Welcome back to our series on how to build an experience your employees actually want to stay for. So far, we’ve covered:

• Treating resource management as the backbone of your business

• How administrative accuracy is fundamental to building trust with your employees

• How to create a culture of belonging

This week, we’re shifting gears ever so slightly and shining a spotlight on managers. This one’s for you, people managers. 👋

If you’ve been reading WRT for a while, you know that managers are, to me, one of the most important functions in any business. You handle pretty much every essential part of the operation spanning strategy, communication, budgeting, and HR. The exec team wants to implement a new policy? Managers own the top-down communication and are expected to field the questions. Employees are dissatisfied with something? Managers are the first line of defense listening, absorbing, and escalating from the bottom up.

Execs, just putting it out there that Manager Appreciation Day is October 16th…

So. What I’m about to say might sound completely counterproductive, but hear me out: the best managers should be actively trying to build themselves out of a job.

Let that sink in.

This does not mean quiet quitting. What it means is that instead of building dependency, we should be building capacity. A manager who has made themselves indispensable sounds like a compliment, but it isn’t. It’s a liability.

🏖️ The Best Litmus Test You’re Not Using

Let me paint the picture.

You know what I’m talking about. PTO in your calendar, out-of-office on your email, but still somehow fully at work. Slack open at dinner. Emails at the airport. Checking in “just real quick” every single morning. That’s not a vacation. That’s remote work with a better view. 😩

I myself have lived that life. I don’t ever want to live it again.

Here’s what I’ve learned: how your team treats you while you’re on vacation is one of the best litmus tests for whether you’ve succeeded as a manager. Over the last few years, I’ve taken multiple one- or two-week trips and even a three-month maternity leave and I genuinely never opened my work apps. When I got back to work, the world didn’t end, my position wasn’t forgotten, and my team didn’t fall apart.

I came back actually rested. Imagine that.

💡 Pro-Tip: I give my team my personal phone number for true emergencies only. There’s a real psychological difference between tagging someone on Slack versus texting their personal cell while they’re abroad. The latter feels more intrusive, and people naturally think twice before doing it. You’re still reachable if the building is truly on fire, but the bar for “emergency” gets appropriately high.

👥 Two Types of Managers

The Indispensable Manager

The Indispensable Manager is always busy, always needed, always the answer. At first glance, they look like a star, and to be fair, they probably are one. But at some point, the stardom starts to fade, and they become a ceiling.

Signs you might be (or have) an Indispensable Manager:

• Deadlines start slipping because too much work is funneled through one person

• The team misses deadlines because they have a bottleneck (who is possibly micromanaging without realizing it)

• Direct reports feel unsupported because their manager is too buried in their own work to show up for them

• The executive team continues to see this person as an individual contributor, not a strategic leader

• No one else trusts their team to get things done because the manager doesn’t either, so work keeps piling back up on them

I once listened to a panel at Transform that called these managers “Player Coaches,” or coaches who are still in the game, and therefore unable to zoom out and actually coach. That framing has stuck with me ever since.

The Multiplier Manager

The Multiplier Manager is, admittedly, a little hard to spot at first because their team just works. Questions get answered, decisions get made, things ship. They’re a true Coach: identifying strengths and weaknesses, carrying out strategy, and making the whole team better by being in the room.

Signs you might be (or have) a Multiplier Manager:

• They have the headspace to think strategically and make proactive improvements — not just react

• They have time to advocate for their team, collaborate cross-departmentally, and genuinely support their people

• Their team understands the mission and has the autonomy to execute — they’re resourceful, and they know what decisions they can make independently

• The executive team sees and respects them as a real leader, not a glorified IC

• Everyone in the company knows: if someone from this team is on a project, it’s going to work

• And, lastly, they go on vacation without the world burning down 🔥 (Callback!)

📚 If you haven’t read Multipliers by Liz Wiseman yet, add it to your list immediately.

🔑 A Note to Founders and Executives

The Indispensable Manager may initially feel like the safer bet to promote. They’re visible, busy, and seem essential.

But in the long run, it’s your Multiplier Managers who will allow your business to actually scale. None of what they build is accidental; it’s designed. And it’s on you to know which type of manager you’re cultivating.

⚠️ One Important Caveat

I want to acknowledge that everything I’ve described above can feel extremely difficult, or even impossible, if the environment around you doesn’t support it.

This only works when these three things are true:

• ⬇️ Your team: You’ve hired the right people (and the right number of people) you can genuinely trust to hold things down when you’re out.

• ⬆️ Your manager: You report to someone who actually encourages this, and doesn’t make passive-aggressive comments when you don’t answer a Slack at 9pm. (Executives: this one’s on you. 👀)

• 👋 You: You’ve built the guardrails, the documentation, the open dialogue, the clarity around expectations and decision-making that make it possible for your team to operate without you in the room.

Building yourself out of a job isn’t a solo project. It’s a systems job.

🛠️ Okay, But How Do You Actually Do It?

Alright, you’re sold on the why. Now let’s talk about the how, because I think this is where most managers get stuck. The Multiplier Manager concept sounds great on paper, but in practice, it requires you to build three specific things deliberately and consistently.

Here’s what that actually looked like for us.

1. A Decision Framework Your Team Can Use Without You

The single most common reason teams become dependent on their manager is that no one has ever clearly defined what decisions they’re allowed to make on their own.

Think about how many times someone has pinged you with a question that they probably could have answered themselves. That’s not a failure on their part. That’s a gap in the system. If your team doesn’t have a clear map of what’s in their lane, they will always default to asking. It’s the safe choice.

What I’d recommend: write it down. Literally. A simple decision framework that answers these three questions for your team:

Read more

Last week, we talked about Accuracy as a Love Language, or, in other words, how the invisible, “boring” parts of operations (payroll, PTO, benefits) are actually some of the most powerful trust-building tools a company has.

This week, we’re going deeper into the operating system. We’re talking about culture — and more specifically, one of the biggest misconceptions I see leaders make about it.

🎭 The Gap No One Talks About

Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count.

A CEO steps onto a stage at the quarterly All-Hands, and they’re fired up. They talk about psychological safety. They talk about open-door policies. They talk about how much the company values its people. The slide deck is beautiful. The words are exactly right. They even invite their employees to set up a meeting with them.

Then the meeting ends.

And later that week, a manager rolls their eyes in a 1:1 when an employee brings up a concern. A new hire asks a “dumb question” in Slack that gets met with silence. Someone raises a flag about burnout and is quietly labeled as “not a culture fit.” Possibly the worst yet: someone raises an issue, the manager empathizes to their face, but then leads in the opposite direction. (Remember performative collaboration?)

This is what I call The Gap — the space between what a company says its culture is and what employees actually experience it to be.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth: The Gap is where trust goes to die.

📣 Your Culture Is Not What You Announce

At SupplyPike, we thought about this a lot. We had a great culture – one that we were genuinely proud of – that showed up in our retention numbers (95%+ YoY employee retention) and in the way people talked about the company (4.5/5 ⭐on Glassdoor and employee-surveyed as the best place to work in Arkansas). But we were also very intentional about the fact that culture isn’t something you declare. It’s something you demonstrate, every single day, in hundreds of small moments.

Think about it through the “company within a company” lens we introduced a few weeks ago. If your EX team is acting as the Marketing department of your internal product, then an All-Hands presentation is your ad campaign. But no one stays loyal to a brand because of a good commercial. They stay loyal because the product delivers on what the commercial promised.

When your Marketing (what leadership says) doesn’t match your User Experience (what employees actually feel), you don’t just have a culture problem. You have a brand problem and your employees are the ones writing the reviews on Glassdoor, in offer conversations with your next potential hire, in the way they talk about you at dinner, etc.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. But a fake culture? That eats everything else too.

🧠 What Belonging Actually Means

Let me push back on something. When most leaders hear “belonging,” they think perks. Ping-pong tables. Happy hours. A Slack channel called #random. The thinking goes: if we give people fun things to do together, they’ll feel like they belong.

But belonging isn’t built through fun. It’s built through safety.

Psychological safety is the belief that you can speak up, make mistakes, ask questions, and be honest without fear of punishment. It is the actual engine of belonging. And it doesn’t come from the perks budget. It comes from leadership behavior.

Here’s what psychological safety looks like in practice:

• A manager who says “I don’t know, let’s figure it out together” instead of performing with confidence they don’t have.

• A leader who admits when they made a wrong call out loud and to the team instead of pivoting and hoping no one noticed.

• A culture where asking for help is seen as resourceful, not weak.

• An environment where a new hire’s “dumb question” gets a warm, thorough response every single time.

None of these cost a dollar. Every single one requires intentionality.

🛑 The Culture Debt Trap

In the early days of a startup, culture is easy. There are 10 of you. You all know each other. Communication is fast and informal. You share the same context. No one needs a mission statement to know what you’re building or why.

