Human-Centered Remote Employee Onboarding at Remotish Agency

Creating the onboarding training program in my previous role at Remotish agency is what led to my interest in creating courses and other content to help people feel more successful at work, especially in topics that not many people share information about (such as documentation!). 

I hope it is helpful to share what we did to help our team members succeed faster in their roles and feel inclusion and belonging on the team, from the lens of what I know now about training and instructional design.

If you have an employee onboarding program you’d like me to feature in a blog, please let me know, to help show people what ‘good’ looks like, or to learn from other’s missteps. I’m also happy to keep your onboarding information confidential and only use it in research, such as in this short survey about employee onboarding.

Topics in this blog (click to scroll down to that section):

• What is Remotish?
• Why did we need an expanded employee onboarding program?
• How did we create a new employee onboarding program?

• What did we include in our remote employee onboarding program?

• How did we improve the onboarding program as we ran it?

• What did our team say about their employee onboarding experience? 

• What onboarding program improvements would I make now?

What is Remotish?

At the beginning of 2019, Nicole Pereira started a company with a vision to create an all-remote, flextime HubSpot agency that supported people who did not prefer or could not fit into traditional working styles. This included anyone unable to work a daily weekday 9am-5pm schedule or work onsite in an office, who have daily or weekly personal life obligations to weave into their schedules, or other factors where flexible schedules and flexible locations are necessary for a full and happy life. Basically… an agency for humans! 

I started working there as one of the first employees in early 2019, and it is where my human-centered focus was shaped, as well as my interest in helping people learn.

It was created as an employee-first company, which was a unique position in the HubSpot ecosystem of primarily ‘customer-first’ agencies. The original company values focused on being a valuable resource to others, efficient troubleshooters, and workers with heart.

This agency was originally known as Chief Martech Officer, a name that connected to how we did the work as HubSpot technologists (and more) when HubSpot was best known for its MarTech tools. Later, we evolved into being known for our why and our culture, so we rebranded ourselves as Remotish in 2020. We also evolved into calling our services RevOps in 2020, as the term better described the work we did to help sales teams, marketing teams, and customer success teams in HubSpot. 

In 2023, Remotish merged with another agency, so you may not find extensive information remaining online about it.

Why did we need an expanded employee onboarding program?

Remotish's team included people from several countries and doubled in size every year since its beginnings in 2019 through 2022, when I left the company. I believe in 2020, we had 10 people on average, and then in 2021-2022, we had 20-25 people.

That jump from 10-20 people happened quickly in 2021. We had forecast growth and the need to hire employees quickly to support a significant number of new or expanded clients. As an agency, the product was our people, so we needed to hire more people in order to service more clients as opposed to only using other methods of scale or efficiency to support the growth (‘doing more with less’, which would lead to burnout -- the opposite of being a people-focused company!).

We also noticed that sometimes team members did not understand how best to be successful at the company after a significant amount of time on the job (significant in startup agency tenure length, at least). We thought that better expectation setting and training upfront during onboarding could help solve that issue, too.

A minimal onboarding program existed at Remotish, one that we made small improvements to each time we ran it over the previous years. I believe it lasted for approximately two weeks while the new hire was simultaneously doing client work in their role. The existing program covered day-to-day software training needs, the most common processes needed to start work, and HR onboarding, such as benefits and paperwork. 

Remotish experienced very little team-member turnover in its first two years and previously never predicted a need to hire more than one team member at a time. Now, we needed a way to not only hire multiple people at the same time, but many cohorts of team members over the next few months. I was tasked with creating a more robust and useful onboarding program.

How did we create a new employee onboarding program?

Looking back on it, using what I know now, I can loosely organize the process of creating the program into the ADDIE instructional design model, though I had very little knowledge of formal training principles at the time. It was definitely a continuous improvement project!

A = Analysis

• Noted any gaps in the current team’s knowledge, people who experienced the shorter onboarding
• Looked into what other companies did. Since the stereotypical agency is not employee-focused, they tend to have very little or no employee onboarding, so there isn't a standard industry-best-practices onboarding program to follow. Similar to documentation, RevOps, or another topic I teach about, there wasn't very much reliable, consistent, useful information online about employee onboarding programs for our type and size of company.
• Researched the types of resources needed to create the program (people, time, tools, etc.)

