How do I use Trello to welcome a new person?

The arrival of an employee is a key moment to ensure their good integration into the team and to manage their personal motivation well. As in human relationships, you must know how to seize the chance to make a good impression from the first exchanges. It is essential to facilitate the arrival of a new person so that they can quickly immerse themselves in the culture and the way in which their startup operates. To miss this moment after putting so much effort into recruiting is simply a waste...

Our special breakfast for newcomers

With us, a new person is welcomed by the founders and is entitled to an organized breakfast with the whole team. This first encounter allows us to break the ice and for everyone to explain what they are doing here and who they are in a more general way.

Once alone, he can check out our Welcome Board on Trello. This table will allow him to get his bearings by discovering both the values of the company and the operating rules of the offices. Much of what appears there was explained orally, but we realized that it must be written and shared so as not to forget anything and refer to it from time to time.

Our Welcome Board

This Welcome Board is organized as follows:

• ‍Our values : it is essential that any newcomer knows our values, the vision that we have built together and that they understand them in order to be in line with our goals and our way of operating,‍
• Our organization : we identify our main work tools (Google Drive, Trello, Slack), identify the managers (HR, sales,...) and the major recurring highlights of our activity (the planning point, the quarterly update, the deployments),‍
• How we work : we specify the hours and the place of work, the way in which the collaborative management of our premises works. It is thanks to this card that we define who will have the most strategic position in the company: the cactus manager.
• Our section on leave and benefits : we explain the rules to follow to take time off and the benefits associated with the positions we offer,
• A list various : we present the activities we do during breaks (video games, ping pong, petanque) and outside of work (soccer, climbing, swimming) but also the power of power naps and how we celebrate the launch of our customers' sites...

Finally, there is a Welcome Board card that will list all the tasks that a newcomer must complete during their first day. In addition to setting up his new work tools (Slack, Trello, Trello, Google Drive, Tumblr etc.), we are going to invite him to follow certain courses, to discover our premises and above all, to play ping pong or Smash Bross with us.

Our training board for new developers

After lunch, we throw him in the deep end by giving him one month to set up his crowdfunding platform from start to finish by following specific exercises and respecting our methodology. We check in regularly with him during this first month of training without giving him all the answers. Our aim is to push him to be as independent as possible.

So certainly, professionally, the first days are a bit frustrating because they have to learn to find solutions on their own, but they quickly get used to this mentality and are very proud of being able to set up their own platform without the help of anyone else.

Gather feedback and get results on our method

We took some time to set up this process, and are always looking for feedback from our team to improve it or add certain points. Following suggestions, we even decided to add the following items to our Welcome Board:

• a Who's Who section where everyone introduces themselves and puts a small photo. A newcomer could thus get to know everyone as soon as he arrived and would add a short description and a photo of himself upon arrival to complete the list.
• a card with funny stories about the history and life of the company.

To convince you that our recipe works, I can tell you that we welcome newcomers so well that Capsens appears in the 2016 Happy at Work ranking by Les Echos, in 4th position among French startups with less than 25 employees where it is good to work.

Trello for new employees: nothing but positive!

Using Trello to welcome a new person allows you to:

• Familiarize him with a tool that he will have to use on a daily basis,
• not to forget any information or important steps to tell him when he arrives,
• to have personalized follow-up on the training that he must follow