so I probably already rambled this answer in my last answer, but the human element is a lot of times missing, not just saying like, here's your job description, here's an org chart, here's how you use software by like, here's one hour call done, but having a person to guide the new team member through the process or go to person for questions, a human that's checking in with this new person somehow every day from the feedback on the program I created for Ramonish in my last role.

We had a one-on-one meeting with everyone across the company, which only was 20 people because it was a small company. But that was a lot of people's favorite part of onboarding, which they mentioned in the surveys after onboarding. And I haven't read or experienced that much in many other onboarding programs I've either read about or experienced myself yet. Again, just beginning the research. And another thing is adequate time is another thing that many processes are missing.

I, the remote-ish onboarding I made was 30 days of onboarding to like company culture in general. Like here's how the company works. Here's how, here's your team. And then 30 more days of role -based learning with their manager and 30 more days to kind of finish ramping up to that doing a hundred percent of the role. So they're not expected to be like fully productive, fully knowledgeable doing their job until about 90 days in, which seems a little more realistic than day one. Definitely.

And then the surveys so far, I only 10 answers still early in the research. But one of my questions was, what was the worst part of onboarding they'd experienced? Some of the answers, as you can expect, were getting nothing. That's the most common answer. Even lacking in the HR pay benefits, how-to information, people mentioned having an unclear path or unclear outcome, a lack of effort or care put into it, having the hiring manager not involved in the onboarding, which kind of goes back to what you were talking about.

Having your expectations during the hiring process if you're just talking to like this one person in your interviews, but then you don't see them for who knows how long. That makes it hard to build a relationship with the manager if they're not there in the first few weeks or first amount of time. No documentation with another answer. No documentation about what the previous person in the role did when it's not a new role. So like where are they picking up from? Who knows? They have to do a lot of investigation and one person did mention a fully automated virtual process. Again, no human touch, no humans caring for them was the worst part that they mentioned. I was just going to ask, what have you heard most from your conversations, Erin?

Erin Rice

I think very similar. I think it's really interesting to sort of take a step back and look at the differences between onboarding, know, company onboarding, learning like all that high-level stuff, the benefits, the handbook, you know, really, really high level. And then, you know, more of that team learning how the inner workings of your department work. And then also that third piece being, you know, role-specific.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone mention that lack of visibility into what that person was doing, who sat in their seat before them. And I think that that's a really interesting thing to sort of hone in on. What are your thoughts about the different types of onboarding?

Jen Bergren

So, in addition to that company role team onboarding, I also got some feedback from someone mentioning like, is the class going to be like individual contributor level onboarding or manager onboarding or like VP executive onboarding? Cause those are also three different kinds of onboarding. And I'm like, this is getting very complex already in the first stages. But I think those are allthree, well actually six, now that we're counting six different kinds or pieces of the onboarding process to kind of mix and match and module together. I want to have that full experience of how the company works, feel like I understand what's going on, not feel lost, and feel confident that I know who to ask questions to and when or when I can self-serve answers.

I'm a little bit rambling, but please continue to ask questions and I'll try to get back on track.

Erin Rice

Yeah, no worries. It is interesting to think about also the different levels within a company because, you know, managers have direct reports and maybe they've managed before, probably have managed at some point in their career to have that role. But, you know, they're not only managing their own job description, but they're also managing other people's job description and making sure that they have the tools to give feedback and to give positive accolades and to coach as needed, which I agree is like a whole other boat of onboarding. Being that you were employee number one, I'd love to hear a little bit more about how onboarding maybe was managed when there wasn't a specific onboarding person or HR representative. How did you all manage that?

Jen Bergren

Sure, so we evolved it, continuous improvement of course, as each person onboarded, but we had very low turnover in the first year or two before ramping up to double the size of the company, which is what led to this creation of the more robust program. But we had bits and pieces, like, of course the HR stuff so we can get paid, and little bits and pieces about roles and since we were agency about how to help clients.

We had some documentation that we created from the beginning, mostly about how to do the projects we serve client with client onboarding and offboarding was our first kind of documentation and project management task template journey because that happened a lot more often than employee onboarding, which was kind of good because our employees were staying, yay.

So we kind of built all the employee onboarding process, but a lot of times they were still having to do client work at the same time as doing some of the onboarding until we made this program about, I think it was about two years into the company where they weren't doing any client work until that second month of role-based learning. They were doing a lot of like shadowing of client work and learning about it, but we kind of separated out that role work until that second month to give people time and space.

Erin Rice 

Yeah, that makes sense. And especially when you're client-facing, it's even more important to make sure they're truly RAM. Yeah, for sure. That's so interesting. I'd love to hear a little bit more on if you have any like tips or tricks on getting hiring managers involved in the process.

Jen Bergren 

Yes, this was something we definitely improved on throughout because originally, I was like the host for the onboarding host onboarding guide for the first month because I was the operations manager and I made the program and I was the most tenured employee so I could easily answer questions. But we were getting the manager involved more and more as time went on. they would definitely have a meeting with their manager the first week to talk about their role.