D = Design 

• Decided how the content and activities would be presented and reinforced
  • How many, how often, and what types of calls should the new team member have? 
  • How to utilize Teamwork task templates for the program, for efficiency, repeatability, and for the new team member to learn Teamwork 
  • What types of tasks to have the team members perform
  • How to remind the new team about important information in multiple formats multiple times
  • What methods could allow people to learn at their own pace while feeling supported, especially for employees new to remote work and asynchronous work
  • And more. From what I remember, the CEO (Nicole) and I would review these choices before I spent time on the development work.

D = Development: 

• Created and tested individual content such as slides, surveys, project management tasks, communications, email workflow of important content reminders, and more
  • Tools included Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Meet, Teamwork task list templates, HubSpot, and Slack. No new software was needed for this program.
• Created and tested the sequence of the entire program, estimating the hours involved, making sure there were the right amount of hours of content to fill people's workweek, with enough variety to keep someone's interest, and more.

I = Implementation: 

• Had the first two new team members enroll in the program at the same time 
• Asked for feedback often in multiple ways (see below)
• Improved and adjusted components and methods as we progressed through the onboarding

E = Evaluation: 

• Weekly check-in calls asked for program feedback to improve the team's experience
• Monitoring the project management system, Slack, and other work locations weekly to make sure the lessons were effective and the new team members were thriving
• Emails asking for improvements after each month of onboarding
• A survey after each month ended

Continuous Improvement: 

• Making feasible improvements on a regular basis
• Documenting larger improvement feedback for the future, when more resources would be available or technology would change to include the requested features

What did we include in our remote employee onboarding program?

This program was designed in the familiar 30-60-90 format, including:

• 30 days of standard onboarding, where every new team member learns about the whole company
• 30 additional days of onboarding, where the team member learns more specific topics and skills for their role, ramping up to a 50% workload capacity by the end of the second month
• 30 more days where the team member ramps up to the final 75% core work capacity or billable utilization, where they are doing 100% of their role responsibilities

Important note about working times and time benefits at Remotish

Here are a few details about time at Remotish, which helps give context to parts of the onboarding program:

• From the beginning days of the company, we meticulously time-tracked everything. This discipline collected the data that helped make the 30-hour full-time workweek benefit feasible, knowing how much time common tasks and projects would take. Then time tracking was needed so people knew if they met their hours requirement without working over 30 hours a week, preventing overservicing and burnout.
• Flexible, asynchronous work: People could work any day of the week, any hour of the day, as long as they met their required work hours and had some overlap for specific internal or client meetings.
• Work hours were tracked in a monthly bucket, not weekly, to allow for time off during the month.
• 75% of a fully onboarded team member’s time should be spent on their core job duties (for client-facing roles, this was ‘billable’ work). Once they earned the 30-hour workweek, this changed to 80% as a lot of the education time was front-loaded during onboarding.
• 25% of required work hours were reserved for time to be an employee, such as attending team meetings, performing general admin work (general email review and time logging), chatting with each other on random topics in Slack, and pursuing education and thought leadership opportunities, all using their paid work time. This changed to 20% of their time when team members were on reduced work plans.
• 30-hour reduced workweek benefit:
  • A 25% work time reduction, about 40-46 hours off each month or 13 weeks off each year, to cover sick time, holidays, vacation, jury duty, moves, and more.
  • Requirements to earn and maintain this benefit:
    • Logging 100% of a month's target hours for 3 concurrent calendar months. This was the qualification period with the equivalent of 40-hour workweeks, and team members were given weekly help and accountability during onboarding with time-tracking and scheduling work.
      • After earning the benefit, the requirement is logging 100% of the lower monthly working hours.
    • Complete and maintain all the required HubSpot certifications 
    • Not be in a Performance Action Plan

Some of the decisions made about the onboarding program were to enable team members to feasibly earn the reduced working benefit soon after starting work at the company. This benefit attracted job candidates and we didn’t want to bait-and-switch anyone. For example, the new team members are not given any client or role-based work during the first 30 days, to allow them time to finish the certifications required for the reduced work benefit.