Then you hire more people. Then more. Then you start to hear things like “it doesn’t feel like it used to” or “I’m not sure what leadership actually thinks of me.” This is Culture Debt. And just like Technical Debt, if you ignore it long enough, the cost of fixing it becomes enormous.

The biggest mistake I see growing companies make is waiting until there’s a problem to think about culture. By then, the best people (aka the ones with options) have already started looking.

Culture needs to be proactively maintained, the same way your product does. You have to ship features, patch bugs, and occasionally do a full refactor. Except the “users” you’re designing for are the people on your payroll.

✅ Closing the Gap: The “Marketing Matches UX” Audit

One practical tool I’d recommend every leader use is what I’m calling the Marketing Matches UX Audit. For every cultural promise you make publicly, ask: “How does this show up in the day-to-day?” The point here is to ask yourself the hard questions and figure out the hard truths.

• “We have an open-door policy.”

  • Ask yourself: Does leadership actually respond well to hard feedback? Do they actually create a welcoming environment for feedback and conversation?

• “We invest in your growth.”

  • Ask yourself: Do employees have budget, time, and support for development?

• “We’re a team here.”

  • Ask yourself: Are wins shared publicly? Are failures handled with grace?

• “We care about work-life balance.”

  • Ask yourself: What happens when someone actually logs off at 5pm? What about when someone’s child has a fever and needs to be picked up from daycare?

If you find yourself hesitating on any of those right-hand column questions? That’s your Gap. That’s where the work is.

🔨 How We Built Belonging at SupplyPike (The Unsexy Version)

Okay, so now let’s get practical. Because I know a lot of leaders read through frameworks like the one above and think: great in theory, but what does this actually look like?

Here’s what it looked like for us (and I want to be upfront that none of it was flashy).

1. We put managers through the same standards we held everyone else to.

This one was a non-negotiable for us.

Read more

Last week, we talked about the “Hardware” of the Employee Experience, including the laptops, desks, and tools that enable people to do their jobs. Once that foundation is in place, the focus shifts to the “Software” that keeps the relationship running. 🏃

In startups, we talk a lot about trust. It shows up in value decks, all-hands meetings, and manager 1:1s. But trust isn’t built through speeches. It’s built in the quiet, unglamorous details of how a company operates.

If you want to understand whether a company truly values its people, don’t look at the mission statement. Look at the payroll. Look at PTO tracking. Look at expense reimbursements. Look at what’s shared (and what isn’t) with its employees.

When a company runs a tight ship, it creates transparency, improves decision-making, and builds trust. In a high-growth environment, getting the “boring stuff” right is one of the most meaningful acts of leadership.

The Friction Tax on Focus

We keep coming back to Focus as our North Star.

When your operational baseline is shaky, you are taxing your team’s focus. Calling back to my example from last week, if an employee has to spend three hours of their week arguing with an HR platform about why their accrued PTO isn’t showing up correctly, or why their health insurance hasn’t been activated yet, they are not shipping code, or talking to customers, or doing what you’re paying them to do.

They are distracted. And worse, they are frustrated.

At SupplyPike, we viewed “Customer Success” for our employees as helping them decrease their Time-to-Value. If they are bogged down in administrative friction, their value to the company is stalled. By treating accuracy as a non-negotiable “feature” of our internal product, we cleared the path for our team to move fast.

Why Invisible Systems are the Goal

The best HR systems are the ones you never think about.

Think about the utilities in your house. You don’t wake up every morning and thank the city for the running water. You only think about the plumbing when it breaks.

Operational accuracy should be just as invisible. When the paychecks are always on time, when the benefits are seamless, and when the expense reports are paid out within 48 hours, the system disappears. This allows the culture, the innovation, the collaboration, and the shared jokes to take center stage.

When it comes to company operations, no news truly is good news. If your team is constantly talking about “the portal” or “the policy,” it’s a sign that your product is buggy. You need a patch.

When Systems Can’t Be Invisible

While invisibility is the goal, there are going to be times where operational systems and processes have to be brought to the center of attention.

When we were acquired by our new parent company, as with any M&A, conversations had to turn toward systems. What should we change? What should we keep? What makes sense to keep separate? What makes sense to merge together? When do we roll out the decisions? How should this be rolled out? Etc.

Even though all questions were legitimate and valuable, there was a lot of change happening at once and it was all anyone would talk about all the time. Being on the Leadership team, I remember sometimes even wishing that I could stop talking about all the change and just go back to my regular job! 😅

Change is hard for everyone. In these moments, it’s even more important to be decisive, proactive, and available for your team. If you have to make a change regarding systems, make sure to be clear and concise, test your “prod” environment as much as you can, and get champions to stand behind you.

Your job is to try to make the change and go back into invisibility as quickly as possible. Invisibility, or “no news is good news”, is a real sign of a smooth and successful transition.

The Emotional Weight of a Decimal Point

When you’re a founder or a high-level leader, a minor error in a payroll system or a slight delay in an expense reimbursement might feel like a “small bug.” You’re focused on the $10M Series B or the enterprise contract. A $50 discrepancy seems negligible.

But for your employees, that decimal point has weight.

For an entry-level engineer or a customer success rep, that $50 could be the difference between making a car payment on time or hitting a late fee. It could be the childcare budget for the week. When you get a paycheck wrong, you aren’t just making a clerical error, you are signaling to that employee that their livelihood is a secondary concern to your big picture goals.

Every time you mess up the “plumbing” of someone’s compensation or benefits, you are withdrawing from the Trust Bank. Trust me, employees talk. If you mess up one employee’s data and don’t handle it correctly, news travels fast. In a startup, trust is built in drops but can be lost in buckets.

The point I’m trying to make here is this: No matter how small the detail, it matters.

The Integrator’s Challenge: Strategic Outsourcing

You might be thinking: “Christine, I’m a founder, not an accountant. How am I supposed to be 100% accurate while scaling at 3x?”

The answer is that you shouldn’t be doing it yourself.

In the early days, we realized that we didn’t have the human capital or, frankly, the knowledge to be an elite payroll and compliance department. So, we outsourced the heavy lifting. We found partners who lived and breathed accuracy. We used Pilot as our bookkeeper, HoganTaylor as our HR and tax partners, as well as various legal firms for employment and corporate counsel.

However, and this is the key 🔑, you still need an Integrator. Someone inside the “company within a company” to own the UX of those outsourced tools. You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to audit. You have to listen to the feedback. You have to be the advocate for your “users” when the third-party tool fails. I personally played this role at SupplyPike.

Next week, we’re going to pivot from the Logistics to the Soul of the company: Employee Culture. We’ll talk about how to move beyond perks and build a belonging engine that actually works.

But for now, take a look at your “boring” operations. Are you speaking the love language of accuracy, or are you letting administrative debt break your team’s trust? Which part of your operations is escaping the cloak of invisibility?

🔐 The Operator’s Toolbox: The Accuracy Audit

Accuracy doesn’t happen by accident. It happens through rigorous, repeatable loops. For my paid subscribers, I’m sharing the specific sanity checks we used to ensure our internal product remained bug-free.

1. The Pre-Flight Payroll Checklist

Read more

Last week, we talked about upgrading your mindset from “HR as a Chore“ to “Employee Experience (EX) as a Product.” If you buy into that philosophy, then your employees are your most important “users”.

In software, if the UI is buggy, the latency is high, or the features don’t load, your users churn. It doesn’t matter how beautiful your marketing site is. If the product doesn’t work, the customer leaves.

The same logic applies to your company. Resource Management is the UI of your Employee Experience. It is the hardware, the software, and the physical (or digital) space where the work actually happens. If the (literal and metaphorical) “plumbing” of your office or remote setup is leaky, you are creating silent friction that kills momentum and erodes trust before a new hire even finishes their first week.

🐛 The “Buggy UI” of the Office

Imagine a new developer joins your team. They are excited, they’ve cleared your rigorous interview process, and they show up on Day 1 ready to ship code.

Then the friction starts:

• Their laptop hasn’t arrived yet, or it’s an old model with a dying battery.

• They don’t have access to the right Slack channels or Jira boards.

• They spend four hours “requesting access” to the very tools they need to do the job you hired them for.

Oof.

In the startup world, there’s a concept called Time to Value (TTV). For a customer, TTV is how long it takes to see the “Aha!” moment in your app. For an employee, TTV is how long it takes until they feel like a productive, contributing member of the team.

When you mess up Resource Management, you are directly impacting and extending your TTV. You are paying a high-salary expert to sit around and wait for an IT ticket to be resolved. That isn’t just an “HR issue” — that’s a massive waste of capital and a “User Experience” nightmare.