And I think the second week, they had another longer meeting with the manager about like, what are they going to be doing month two and three? So they'll know like, Hey, I know we're not doing a lot of role stuff right now, but here's your plan. have planned out for you. So they would meet every week with their manager, at least if not more, along with all those meetings with the other team members and the manager, the hiring manager, the hiring manager or their direct manager, whatever phrase you want to use. Also help create that month two and three programs for their role so they would be directly involved in that as

Erin Rice

Awesome. And then, at what point did you all decide to have somebody that specialized in onboarding? Was there a head count number, or how did you make that decision?

Jen Bergren

We hired a people ops person that was taking over me as I was leaving and I think that was our third year. It was maybe six months into me running this program, if I can remember correctly.

Erin Rice

Yeah, okay, awesome. Well, would you have any advice for new people coming on board in terms of how they can ramp up quickly and start contributing quickly?

Jen Bergren 

I would say ask a lot of questions, feel confident asking questions. And let me think about that for a minute. How can people ramp up quickly?Would this be if they do not have an onboarding program? Like how can they onboard themselves?

Erin Rice 

Just in general, like individual contributors are just very eager in the beginning. So, you know, how can they set themselves up for success?

Jen Bergren 

I'm gonna go back to the asking questions. So asking questions will help the person who is running the onboarding or their manager or whoever's involved know that that's a missing piece of information they haven't provided yet. I know that was at least in my case. I'm like if people keep asking the same question, that means I haven't answered it well enough. I haven't made the information clear and easy for them to find. So that was helpful. Just knowing that people asking questions is helpful. It's not like annoying.

And if you do already have information just kind of remind people like here's where you find it. I know there are a lot of there's a lot going on. We don't expect you to remember everything the first time you hear it. It's a reminder like here's where you can find in the wiki in the documentation or in the Slack channel or in the project management system kind of directing people where they need to go besides just giving them the answer. So they kind of learn that habit of where to find the information. I think that that could be helpful.

Erin Rice

Yeah, I think that's half of my job, is reminding them where things are.

Jen Bergren 

Right, where to go? Yeah.

Erin Rice 

It's like for future reference, you can search it here.

Jen Bergren

Yeah. Happy to answer now, but here's where you go if I'm not available because I don't work 24 hours a day.

Erin Rice 

Yeah, for sure. And also a big part of PeopleOps is just empowering employees, right? Like, be in charge of their careers and to pave the way for their future, but also answering their own questions. We're just there to support them.

Jen Bergren

Yes, yes.

Speaking of that, I mentioned we had education was a big part of that first month. So it's complicated, but we had this time benefit that people could earn called like a 30-hour work week. I won't really go into that. But one of the things that people could do to earn it was to earn all of the HubSpot certifications because we were HubSpot agency. And so they had a lot of time set aside to do that in the first month so they could earn that benefit sooner. And that also provided them a lot of education that they may not have had time and past jobs like past jobs may not have allowed them the time to do all these certifications to keep their skills top-notch. So I wanted to mention that about empowering employees.

Erin Rice 

Yeah, that's such an interesting concept to think about earning a 30-hour work week. We don't need to dive into it now, but I have lots of questions.

Jen Bergren 

That's a whole other podcast.

Erin Rice 

But yeah, mean, it's kind of mutually beneficial to, you know, motivate them to do something that's meaningful, but also, you know, get more ROI for them learning and just being better at their jobs. That's amazing. Well, this has been so lovely. When you publish your onboarding, is that something that would be shared with the larger population that would be put out on these modules? Okay.

Jen Bergren

Definitely.

Jen Bergren 

Yes, yes.

Erin Rice 

Awesome, so you'll have to update us on when that is published. But before we go, I have one final question, and that is, what is one thing that onboarding specialists, HR professionals, and hiring managers can do to wow their onboarding experience or their onboarding employees?

Jen Bergren

It might not be an immediate wow, but I think it'll be appreciated. We sort of talked about it before would be like an easy thing. Companies don't need to buy new tools for spend hours creating anything like documentation is one thing they could do right now would be to set up those meetings with all the people. The new person needs to meet and greet to build relationships with, or at least enable the new person to easily schedule those meetings quickly without a lot of back and forth, without a lot of people canceling, and ensuring the current team members know the importance of those meetings. They're prepared to talk to the new person about specific topics, maybe, even if it's just 15 minutes is all you really need for some people in that first touch for building relationships.

Erin Rice 

Yeah, I think I agree. That is very impactful. I remember my first day at Process Street when I logged into my work email. My calendar already had a meeting with my hiring manager in the first hour of my first day. I had like four or five other meetings sprinkled throughout the first week to meet sort of key players that would impact my job directly. And, my team meeting was already on my calendar. So I already felt like a part of the team before I even started, which was really cool.

That's awesome. Well, thank you, Jen, so much. Again, please do share your course once it's complete. We'll all be anxious to check it out. And thanks for joining us today.

Jen Bergren 

Thank you so much, Erin.