A culture of transparency and discipline for using project management tools, HubSpot, and documentation made it possible to take the extra time off without the employee, agency, or clients and contacts suffering. 

Onboarding Days 1-30: Intensive learning about the company & culture

The first 30 days of onboarding used a variety of educational formats to deliver information about the company, culture, how to succeed, and additional important topics that are often rushed, unspoken, or ignored at other companies. This variety of methods attempted to accommodate all learning preferences and speeds of team members from different time zones. This 30-day journey was also intended to help people from different career paths, industries, or countries, to have time to adjust to this new way of working. 

The first 30 days of the onboarding program were run, or ‘hosted’ in a way, by the most tenured employee (myself). Since I had built the knowledge base, I could also efficiently answer questions and convey the historical context and historical information that employees need to be able to quickly understand the big picture and WHY we run the business and processes a certain way. It also meant I knew the scope of any changes the new team members proposed, if they were feasible to complete soon, or if the suggestion was an idea to put on the wishlist for later discussion.

Though there was a lot of structure and education to help employees succeed faster, there was also a lot of time for the team members to explore information, giving people the time they needed to succeed.

The program included:

• At least one live call a day
  • This live interaction would help the new employee feel belonging and support, especially if they were new to remote, asynchronous work
  • Though Remotish was a camera-optional company, aware of Zoom fatigue’s effect on mental health, the senior Remotish team member had their camera on during these calls so the new team members could see a human caring for them 
  • We could accommodate most time zones or preferred working times by limiting the live call schedule to one call a day, so no one was at a disadvantage based on where they live or their existing life schedules
  • Some of these calls were with the team member’s manager, to start building that important relationship, introduce the role, and learn about role-based education for months 2-3
• Knowledge-base wiki articles to read and tasks to complete for hands-on learning, related to the call topics.
  • Our Knowledge Base contained 160+ articles we built, improved, and updated since our first year in business. Knowing how to do something at Remotish did not depend on seniority or tenure. This extensive documentation was intended to give new employees a better sense of security or belonging, knowing they can self-service to find the answers, at any time of day. The articles are also useful for employees whose native language is not English. (Creating a knowledge base is recommended before creating an onboarding program – see my documentation class resources if you need to complete that important work first!)
• Certifications: Many of the first month’s hours were reserved for the 40+ HubSpot Academy certifications.
• Shadowing calls/meetings across the company: About 30 hours of shadowing a mix of recorded calls and live calls, all types of calls across the company, to learn about the entire customer journey and inner workings of the agency. This was intended to give the team a clearer picture of their work’s value and how their role fits into the agency.
• Repeated information: Expecting anyone to remember or understand something they read or heard one time is not realistic. One of the ways information was repeated is a 15-day email workflow, delivering bite-sized pieces of the most important information.
• A live Slack chat for the onboarding cohort occurred during the weekly team meeting, where the onboarding manager provided context to help the new team member feel less lost.
• Celebrations!
  • Many public and internal posts/messages were created to celebrate the new employee
  • They received a welcome gift, to help increase belonging
• Frequent feedback requests: Encouragement for the new team member to give suggestions on how to improve the onboarding for the next person, and show that we take action on their advice.

A few specific tasks during the first 30 days included:

• Building relationships with their team members through a one-on-one  "Get to know you" call with everyone in the company (This was many team members' favorite part of month 1, based on their feedback)
• Completing a "How to Work with Me" document that is shared with the team, for more learning and future reference about each other's work styles 
• Creating their team member page on the company website's About page. This gave the team members control over how they appeared to the world and how soon it was published
• After the first week, reading and commenting on the various client-related or internal Slack channels, to learn and comprehend more deeply and not be afraid of commenting where team members can see it. 
• Using and reviewing the project management system – All team members had access to all projects to enable them to learn what was going on.
• Reading all client brief documents to learn about the history, personality notes, and progress of each client

