How we’ve built a seamless onboarding experience

Having a new member of the team join us is an exciting time for everyone, but we appreciate that starting a new role can naturally lead to a bit of anxiety in the early days. Over the years, we’ve always iterated and improved our onboarding experience to help try to minimise this and give the best welcome to anyone joining us.

Before any new starters join we invite them to join Charlie, our HR software. This sounds a bit boring but its seamless UI means that new team members can self-service their initial onboarding such as uploading personal details, identification and employment documentation etc. This provides a secure way of storing and managing confidential information without the need to send it over emails. Once signed up, they can take a look at our team directory and who they’ll be working with along with getting access to policies and our digital company handbook. They can even book holiday straight away!

What can you expect on your first few days at adaptable?

Normally onboarding takes place in person at our studio but we can do this fully remote too. The first few days are all about bringing them up to speed on the different areas of the business, introducing them to the team and taking them through our process, tools, projects and client partners.

We block out dedicated time with each department lead from project management, design, engineering and then a sit down with our founders to get the overall picture of the company and how we operate. This is a great opportunity to ask lots of questions about how we do things and an opportunity for them to share any pearls of wisdom they have learnt along the way.

Once their equipment is set up, we normally like to ease new team members into our projects (subject to how busy our schedule is!). An initial first project could be working on something for our studio rather than a client just to get familiarised with our tools and process. This could be anything from building a new landing page for our studio site, designing a new set of assets for a proposal document or putting together a project schedule for one of our internal digital products.

We’re set up for hybrid flexible working (three days working from home and two days in the studio) but in the first few weeks, when a new person joins the team we usually go into the studio a bit more so we can all get to know each other – whilst Zoom is great, face to face meetings with your team will always be our fave, especially in the early days of joining us – Plus we can go out for a bite to eat or a few drinks.

We like to make sure all of our team members have got everything they need to comfortably work both in the studio and at home. All our team have Macbooks, company iPhones (when needed) and a monitor, along with any accessories, that’ll help them with their work.

One month down, what next?

After your first month with us, our founders and their department lead will get together to chat about your first month. Think of it as a very informal mini-review over a coffee (or Zoom) where we can celebrate any early achievements and discuss their ideas or any concerns they may have.

If you want to hear first-hand what our onboarding process is like, have a read of Tom’s blog that he penned after joining us in 2021. Read Tom’s Blog