I once worked with an HR team member who was hired specifically to address a capacity gap on the team. But after months on the job, she kept running into roadblocks on the most fundamental things — permissioning issues in the HRIS, access issues to shared drive documents, and sometimes even getting time with her own boss. 🙃 She was hired to fill a gap but never actually empowered to do it. Imagine the time and money lost just from “plumbing” issues alone, not to mention how completely it cut her off from being able to build trust with her counterparts.

💻 Treating Logistics like a SaaS Product

At SupplyPike, the marching orders I gave my team were always first and foremost: “Our employees are our customers. Our job is to make sure they can do their jobs to the best of their abilities.” With that, my team took on the role of Product Development for the team, continuously improving the environment by making incremental changes to our “product” aka the EX.

This meant looking at things like:

• The Hardware Stack: Standardizing equipment so that troubleshooting wa instant. We would use tools like Rippling to set up role-based rules that not only automatically assigned laptops, but the software that was downloaded as well.

• The Software Suite: Automating “Day 1” access so that by the time an employee logged in, their virtual desk was already set up.

• The Physical Environment: Whether it was the quality of the office chair or the type of snacks available in the kitchen, these were the “micro-interactions” of your EX.

• The Psychological Environment: Ensuring the culture of the team was one that encourages trust, accountability, and doing their best work.

If your kitchen is always out of coffee, the printer never works, or you’re constantly battling calendar booking rules, it sends a subtle message to your team: We don’t value your environment, so why should you value the work? It sounds trivial, but as a “company within a company,” these end up being the bugs in your code that need to be fixed.

👀 Reclaiming the Most Valuable Asset: Focus

The biggest cost of poor Resource Management isn’t the price of a new laptop — it’s the loss of Focus.

In a startup, every minute a manager spends hunting down a spare monitor or explaining how to use the guest Wi-Fi is a minute they aren’t spent coaching their team or solving customer problems. When the “hardware” of your company just works, it becomes invisible. And invisible is the goal.

You want your employees to walk into their (virtual or physical) office and have 100% of their cognitive load available for the mission. If they have to spend 10% of their brainpower fighting with their tools, you are losing 10% of your company’s output.

A real life example

A perfect example that comes to mind for me is when I was working at a larger corporation. One of my coworkers was trying to figure out why there was a 6-cent discrepancy on their paycheck. The issue ended up being escalated up to multiple layers of HR over the course of a few weeks. Over 6 cents! By the time I left the team, there was still no answer to the question.

I have soooooo many thoughts.

• For starters, what stood out to me is how little trust there was between the employee and HR department, to the point where they felt they needed to check for that discrepancy every two weeks. Not to mention the further erosion of trust if it is found to be a true discrepancy.

• From a leadership perspective, this customer-facing employee probably had so much actual valuable work to be done, but had to spend their time and mental energy on this distraction.

• Additionally, how much time was spent by multiple levels of HR across multiple weeks to find this answer?

I do want to note that I do think paycheck accuracy is extremely important. If there is an issue with your paycheck, please advocate for yourself. The issue here is that it even got to this point.

Again, when the pipeline is broken, your team shifts their focus to fixing those leaks (as they should) instead of what you want them to be focusing on.

🚰 The Lean Approach to “Plumbing”

It’s important to note that you don’t need a 50-person IT or HR department to solve this. You need a Process.

With an EX team of 4 for 150-200 employees (1 team member was specifically dedicated to IT), we relied heavily on checklists and automation. We treated the “New Hire Setup” like a deployment script. If it couldn’t be done consistently every single time, it was a broken process. If processes and automation are set up correctly, you free up your team’s time to solve real strategic problems.

Note: If you are just beginning your startup journey, don’t feel bad if you don’t already have a process set up! It takes time to figure out what’s “right” and, better yet, what’s right for your team. Next week, we will dive into the “software” side of this, but this week, start with the hardware. Walk through your “User Journey” as if you were a new hire. Where is the friction? Where is the latency? Fix the plumbing, and your team will thank you by doing the work they were actually hired to do.

The important thing is to just start somewhere! Put pen to paper, figure out what today’s best experience looks like to you, and continue to iterate from there.

The Operator’s Toolbox: Resource Management Edition

Building a “company within a company” is a lot easier when you aren’t staring at a blank page. For our paid supporters, I’m opening up our vault to show you exactly how we turned IT and Facilities into an “Employee Success” engine.

1. The “Success” Framework

Read more

But here’s the truth: If you have employees, you have HR. The only choice you have is whether you let “HR Debt” accrue in the shadows until the plumbing fails, or whether you upgrade your mindset to fostering the Employee Experience (EX).

To me, EX is today’s “new and improved” version of HR. While traditional HR focuses on managing risk and compliance, EX focuses on managing the product of work. At SupplyPike, we stopped looking at our team as a “resource” to be managed and started looking at them as our most important “customers.” If our company is the product we sell to customers, then the experience of working here is the product we sell to our team. Being able to attract and retain top talent at the beginning of your startup journey can be what makes or breaks your company.

When you treat EX like a “company within a company,” you stop seeing HR as “an annoying problem you have to figure out” and start building a high-performance engine that fuels the rest of your business.

Why EX is the Ultimate Startup Lever

In a startup, your most valuable asset is Focus. When your EX engine is broken, friction takes over. If paychecks are wrong, if a new hire doesn’t have a laptop for three days, or if a manager is arguing with an employee over a few minutes of accrued PTO, focus evaporates. Your leaders end up spending their afternoons clarifying errors instead of focusing on the work.

Treating EX as a product means identifying that friction and automating or optimizing it out of existence. It means ensuring that the “invisible” parts of the job (like payroll, tools, and policy) just work, so the “human” parts of the job (like innovation, collaboration, and growth) can take center stage.

To provide some real-life examples of how we turned our EX function into a company within a company, our team would take on the roles like:

• Product Development: Continuously launching new “features” like perks, benefits, and events and making incremental improvements based on feedback we received.

• Marketing: Responsibility over brand and PR management through company-wide communications like all-hands meetings, increasing leadership visibility, and squashing rumors.

• Customer Success: Helping our employees decrease time-to-value, maintain high employee retention rates, and utilize all the benefits and perks available to them.

The Pillars of the Employee Experience

I structured my team around these 5 pillars:

• Talent Acquisition: I want to work at this company.
  Similar to the TOFU phase of the business.

• Recruitment: I had a great interview experience.
  Similar to the demo-to-close phase of the business.

• Employee Success: I’m excited to start my journey here!
  Similar to the kick off and onboarding phase of the business.

• Talent Development: I can see myself stay and grow here!
  Similar to the customer upselling phase of the business.

• Retention: This is the best job I’ve ever had! (Our north star ⭐)
  Similar to the customer retention phase of the business.

This is a slide from a deck that I presented to each new member of my team, my team as a whole, and to anyone who was ever curious about what we did.

Strategies and levers that greatly attribute to success as an EX team include:

• Resource Management: Do I have what I need to succeed? Do I have a desk? Do I have an office? Do I have the software and hardware tools that I need to do my job?

• Employee Culture: Do I belong here? Do I like the people I work with? Does the company align with my values?

• Talent Development: Is there a path for me here? Do I want to put in the work to reach the next stage? Is it fair and unbiased?

• Humane Transitions: How do I leave? Do I still like and respect the company after I’m gone?

If you couldn’t tell, despite the name, I strongly believe that the employee experience doesn’t start on Day 1 and end on your last day. It starts at the very first touchpoint and never really ends! It might sound crazy, but we’ve had candidates who were rejected from interviews refer their friends to us because they respected our selection process so much. We even have several previous employees who subscribe to this newsletter! (Hi guys!)

Note: Last quarter, we did a deep dive into hiring. We talked about how to find the right people and set the tone before they even sign an offer. Since we’ve covered that ground, we won’t dive much deeper there—but it remains the essential “top of the funnel” for everything that follows.

The Road Ahead

Over the rest of this quarter, we are going to dismantle the remaining pillars. We’ll talk about why “accuracy is a love language,” how to build autonomy as a feature, and why the way you treat someone on their way out the door is the ultimate test of your culture.

HR shouldn’t be a necessary evil. It should be the operational foundation that allows your team to move fast.

Next week, we start with the plumbing: Resource Management. We’ll discuss how to treat your internal tools and logistics like a SaaS platform, and why minor administrative friction is a silent killer of startup momentum.

Let’s stop managing “resources” and start building an experience worth joining and staying for.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article! Has your company embraced the employee experience mentality? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

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Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I am reading another Stacy recommendation: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain! I’m about to finish it! I feel like I should pick up Onyx Storm, but I’m honestly a little intimidated by the length 🥴

🍿 Watch of the Week: I saw The Drama in theaters last week! Not gonna lie, it was kind of another head-scratcher for me.