Onboarding days 31-60: A supported start in the role

• More celebrations! We used company communications to celebrate the new team member's completion of their first month of onboarding.
• An official email handoff from the operations/onboarding manager to the team member's manager made it clear that the team member's manager leads the next phase of onboarding and beyond!
• Call shadowing continued, now emphasizing calls related to their role.
• Numerous check-in communications for support from their direct manager. 
• Bi-weekly calls with operations to check project management skills, time-tracking habits, and other educational and accountability topics (reduced from the weekly calls during month 1)
• Certifications continued.
• The role-based work for months 2-3 was designed by the manager and ideally included work such as relevant practice projects or shadowing an experienced team member as a buddy to assist in kicking off their first client, sale, or internal project. At the time we were running this program, we had a client servicing team manager, a sales manager with one team member, and an internal operations team manager (me) with an occasional team member, all of who did this role-based training. The CEO managed the managers.
• Ramping up their core work activity time to 50% utilization by the end of the month.

Onboarding days 61-90: Transition to 100% of the day-to-day role

• Completing any remaining certifications
• Continuing the manager’s custom role-based projects in the onboarding plan, transitioning to 100% actual tasks instead of practice tasks by the end of the month
• Reducing official manager check-ins to once a week (though calls or Slack chats were available on-demand as needed on specific topics)
• Creating a backup plan for the times when the team member was unavailable.
  • This document explains the recurring daily, weekly, and monthly tasks and routines, with documentation links for further instructions to complete the tasks. 
  • For new positions, this backup plan work may have included creating the first version of the documentation or editing it to reflect the new position’s responsibilities.
  • Backup people are also chosen, informed, and trained for this work when the team member was unavailable due to flex time or due to their upcoming time off from reduced work plans
    • This backup plan prevented the need for lengthy phone calls or individual note-taking to "catch up" on what they are working on when preparing for or coming back from time off. 

How did we improve the onboarding program as we ran it?

We collected feedback in numerous ways, official and unofficial, as friction was noticed or questions appeared that weren’t yet addressed in the program. 

During operations check-in calls, which started weekly in Month 1 and then were reduced to bi-weekly in Month 2, feedback was specifically prompted and documented. The improvements made were communicated to the team, often with credit to any specific person’s feedback. Feedback was also collected in a survey after month 1 of onboarding. 

Ad-hoc feedback during calls, for example, about unclear sections of the slides, was acted on and changed in real time.

A few examples of the feedback and friction we used for improvements:

• People wanted more role-specific work or information sooner during onboarding, such as a typical week in the role or how to onboard a client
  • We learned that many team managers did not have the time or experience to create the role-specific onboarding work for months 2 and 3, so we hired a new people ops manager to help them create these plans. Creating these role plans was also a topic added to the wishlist for future manager training.
  • We learned the goal of 50% core work capacity by the end of month 2 was not clearly defined, and managers were giving the team members new clients on the first day of month 2 (after very little role training in month 1) instead of ramping the new hire up to doing client/role work by the end of month 2. After eliminating this confusion, the requests to learn client servicing work during month 1 decreased. 
  • We also solved this issue by giving new team members a “buddy” to shadow and learn from during month 2, someone who was in the same role on their team or previously had the role.
• People asked for more useful client brief documents to learn the history and context of current clients or returning clients
  • We introduced more accountability and enablement for team members and managers to make sure this critical document was thorough, complete, and maintained through client relationship changes
  • Once the newest onboarded client-servicing team members were working in their roles, they thoroughly completed and maintained the documents, after seeing their importance during onboarding
• Non-client-servicing team members wanted less service-call shadowing 
  • We streamlined the call shadowing template so it was easier to see which calls were optional, and further customized the template for each role
• People wanted to hear from the CEO in more calls or videos
  • Monthly CEO fireside chat meetings solved this, so team members could attend current sessions live and watch previous months' recordings
• People wanted more tasks added to week 3-4 to break up the certification time
  • We added additional tasks and role-specific call shadowing these weeks, for people who weren’t trying to complete all certifications during month 1
• People asked for more recordings instead of live calls
  • We started providing live or recorded options for call shadowing once we had more of each specific type of call recorded. This new onboarding program also helped the company increase the discipline of recording different types of calls for future learning purposes.
  • We recorded a few of the daily onboarding learning calls and paired them with a 15-minute live Q&A about the topic. This ensured the new team member still received one live human call for the day, either for an onboarding topic or from their ‘get-to-know-you’ calls.

What did our team say about their employee onboarding experience? 

