In just under a week, Yarno is doing something we haven't done in over a year.
Welcoming a new member to our team.
We have a bunch of new and exciting work coming up, and as a result, we've been on the lookout for a content-guru to team up with Joel in producing epic content for our customers.
Onboarding a new employee isn't something that should be taken lightly. New hires deserve to feel that they're part of the team before they step foot through the door.
We were thinking about the best way to get our newest team member up to speed on the ins and outs of Yarno when it occurred to us – we'll just use Yarno for Yarno – duh!
We're lucky enough to have built a snazzy learning platform that has been proven to kick butt at onboarding new employees. It's pretty meta, but what better way to test our process and our product than to just use it ourselves for the same purpose our customers do?
Our onboarding campaign is aptly named the 'Yarno Yarno campaign' and will help fresh Yarnoers understand our core values and strategy, the product, our individual roles and even (hilarious) inside jokes before day one. It's also going to be split into two campaigns: preboarding, and onboarding (which will be a continual process, to avoid bombarding them with information.)
What's preboarding?
We know starting a new job can be stressful. New faces, new names, new office, new processes, new knowledge - everything is new, and it can be pretty overwhelming.
Research shows that structured training for new starters in the first three months results in happier and more productive staff.
Unfortunately, though, most people starting a new job don't get this kind of training.
We want to buck that trend. So, we came upon the idea of pre-boarding.
Pre-boarding is designed to introduce new team members to Yarno in a manageable way. To seed a few foundational concepts before they start so that on their first day, they have some background on what we're trying to achieve.
Our Culture Captain Joel set about creating a few learning objectives for the campaign, so we'll know when we've succeeded with the campaign.
Content creation process
The question creation process needs to be carefully considered and work toward specific goals for the campaign.
And we work through each step of this process with our customers.
Great content in, great results out.
Creating learning objectives is an integral step. Learning objectives allow the campaign content to be targeted, tracked and evaluated on.
Joel often asks our customers to think about them while they're writing Yarno questions:
"Does this question answer a learning objective? If so, great! If not, is it essential? Add another learning objective, or save it for a future campaign."
So after we ironed out the goals, success measures and learning objectives of the Yarno Yarno campaign – we could get into the fun part. Brainstorming!
Great ideas do come from anywhere – and lots of them at that! We sat down as a team and had a classic Yarno brainstorm using our favourite project management tool, Trello.
The result?
92 question stubs in 30 minutes
Check. That. Teamwork.
We love Trello because it helps us make sure the content process is smooth, simple and free from confusion – every time.
Trello cards allow us to use their neat Kanban system to move Yarno questions along from their inception, 'Asked', allllll the way to 'Entered into Yarno'.
Here's a screenshot of some of the preboarding questions:
Another neat feature we couldn't live without are the Trello card Power-Ups.
We use the Custom Fields Power-Up and Slack integration, along with handy standard features like tags for topics and stage of development.
Each card is then converted into a Yarno question, which form the campaign.
From there, learners receive an invite email or SMS and get their account set up (if they haven't been on a campaign before). They answer 2-3 questions a day and are re-presented correct and incorrect answers at specific intervals (this is called spaced repetition – for more on our learning principles, read this post by Lachy).
Our new content genius Liam received his invite and started his Yarno preboarding campaign yesterday and has jumped into his first set of questions!
I'll be documenting the whole onboarding process here on the Yarno blog. Stay tuned for the next post by subscribing by email (you can do this below), or following us on Twitter or LinkedIn!