🎧 Song of the Week: Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head showed up randomly on a playlist today and what a vibe. It is pure coincidence that it’s also going to be raining a lot this week for us.

• Before the Hire: How to decide if a hire needs to be made

• Making the Hire: How to interview for the best candidate

• Prepping for Day 1: How to prepare for your new hire’s arrival

Today, we’re going to go over how to set your new hires up for success on Day 1 and beyond.

If you’ve subscribed to WRT for a while, you’ve probably sensed a theme that Stacy and I really believe in letting “current us” prepare for “future us.” From setting up goals to solidifying meeting rituals to hiring, we truly believe that putting in the work up front will lead to so many rewards in the future. Setting your new hire up for success is no different!

This article will cover the 2 assets every team should have prepared for each new hire before they ever walk through your front door.

Let’s dive into it! 🐬

2 Assets for New Hire Success

#1: The Company Orientation Deck

Think back to syllabus day at school. On the first day, you’d walk into class, and your professor would go over the high-level topics, expectations, and point system for the rest of the semester. You’d walk away knowing what you needed to do to succeed.

Why shouldn’t work be the same?

The Company Orientation Deck

• Responsibility: HR

• Format: Slide Deck Presentation

• Duration: ~2 hrs

Content

This is your chance to communicate what you deem as the most important things for the employee to know about your company. There should be a healthy balance between true work and any benefits you’d want the employee to be aware of or to take advantage of.

Our deck included:

• Introduction to what your company does and its mission and vision

• A high-level org chart where you can point out where the new hire’s role sits

• Company culture code

• Company policies (time clocking, PTO policy, office etiquette, etc.)

• Company benefits (health benefits, professional development, etc.)

• Dedicated time to set up laptops, accounts, etc. (Wi-Fi, email, Slack/Teams, shared drives/sites, etc.)

Tips

• Keep the content as high-level as possible.
  The new hire will be drinking from a firehose for the first 30 days, so you don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information too fast.

• Keep the presentation as interactive as possible.
  Nobody likes a 9 AM meeting on a Monday. As excited as they may be, new hires won’t either. Try to make the presentation fun and interactive to also increase their knowledge retention.

• Keep relating content to the new hire’s role.
  Why does this information matter to them specifically? Ex: This is what the company does, and this is how your role impacts the mission.

• Think about what the employee will need to be successful at your company.
  Actually think about what your employees need in order to be successful at your company and weave that into your content and presentation. Invest in your new hires on the front end, and their time-to-value will decrease significantly!

🚨A Note on Remote Employees 🚨

If you require remote new hires to fly/travel to your corporate headquarters for orientation, please spend some extra time working with Finance and HR to determine the best way to pay for the trip. This not only includes travel, but also room and board. This is especially important if you are hiring fresh grads who don’t have any work-related travel experience…or savings!

This list can seem tedious, but it’s really important to iron out for a smooth experience:

• Who is responsible for booking travel? We’ve had employees try to expense miles for driving across the country instead of taking flights. Is that okay?

• Who is responsible for booking the hotel? Does the hotel have a policy that requires having a physical card on file when you check in? How will you provide that if necessary?

• Who will share and explain the travel policy to the new hire?

• What types of meals are covered in the per diem? We’ve had employees expense $100+ meals in their first week while traveling. ☠️

• Can you proactively get an expense card made for the employee prior to their first day?

• Is their manager also remote? Should they also fly in for orientation? If not, how will you ensure they are able to start on the right foot?

#2: The Role-Based Onboarding Doc

While the purpose of the Company Orientation Deck is to orient the new hire to the company as a whole, the Role-Based Onboarding Doc is specific to the new hire’s role and team. This is a document structured like a syllabus that would last 4-6 weeks, meant to guide the new hire on what they need to complete.

The Role-Based Onboarding Doc

• Responsibility: Hiring Manager to Prepare; New Hire to Complete

• Format: Document with Face-to-Face Check-Ins

• Duration: 4-6 weeks

Content

We structured our training materials as a series of checklists that the new hire could check off, take notes, and reference when checking in with their hiring managers. Below is a high-level template of what our onboarding template looked like for an AE. Feel free to take it and make it your own for the roles you are hiring for!

📝 Note: Text in italics are placeholders.

Home Page

A page welcoming the new hire with a company group photo, how to use the document, and a table of contents for easy navigation.

Week 1: Get Oriented

• Complete Orientation with HR

• Meet with Manager

  • Understand high-level goals, expectations, and initial projects

  • Review 30/60/90

  • Discuss and set up team rituals and expectations

• Join Slack/Teams Channels

  • List of Team Channels

  • List of Cross-Team Channels

  • List of “Help” Channels

  • List of Special Interest/Fun Channels

• Get Access to Tools

  • List of Team Tools (Ex: CRM, email, etc.)

  • List of Team Assets (Ex: design/template libraries, etc.)

• Fun/Non-Work Stuff

  • Make your first cup of coffee in the kitchen

  • Join your first team event [date/time/location]

  • Have lunch in the break room

• Need Help?

  • List helpful resources for the new hire (Ex: IT, HR, etc.)

Week 2: Get to Know Your Role and Team

• First 1:1 with Manager

  • This is a dedicated time to raise issues, ask for help, align expectations, etc.

  • Check in on the Onboarding doc

  • Review progress on the 30/60/90

• Chat with Team Members

  • Schedule 30-minute chats with teammates and cross-teammates to learn more about their roles (💡Pro-Tip: Make sure to be cognizant of how many folks they’ll need to meet as your team scales! In the early days, it can make sense for them to meet all the AEs if there are 1-2 other peers; later on, they probably don’t need to chat with all 10 of them!)

  • Provide a list of coworkers who collaborate the most with this role (Ex: Other AEs, CSMs, AMs, RevOps, etc.) so they understand how their role impacts other teams

• Begin Shadowing + Debrief

  • List calls/meetings/rituals for the new hire to shadow to start hands-on training

    • While you are getting real-world experience, schedule 30-minute calls with your teammates to help you debrief on what you have learned

  • List call recordings from Gong or Chorus for the new hire to listen to and helpful articles/content/case studies produced by your team (or otherwise) for the new hire to read (💡Pro-Tip: Provide multiple formats to account for multiple learning styles!)

Week 3: Understand Your Product

• Chat with Product Managers

  • Feel comfortable talking about our products with ease by chatting with the experts - The Product Managers!

  • List your Product Managers and what products they own and help with introductions if needed

• Watch More Calls

  • List more call recordings that would be beneficial to listen to

Week 4: Build Confidence

• Lead a Call

  • Lead an intro/demo call with a prospect with another teammate present for support

  • Schedule a debrief with them after to ask for feedback

  • Update the CRM with notes from the call

• Continue Shadowing

• Watch more calls

Tips

• Give direction, but don’t micromanage.
  The goal here is not to provide a detailed timeline for how the new hire should fill up each of the 40 hours in their week. It is to provide some direction and phase out training over the first month.

• Stay involved.
  Conversely, the goal with this is not to give a document to the new hire and wish them luck. 👋 Managers should be heavily involved in this process and checking in to make sure the new hire feels supported.

• Phase out over 4-6 weeks.
  If you read carefully, as the weeks go by, there is less and less content. The thought behind this is that the new hire should be more and more ramped up by the end of the 4 weeks.

• Build habits.
  Be sure to sprinkle specific habits that you want to reinforce with the new hire throughout the onboarding doc (Ex: update the CRM with notes from your call) to get them into the good habits you want them to keep.

💻 Tech Stack

At SupplyPike, we used Slite to house our templates and the dedicated documents that our new hires would use. Of course, you could use Google/Word Docs, Slack Docs, or even Zoom Docs to house this. I highly recommend Slite as an internal knowledge base tool. We used it for several years, and it was highly adopted by the entire company! (You already know…Slite, we’re looking for sponsors 😂).

☮️ Working Together

Tying it all together, this is what a typical first day would look like for our new hires:

• 9:00 AM: Meet with HR to complete I-9 verification

• 9:15 AM: Orientation Deck + Tech Setup

• 11:30 AM: Office Tour

• 12:00 PM: Lunch with relevant folks (Orientation team, other new hires, etc.)

• 1:00 PM: Hand-Off to Hiring Manager

  • 💡Pro-Tip: Make sure the Hiring Manager (or another representative) has actually made time on their calendars to receive this new hire.

  • The Hiring Manager should go over the Onboarding Doc and 30/60/90 with the new hire.

After the first day, the new hire would be expected to complete their onboarding doc and take initiative in further training.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! We were wondering if there would be any interest in us generating templates for assets like this at a small cost? Let us know in the comments or chat!

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

PS: Before you go, I wanted to share that Stacy and I are both supporting Blood Cancer United’s fundraiser right now. All the funds raised go toward research, education, patient and family care, and advocacy. They have a bold goal of adding one million more birthdays by 2040.