From mid-2021 to late 2022 (when I left and the program was logically handed off to people ops), about 10-15 people went through this program, or a variation of it (part-time or contractors).

We covered some of the critical feedback and resulting improvements above.

Here are a few of the positive aspects of onboarding that various team members mentioned in the surveys:

• People loved how the program built in various ways to get to know everyone in one-on-one calls and on Slack
• People felt supported by the structure, knowing the roadmap of what happens during onboarding, and the onboarding content/decks
• People enjoyed having the freedom, time, and focus to learn. Some team members had never been given time to take certifications at previous jobs, for example, and now they had time reserved for learning right away.
• People liked learning the processes of Remotish, the ins and outs of the company 
• People appreciated how optimized the onboarding process was, for example, using HubSpot automation for emails
• People said they felt successful even when given clients “early” by our standards, during urgent client load situations, and when we were still clarifying the best month 2-3 schedules
• People were glad that the hours, how we work, transparency, and everything else published and discussed during hiring was proven to be true during the onboarding program
• People felt supported by having an onboarding manager
• People enjoyed learning how a HubSpot agency works, for people new to the HubSpot ecosystem

Team member testimonials from the 30-day survey

"My favorite part of the last four weeks was getting to know all the team members and learning more about all the Remotish processes.  Having never worked for an agency before, it was great to learn about being a HubSpot partner agency as well." -- Vicki Sonne, Digital Project Strategist while at Remotish

"My favorite part of month 1 was interacting with team members on Slack. Remotish has strong gif game!  I also really appreciated all the decks you took us through... it was so helpful to learn all aspects of the business and to have someone in my corner as I onboarded " -- Camille Balhorn, HubSpot Strategist while at Remotish

"I love how the onboarding plan is laid out. It feels good knowing that I'm not being thrown to the fire on day 1, which I've been a part of before. It's thoughtful and planned out which I appreciate." -- Stefan Lynton, People & Culture Strategist - Program Lead while at Remotish

"Remotish stayed true to their word. Some other companies just lip service to the benefits, culture, working conditions...[but] during the interview process we talked about the support and breaking down silos of information for sharing, and I have experienced that as well with the wikis, Slack channels, meetings, the way communication is handled at large." -- Adam Stahl, Sr. HubSpot Strategist while at Remotish

I want to give a special thank you to everyone who gave permission to use their onboarding feedback quotes, so you, the reader, get more perspective than just my thoughts and memories. Thank you, all!

What onboarding program improvements would I make now?

If I went back in time to where I left off in the improvements for this program, many of the improvements would be building further on the improvements in progress when I left, such as on the role-specific onboarding plans for months 2-3, and setting clearer responsibilities and timing of the ‘onboarding buddy.’

One major improvement would be to find more ways to measure the success of people in the program and the success of the program itself for training new team members to be successful sooner in their roles compared to experiencing the limited or lack of onboarding.

Though we built many opportunities for qualitative feedback, such as calls and the survey, any before-and-after scores for individuals or the program itself were not in place. For example, we did not have employee satisfaction scores or measurements in place before the program was created, and we did not track retention due to improved onboarding, but those would be good improvements for future onboarding program creation. This is something I will be researching for inclusion in my class, to make sure whoever is creating the program can prove its value and success to their leaders, as well as know when and where to adjust and iterate on the program when the scores trend lower.

Other improvements on the wishlist were creating a manager-specific onboarding and a re-onboarding refresher training (or  ‘everboarding’ I’ve seen it called) that happened once a year to remind people of the key processes, people, and principles of the company.

Conclusion

By no means was that a ‘perfect’ onboarding program, or one applicable to cut-and-paste into any company, but I think it was fairly successful and showed the spirit of transparency, time freedom and accountability, setting expectations, and continuous improvement that is critical for any new team members to see and experience. 

Personally, it inspired me to learn more about learning (instructional design), eventually leading me to start a business to offer human-centered operations education and help people succeed in their careers at a greater scale than working internally at one company.

I hope this case study was helpful for you to discover a few ideas that you can use to create or improve your own program!

If you'd like to help shape the employee onboarding course or be informed of its progress, please fill out this research survey or contact me about writing an article about your program.