If you’re in any position to give, even a small amount makes a difference. You can donate here and we will be incredible grateful for your contribution! To sweeten the pot 🍯, for any donations of $50 or more, you get to pick a WRT topic for either of us to write about!

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I’ve been reading a fun book this week - How to Age Disgracefully by Clare Pooley!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I just finished Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model over the weekend, and I have so many feelings!!! Really looking forward to the Traitors finale and Bridgerton Part 2 this week!

🎧 Song of the Week: Not gonna lie, I’ve been listening to a lot of children’s music for my 16-month-old who loves dancing 🕺 but I’ve also been listening to the French Cafe Lounge playlist on Spotify as I’ve been planning an upcoming trip to France. 👀👀👀

Picking right back up in our hiring series, now that you’ve planned for your new hire, interviewed candidates, and made an offer, it’s time to prepare for their arrival! Typically, candidates will require a minimum of 2 weeks before they can start in order to provide the standard “2-week notice” to their current employer. This means, you only have 14 days to get your ducks in a row! Not to worry, this article will walk you through the checklist of things to do to prepare.

New Hire Onboarding Checklist

Before we get started, remember to think about this entire process from your new hire’s perspective. This is a great opportunity for you to brand yourself as an amazing employer and create excitement from your new employee. First impressions matter.

After you’ve received a verbal commitment from the candidate you want to hire, work with HR to send the official offer letter to them from your HRIS (HR Information System). Once the offer letter is signed, it should automatically kick off a multitude of things.

At SupplyPike, the Operations Team was responsible for coordinating across teams and making sure all of these to-dos were completed prior to the new hire’s arrival.

HR/People Ops’s Checklist

• Send over any documents they should sign/fill out before or on their first day. These could be documents like…

  • Employee Handbook

  • Code of Conduct

  • Photo Releases

  • Door Usage Agreement

  • Proprietary Agreement

  • Direct deposit information for payroll

  • Information for background checks

  • Instructions for drug tests

• Send an email to the new hire informing them what to expect on their first day.
  💡Don’t let your new hires feel ghosted and/or unprepared between signing the offer letter and their first day.

  • Who will their point of contact be?

  • Where should they show up? Are there confusing instructions on how to navigate to the building, how to park, if there is a check-in process, etc.?

  • What date and time should they arrive?

  • How should they dress?

  • What should they bring on Day 1? Documents for I-9 verification, their laptop, etc.

  • Is there anything they need to complete before their first day? Ex: drug testing, background check consents, etc.

  • Anything else you can think of that will set them up for success on their first day.

• Schedule a 90-Day Survey to check on orientation and to see if there is any additional support needed. It can include space for information like…

  • Feedback on the orientation and onboarding process

  • Feedback on the job itself and if it was what they expected it to be

  • Feedback on any additional support needed from their manager

  • Skills they would like to develop in the next 3 months

  
  💡 Pro-Tip: Reassure your new hires that they are not alone and have a safe/neutral space to ask for help. The success of a new hire’s first 90 days in seat can drastically impact the long-term retention at the company. Again, first impressions matter.

• Send announcements to the company.
  We found it very beneficial to make both written and verbal announcements whenever someone joined our team at ~150 people. If you feel like your team is too big to make company-wide announcements, you can tailor these to just your team or department.

  • Slack/Teams announcement to all people managers when the hire is made

  • Slack/Teams announcement to the company on the new hire’s first day with fun tidbits from the new hire as a “Get to Know You”

  • Announcement at the company All-Hands and invite the new hire to introduce themselves

• Send the new hire some goodies or branded swag to their house or place it on their desk for their first day.
  Y’all know how I feel about getting free stuff! 😂

  • Branded T-shirts, pens, notebooks, stickers, etc.

  • Their favorite snack/candy

  • A printout of your company’s OGSM and values

  • A box/sampling of your company’s products

• If relevant, assign a desk to the employee.

IT’s Checklist

• Set up the new hire’s laptop and accessories.

  • Does the new hire get a choice of Mac or PC? Does it depend on the role? Is there specific software that needs to be pre-uploaded into the laptop?

  • Prepare any other accessories that are necessary for the role - docks, monitors, keyboards + mice, headphones, webcam, etc.

  • For remote employees, do employees get a stipend to purchase equipment or is equipment sent to their house?

• Set up the new hire’s accounts.

  • Add the new hire to any necessary software for their roles - Slack/Teams, email + email groups, shared drives, CRM, etc.

• Set up the new hire’s fob/access code.

  • Make sure the new hire has access to the building, office, any other building amenities (ex: gym, parking garage, etc.).

🚨Reminder to make sure all of these are tracked in a system so that if the new hire departs from the company, you know what equipment, accessories, and software to collect or turn off.

Manager’s Checklist

• Prepare role-based training materials for the new hire.

  • Introduction to how you manage and your expectations of the new hire, including PTO expectations, when to clock in and out, etc.

  • Reiterate job description and key metrics (especially important for sales roles with quotas)

  • Add to specific Slack channels, email groups, and calendar invites

  • Train on how this specific team uses certain software

  • Train on specific product knowledge and how this specific team utilizes it

• After their email address is set up, send invites for dedicated meetings with the manager or relevant team members.

  • Your first 1:1 on Day 1

  • Lunch with the new hire’s team to get to know each other

  • Dedicated check-ins for the first 30/60/90 days

  • Dedicated training/shadowing times

• Work with Talent Development to enroll the employee into necessary courses/training.

  • Compliance Training - Anti-Harrassment Training, DEI Training, Security Training, etc.

  • Product-Based Training - Dedicated training on what your company does

  • Role-Based Training - Dedicated training on the employee’s role

💡 Even though this is a collaborative effort, the new hire’s manager is probably the most important and impactful person when it comes to a successful and smooth onboarding process. Take ownership of the process!

Nice-to-Haves Checklist

These are additional “nice to haves” for your team that don’t need to be prioritized, but really add to the experience.

• Schedule an email to ask the new hire to write a Glassdoor Review after 30-90 days of joining the team.

• Share a dedicated image they can use to post on LinkedIn. This also prompts them to update their LinkedIn profile to add your company. Here’s an example of what we did at SupplyPike!

  

• Share a list of special interest groups (online or in person) that the new hire could join.

• Create a week-by-week checklist list for the new hire to provide direction to them (and less pressure on you to tell them what to do). I’m thinking about writing a post about this in the future, so stay tuned!

💻 Look at Your Tech Stack

If you recall my soapbox from a while ago, your tech stack matters. We used Rippling as our HRIS and I highly recommend their software because they had all the different modules needed to make this a success for the new hire. They also had automations/workflows built into the platform that integrated with tools like Slack, G Suite, etc. so that you could easily customize the software to suit your specific needs. Literally everything I listed above was done automatically by the software. Again, this is not sponsored but like…talk to us, Rippling. 👀

By checking off all the items from this list, you can ensure that your new hire will be ready for their first day. In next week’s post, we will cover what happens post-Day 1!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! What was something your current or previous employers have done during orientation that you’ve enjoyed? Leave a comment below.

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I’m on the last chapter of The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan! Deciding what I want to read next.

🍿 Watch of the Week: I finished the limited series His & Hers over the weekend and, let me tell you, I was not expecting the ending at all. 🫢

🎧 Song of the Week: I’m in a weird place with my music this week…I need some recommendations on what to listen to. Send ‘em my way!

At SupplyPike, we used a three-stage process for interviewing each candidate: a phone screen, a technical interview, and a culture fit interview. Over the past eight years, we tested a few different variations, but we kept coming back to this structure because it consistently produced the best outcomes. Here’s what we did!

💡Read Me

Here are some rules of thumb to review before we get started:

• Before you start the interview process, please ensure that any hiring manager/panelist goes through training in unconscious bias and interview etiquette/conduct. Depending on your state/country, some questions are literally illegal to ask.

• Treat your ATS (applicant tracking system) as your single source of truth. Send all communications from the ATS so that you can go back and reference anything that was said and communicated. Just like your Sales Team’s CRM, your ATS should be kept up-to-date at all times. We used Pinpoint as our ATS.

• Always refer back to the ICP to make sure you’re keeping yourself accountable.

• If possible, share the high-level stages of the interview process on the job posting so candidates are able to manage expectations before they even apply.

• Keep in mind that this is a great opportunity for your company to showcase your culture to candidates. A positive experience and word of mouth go such a long way. We have had multiple rejected candidates over the years compliment the intentionality of our interview process, continue to apply for additional roles, and even refer their friends to apply for roles. Candidates are interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing them!

The Interview Process

Here is the step-by-step interview process that we used at SupplyPike, refined and optimized over the last 8 years. Use this as a guide to building out your own process, but make this your own.

The Phone Screen

📧 Invitation to the Phone Screen

Send an email to the candidates inviting them to a phone screening.

• Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

• Method: Email

• # of Applicants: 10 candidates max; +5 candidates max for each additional seat

• Typical Script and 👉Action Items:

  • Provide a tweet-length purpose of the call and what to expect.

  • Provide times for the candidate to select from.

    • 👉Send a calendar invite to the candidate with a Zoom link (if applicable) when confirmed.

🚨Remember to send rejection emails to the applicants who you will not be moving to the next stage. Please don’t ghost applicants!

💬 The Phone Screen

The first verbal conversation with a candidate to check if the candidate is who they say they are and can speak to the points on their resume, and to clarify details of the role with the candidate.

• Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

• Method: Phone or Zoom

• Duration: 15-30 min

• Typical Agenda:

  • 3-5 min - Greetings + Intros

  • 5-10 min - Ask the candidate to speak to their work experience (on and off the resume)

  • 3-5 min - Provide a brief overview of the job description

  • 3-5 min - Clarify salary expectations with the candidate

  • 3-5 min - Questions from the candidate

  • 1-2 min - Next steps + timeline expectations

The Technical Interview

🔁 Technical Interview Panelists Prep

Coordinate with panelists that you would like to be involved in the interview process. 💡Pro-Tip: One of the hardest parts of this is coordinating your panelists’ schedules. Go ahead and put calendar holds on the panelists’ schedules once you start phone screening.

Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

Method: Slack/Teams

Action Items:

• Ask panelists to be a part of the interview (5 panelists max). Keep panelists the same for all candidates. In order of importance, this should be the general makeup of your panel.

  • 1 Hiring Manager

  • 1 Founding Member/Senior Leader (can overlap with the below criteria)

  • 1-2 employees this role would collaborate with on the same team

  • 1-2 employees this role would collaborate with from different teams

• Send calendar holds to block times on their schedules

• Start a private Slack/Teams channel to disseminate information

  • Share links to candidate profiles from the ATS/resumes

  • Share technical interview prompt

  • Share the ICP

  • Share links to technical interview rubrics/score sheets for panelist feedback

  • Share any updates from candidates (ex: running late, questions, thank you emails, etc.)

• Archive the channel when hiring process is complete

A Note on Technical Interviews: The purpose of Technical Interviews is to see a sample of the candidate’s work, check their ability to follow instructions, and to see how they collaborate and receive feedback. The purpose is NOT to get the candidate to do “free labor” on behalf of the company. Make it clear that candidates should not take more than 1-2 hours to prepare and that their work will not be used in production.

I could probably do an entire post on Technical Interview questions and prompts. Let me know if there would be any interest!

📧 Invitation to the Technical Interview

Based on the phone screenings, send an email to the candidates inviting them to a technical interview.

• Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

• Method: Email

• # of Applicants: 5 candidates max; +2 candidates max for each additional seat

• Typical Script and 👉Action Items:

• Provide a tweet-length purpose of the interview and what to expect.

• Provide times for the candidate to select from.

  • 👉Send a calendar invite to the candidate with a Zoom link (if applicable) when confirmed.

  • 👉Schedule the technical interview prompts to send out at consistent times. Ex: Each candidate receives the prompt 5 days before the interview.

• Reiterate anything important from the prompt to set the candidate up for success. Ex: Do not take more than 1 hour to prepare, make sure to bring your laptop for the presentation, etc.

• (Optional) Include the list of panelists that the candidate will meet in the interview. Some candidates will go the extra mile and research the panelists before the interview and prepare questions for them.

🚨Remember to send rejection emails to the applicants who you will not be moving to the next stage. Please don’t ghost applicants!

💬 The Technical Interview

A checkpoint to see a sample of the candidate’s work, their ability to follow instructions, and their presentation, communication, and collaboration skills.

• Completed by: Hiring Manager and Panelists

• Method: Prioritize In-Person, but at least Zoom Call

  • For key positions and if the budget allows, fly remote candidates to meet them in person.

• Duration: 60 min (but book 90 min on the calendar for the Culture Fit)

• Typical Agenda:

  • 5-10 min - Greetings + Intro Panelists

  • 15 min - Candidate’s Technical Interview Presentation

  • 15 min - Presentation Q&A from Panelists

  • 15 min - Behavioral Q&A from Panelists

  • 5-10 min - Q&A from Candidate to Panelists

  • 1-2 min - Next steps + timeline expectations

The Culture Fit Interview

While you should be assessing culture fit throughout the entire interview process, the Culture Fit interview is a dedicated time to get to know the candidate at a deeper level than what’s on their resume. The purpose of the Culture Fit interviews is NOT to practice unconscious (or conscious) bias. This is a great time to remind your team, especially inexperienced panelists, of the questions they legally can and cannot ask.

💬The Culture Fit Interview

A checkpoint to see what the candidate would be like to work with and if they would add to the company’s existing culture.

• Completed by: Hiring Manager and Panelists

• Method: Prioritize In-Person, but at least Zoom Call

  • For key positions and if the budget allows, fly remote candidates to meet them in person.

  • If possible, it’s a great idea to move the location of the interview to a coffee shop to shift the tone of the interview.

• Duration: 30 min

• Typical Agenda:

  • If the candidate successfully “passes” the technical interview, naturally transition them to the culture fit portion of the interview. If they do not, end the interview.

  • This portion is typically less scripted. Try to just have an organic conversation.

  • Ask a healthy mix of personal and work-related culture questions, such as:

    • “Personal” Culture Questions

      • What do you like to do in your free time?

      • What Netflix shows are you watching?

      • I’m personally not a fan of the “if you were an insect, what would you be?” type of questions

    • “Work-Related” Culture Questions

      • What are you looking for in your next role?

      • What type of manager do you respond best to? What’s the worst experience with a manager you’ve had and why?

      • How do you destress?

  • Next steps + timeline expectations

The Offer

Woohoo! 🎉 You’ve made it to the end of the interview process! Hopefully, you have a clear direction on which candidate you would be most interested in making an offer to. Remember, if none of the candidates stood out to you, it is okay to make no offers and start the process again.

💬The Verbal Offer

• Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

• Method: Phone Call

• Duration: 10-15 min

• Typical Script:

  • Call the candidate to let them know you would like to offer them the position.

  • Be prepared to answer questions about the role, start date, compensation, and benefits package. Know what can and cannot be negotiated.

    • Keep in mind that candidates will typically need 2 weeks to provide their current place of employment notice of their departure.

  • Let the candidate know to expect an email with a recap of the offer so they have time to digest the information before accepting.

📧The Written Offer

• Completed by: The Recruiter (if available) or Hiring Manager

• Method: Email

• Typical Script:

  • Send a recap of the offer with any adjustments that were discussed on the phone.

  • Provide the candidate with a deadline to accept or decline the offer.

🚨Remember to send rejection emails to the applicants that you will not be sending an offer to. At this stage, candidates have spent a lot of their personal time interviewing with your team. Offer to hop on a call with them if they would like to discuss the decision further. 💡Pro-Tip: If you have a close runner-up, do not send them the rejection email until your #1 candidate has accepted the offer.

Post-Interview Survey

An optional but extremely valuable step in the process, after the interview stage is complete, is to send a Post-Interview Survey to all candidates. It was important to us as the Talent Acquisition Team to see what gaps and successes we had in the interview process. It was also a great way for us to share any specific feedback with hiring managers on how they carried out the process.

Questions on the Survey:

• On a scale from 1-10, how was your interview experience?

• On a scale from 1-10, how likely are you to recommend SupplyPike to your friends or colleagues?

• Please share any specific feedback on your hiring experience with us.

As mentioned earlier, we used Pinpoint as our ATS, and it had a built-in feature to conduct the survey automatically. If your ATS doesn’t have this functionality, I recommend sending the survey from a generic email like “hr@company.com.”

Now that you’ve successfully hired your candidate, it’s time to prepare for their first day! Next week, I will be going over Orientation Day. 👋

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Am I forgetting anything? What has been your team’s most effective interview process? Leave a comment below.

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I just started the Percy Jackson series for the first time! Starting with The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, of course!

🍿 Watch of the Week: I watched The Smashing Machine last week as an Oscars watch, and it was really good! The nomination for makeup was definitely deserved.

🎧 Song of the Week: I mean, is anyone listening to anything other than Bad Bunny this week?!

Because of that, I’m spending this month focused on just one core theme: hiring.

The people on your team are the single biggest driver of your company’s success. So it’s important to realize that your hiring process is the first (and sometimes only) line of defense. Who you bring in shapes how work gets done, how decisions are made, and ultimately, how your culture feels. One bad hire doesn’t just slow things down; it can ripple across communication, trust, and morale in ways that are hard to undo.

In this post, I’ll be focusing on the work that needs to get done before you even make a decision to add to your headcount.

5 Steps to Take Before You Hire

🖐️ 1. Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

Before we even get started, I’m about to become your CFO’s best friend and throw the biggest stop sign in the air. It’s so important to first ask yourself, “Do we actually need to make this hire?”

Salaries and Benefits is typically one of the largest, if not the largest, expense categories on a company’s financial statement. If you start hiring without the right checks and balances, this line item can get really bloated, really fast. It’s also an incredibly challenging and distracting problem to fix down the road. An oversized team can lead to too many cooks in the kitchen, declining productivity, and rising frustration as people struggle to find clear ownership and meaningful work.

It’s important to note that this exercise is a delicate balance. On one hand, you want to avoid hiring too many folks and end up facing a reduction in force or layoff later. On the other hand, you can’t keep the purse strings so tight that the entire team suffers because they’re stretched too thin. Work closely with your CFO to have transparent conversations about the state of the business to determine what levers you actually have at your disposal. This step is really about pressure-testing the need before jumping to the solution, and setting yourself up to hire with intention.

👁️ 2. Be intentional

So, how do we actually do this? Once you’ve confirmed the hire is necessary, the next step is being intentional about how you plan, budget, and justify that headcount. These are some of the strategies we used at SupplyPike that worked well:

Start with the Budget

During budgeting season, I recommend putting forth the highest number you might need for headcount, while still staying grounded in reality. To be clear - don’t ask for 10 people when you only need 3. But, if you think you’ll need 3.5, round up to 4. Doing this will make conversations easier for you down the road. In the middle of the year, it’s a lot easier to spend less money by not hiring the extra person than to go back and ask for incremental headcount later.

PS: wrote an in-depth post on how to convert your GTM goals into sales headcount numbers. I highly recommend checking it out!

Metrics-Driven Hiring

As you build out your budget, be sure to understand the logic behind the headcount you’re requesting. For example:

• Hire an Ops employee for every 50 employees added to the total headcount, or

• Hire an AE for every $1M ARR we need to close

Document and discuss this logic with your CFO. These milestones will act as the key to unlocking your job reqs in the new year. 🔑 As the year progresses, hitting those milestones unlocks new hires. If you don’t hit them (and I know this can be painful), you don’t unlock the hire, even if it was budgeted. This keeps you disciplined and mitigates bloat.

As an example, let’s say you and your CFO agree on a 1 CSM:100 customers ratio. You budgeted that you would close 100 new customers and, therefore, hire a new CSM by June.

• Scenario 1: It’s June, and you’ve only closed 50 new customers.

  • 👉You would not hire the new CSM because there would not be enough work for them to do.

• Scenario 2: It’s June, and you’ve closed 150 new customers.

  • 👉You should have already hired a new CSM when you crossed the 100-customer mark. Based on this trajectory, you might even need to start discussing an additional CSM headcount with your CFO.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

You’ll hear me say this a million times in this post, but always stay in communication with your CFO to make sure you are aligned on this logic and the state of the business. A shocking number of leaders only talk to their Finance leadership during budgeting season. Alignment throughout the year not only makes it easier to get things done - it’s the difference between constantly asking for permission and actually operating as a true business partner.

Our ex-CFO Micah Bender actually wrote a great post about this on LinkedIn from a CFO’s perspective!

🙋‍♀️ 3. Be Proactive

Most companies manage their budgets on a month-to-month basis. However, because hiring cycles can last 2-3 months, be sure to stay ahead of your budget and post jobs today for roles that you’ll need in 3 months. For harder-to-fill roles, you may even need to be planning 6-9 months in advance.

Building on the CSM example from the previous section: If we budgeted to hire an additional CSM in June, we should be looking at our customer count trajectories in March/April to determine if we should post our job.

💡Things to Consider:

• If you have a new hire slotted for January, this could mean posting roles in October or November of the current year, before budgets are approved. Talk with your CFO.

• If the numbers are not trending as quickly as you’d like, but the role has historically taken 6 months to fill, it might still be worth your while to post the position anyway, knowing you have an extended lead time. 💡Remember: posting on your job board is free. Filling the positions before you need to is not.

• If your role typically has a higher turnover/promotion rate (like BDRs), you may decide to staff more headcount than strictly necessary in order to mitigate gaps on the team. Be sure to keep your pipelines full and warm so you can shorten the hiring cycle as much as possible.

🔎 4. Be Clear

After completing parts 1-3, you should have a very clear picture of who you need to hire and when. A very crucial next step in this process is to actually document what this role will be doing and the skills needed to be successful. It sounds so obvious, but trust me, I’ve been on the receiving end of this not being done too many times!

To combat this, the hiring team at SupplyPike decided to build an “ICP” for each role we wanted to hire. ICP is a term typically used by GTM teams to document the Ideal Customer Profile. It’s a short, easy-to-digest, and, more importantly, easy-to-remember description of your target market, and is very effective in focusing your GTM teams.

So, we stole that concept and applied it to hiring! 😏

For us, ICP stood for Ideal Candidate Profile. We created a short questionnaire that hiring managers were required to fill out, forcing them to slow down, think, and be intentional about who they actually needed to hire. This clarity was valuable not just for recruiters but for interview panelists as well. As a panelist, having that level of alignment straight from the source made evaluating candidates much easier. As recruiters, it also gave us something concrete to point back to when a hiring manager inevitably started wavering or getting enamored with candidates who didn’t truly fit the profile. #accountability

Key questions from our questionnaire:

• Job title

• Job description

• Salary range (for HR/Recruitment-eyes only)

• Key metrics this role would be responsible for

• What success looks like in the first 6–12 months

• Team dynamics HR/panelists should be aware of

• Remote-friendly or not

• Non-negotiables

If you decide to apply this at your company, a few quick recommendations:

• The questionnaire is an internal-only doc, so it doesn’t need to be super clean or presentable

• It shouldn’t take more than 20-30 minutes for your hiring manager to fill out - if they struggle with this, that’s usually a signal that they don’t yet have clarity on what they need, which makes hiring harder and increases the risk of bringing in the wrong person.

  • This is a great opportunity for your recruiting team to step in and help bring that clarity.

Note: Of course, every hiring manager wants to hire the best possible person at a reasonable cost. Part of the recruiting team’s role is helping hiring managers stay grounded in what’s realistic for the market and the salary range. Some hiring managers can get bogged down in the details and define ICPs with “non-negotiables” that simply don’t exist (or don’t exist at certain compensation levels 👀). If time passes without success, it’s worth revisiting the ICP and discussing whether some non-negotiables should become negotiables.

📑 5. Recruitment Strategy

Now that we’re set up, let’s go out and get our candidate pipeline filled! As you search for the right candidates, spend some time thinking about your recruitment strategy to make sure you are putting your efforts into the right places. For example,

• For all positions, do the standard “textbook” recruitment strategy, like post the job on job boards, update your LinkedIn with the #hiring tag, reach out to your network, etc.

• For entry-level positions and internships, leverage college/university events like career fairs, speaking in classrooms, and good old-fashioned word of mouth.

• For entry- to mid-level positions, you can probably rely on your hiring managers and any in-house TA teams to handle filling these positions.

• For senior-level or niche/technical positions, you may have better luck connecting with dedicated external recruiters in these niche spaces. Personally, I’m a bit 50/50 on this. Some roles are just really hard to fill.

• For leadership roles, we have tried using external recruitment firms in the past and hired candidates from them. However, while their resumes might fit the bill, we have found a harder time with culture fit. Ultimately, we decided that promoting from within was the best route for us. If that’s not an option for your team, be sure to really spend time with the candidates you talk to and suss out alignment on culture and leadership philosophy.

Saying this as someone who ran a TA team, when engaging with TA teams and external recruiters, keep in mind that they are typically incentivized by filling positions, not necessarily filling positions with the right people. You are responsible for that. So, speak up and don’t settle for less, or it will become a problem - your problem - in the future. At SupplyPike, we had a hiring philosophy that took us far - every new hire should raise the bar of the company.

Now that you’ve completed the prep for hiring, you can post your job! Next week, I will be going over the interview process and making an offer. 📝

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Am I forgetting anything? Do you have a funny recruitment story to tell? Leave a comment below 👇

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Have a wonderful week!

Christine

Christine’s Corner

📖 Read of the Week: I’m still making my way through People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry! The book version and movie version are definitely sisters, not twins.

🍿 Watch of the Week: I finally watched Fargo and I can see why it’s a classic. Frances McDormand is so good and William H. Macy is so good at being bad.

🎧 Song of the Week: APT. by ROSE and Bruno Mars has been on repeat in our house. Another favorite of my son!

As a WRT milestone, we have hit over 30 subscribers since launching at the beginning of the month! 🤯 and I are so excited about the support we’ve seen from our friends, coworkers, and people we’ve never even met (hiya 👋)! Thank you all for trusting us with your inboxes! 💌

Since we’re still in January, I wanted to stick with the theme of discussing Goals, but shift our focus to chatting about the career goals of the folks on your team. Career growth conversations aren’t just “nice to haves.” They’re how you show your team that you see them as people with a future, not just resources hitting a number.

🗣️ Talk to Me, Tell Me All About It

Now that budgets are approved (please tell me they’ve been approved 🙏) and your goals have been set, the beginning of the year is a really great time to sit down with your direct reports to see where their heads are at. It’s a chance to check in after the holidays, talk through the goals your team needs to hit, and set expectations around what budgets were (and weren’t) approved.

As managers, many of us are guilty of getting bogged down in tactical conversations with our directs - I used to be guilty of that myself! It’s important, though, to intentionally create space for discussions about career aspirations and growth opportunities at the company as well.

A Brief History

As with any startup, in the early days of SupplyPike, promotions and career growth opportunities were easier to come by because every single person was doing the job of at least 20 people. I was promoted 4 times in 3 years because the business need kept presenting itself. In fact, our entire executive leadership team started as ICs during the startup and scale-up phase of SupplyPike and were promoted at a pretty similar pace.

As the business grew, so did our team. When we hit ~75 employees, we reached an inflection point and realized that we needed to start formalizing things like our org chart, career pathing, performance reviews, and merit cycles. Then, when we hit ~135 employees, it became clear that we needed dedicated resources focused on this work. So, we built a dedicated Talent Development Team (shoutout to the magical, mystical Kayla Woessner, who brought this entire vision to life!) to further optimize and improve our employee experience around growth and development.

Here’s what we did…

🗓️ Year At-A-Glance

This is how we structured our year when thinking about employee performance. FYI - this week’s article will dive deeper into Career Convos specifically, but leave a comment if you’d like to hear more about the rest!

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• ↕️ Career Convos every January-February

  • Career Convos were used as check-ins and not tied to merit increases.

  • They were held between managers and employees only.

• 🔄 Performance Reviews every June-July

  • Performance Reviews were tied to a formal merit increase cycle.

  • They included 360s with self-reviews, manager reviews, peer reviews, and employee reviews.

• 📆 Year-Round Expectations

  • Promotions: We didn’t have formal promotion cycles. Promotions happened year-round and were accounted for during the regular budgeting season, which started in Q3 of the previous year.

    • Though we felt it wasn’t necessary to bundle promotions into a single cycle, many of our managers naturally anchored their budgets/headcount planning to the Career Convos and Performance Review seasons, as these moments provided the space for more formal, transitional conversations with employees.

  • Feedback: Top-down and bottoms-up feedback was expected year-round, even with “formal” checkpoints for this. All managers were expected to have 1:1s with their team members at least monthly, where this type of feedback could be shared.

🧂 Grain of Salt: There are about a million ways to run these types of programs, so I wanted to be clear that this is just something that worked for us. We were able to run 2 full cycles of this structure (over the course of 2 years) and saw success with it! Like any program, we’d continue to improve it over time by gathering feedback and making adjustments as needed.

🎙️ Career Convos

Here was our structure for doing Career Convos at SupplyPike.

The Setup

• Every employee would complete Career Convos, including interns.

  💡 Pro-Tip: Interns are a great pipeline for your future workforce. Don’t forget about them when it comes to career development - it goes a long way toward retention. No surprise here…they want to invest in companies that invest in them!

• We used a software called Leapsome to facilitate this process.

• Employees and managers each received separate questions to complete.

  • Managers could view their employees’ responses when submitted.

  • Employees could view their manager’s responses once they were “published”, typically 1-2 business days before their formal discussion.

• Employees and managers held 1:1s to discuss the responses on the form.

  • Both parties would e-sign off on the Career Convos to finalize them.

• Behind the scenes, the Talent Development team followed up with managers and employees to ensure completion…there was so. Much. Follow-up. 🙈

The Questions

For the Employee:

• What are the top 2-3 skills you are most proud of in the last 6 months?

• What are the top 2-3 skills you want to work on for the next 6 months?

• What can you do to achieve these goals?

• What excites you about this year?

• Is there anything else you would like your manager to know?

For the Manager:

• What are the top 2-3 skills you have seen from this employee over the last 6 months?

• What are the top 2-3 skills this employee needs to work on for the next 6 months?

• What can you do to help this employee achieve their goals?

• Is there anything else you would like this employee to know?

Notes:

• Any reference to “skills” would be selected from a list in their respective Skills Matrix. The Skills Matrix was a rubric-style grid for every role family that showcased the skills needed to be exemplified (y-axis) across the different levels along the career path (x-axis). I plan on writing an entire post on our Skills Matrices soon, so stay tuned for that! 👀

• Since we alternated between Career Convos and Performance Reviews every six months, we focused our questions around “6 month” time periods.

The Convos

After the responses were submitted on Leapsome, employees and managers were expected to have a formal 1:1 to review their responses together.

We coached employees to:

• Be prepared and actively participate in the conversation.

• Be clear about their wants for their careers, but mindful that not every want translates into a business need.

• Be receptive to feedback and be ready to discuss solutions.

• Be curious and clarify any uncertainties about the feedback they received.

We coached managers to:

• Be knowledgeable about career path opportunities and business needs that might impact their employees.

• Be ready to constructively discuss specific examples of any feedback.

• Be receptive to feedback and be ready to discuss solutions.

The most important thing to note here is that this 1:1 is not and should not be the only time career development conversations are had. Takeaways from both parties should be noted and followed up on in the next agreed upon 1:1, but at least monthly.

Additionally, if your team ever needs help with prepping for these 1:1s or finding solutions, HR or a dedicated Talent Development team can be great resources, or at least sounding boards! Our team also established self-led Management and IC Peer Groups where they leaned on each other for support when talking through these situations.

💻 Look at Your Tech Stack

I’m gonna step on a soapbox for a second, so bear with me here.

If you are in a position to select the tools your entire company is expected to use (ex: writing reviews, requesting PTO, training, etc.), it is to your advantage to select a tool that brings delight. 💖

Our employees actually told us that they liked and looked forward to our Career Convo and Performance Review seasons. Crazy, right? In addition to hopefully actually enjoying the process, I truly think our tech stack had a big part to play here. Our team genuinely enjoyed using a tool like Leapsome when completing our reviews (I swear this is not a sponsored post but…like…let’s talk 👀). We built our Skills Matrices into their system, it integrated with our HRIS, we could pull reporting on completion rates and skills measurements, etc. It was great for employees, managers, and us admins to use!

Selecting a tool that brings delight to your team = higher engagement and usage, and that makes your numbers look better too!

Okay, stepping off the box now. 😇

🤔 Out with Performance Reviews?

Over the last few years, I’ve heard some discourse from newsletters I follow and conferences I’ve attended around cancelling Performance Reviews altogether. 🤯 While I’ve always thought it was an interesting concept, I’ve never felt like I’ve gotten a clear answer on what the alternative would be that still preserves the benefits of a formal review.

From personal experience, even though our team expected free-flowing feedback year-round from both managers and employees, we consistently heard positive feedback about our formal review process. Most of the complaints we heard were logistical - not having enough time to write or having too many to write. Also, not to be a teacher’s pet, but I genuinely believe that reviews also play an important role in helping surface risk factors like unconscious bias or pervasive performance issues. I’ve personally had to produce Performance Reviews as documentation for HR and Legal before, and in those situations, they can truly be helpful.

Even with that perspective, I’m still genuinely curious about what alternatives can look like in practice. The thoughts above are just genuine musings of mine. If anyone has successfully (or unsuccessfully) implemented “no performance reviews” at their company, I would love to hear more about this!

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Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Please leave a comment with a retention program you’ve liked or your plans for Valentine’s Day! 💕

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!
Christine

Christine’s Corner

• 📖 Read of the Week: I’m slowly making my way through People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry! Already noticing the differences between the book and movie. 👀

• 🍿 Watch of the Week: If there are any parents of young kids out there, what is with the ending of We’re Going on a Bear Hunt?!

• 🎧 Song of the Week: I just learned that my 15mo loves Golden from KPop Demon Hunters, so that’s been playing on repeat.

I decided to take this post to write about something a little more fun, and our very first post about company culture! 🎉 I will be breaking down the most successful employee experience program we implemented at SupplyPike, which, among other things, helped us become the #1 best place to work in Arkansas and boast a steady 95%+ YoY employee retention rate.

Btw, if you’re on our website, you can navigate to the “Culture Code” section to view this and all our future posts about culture!

Happy reading!

🏢 Setting the Scene

In 2022, our team had drastically outgrown the 5,000 sq ft space we had in Fayetteville. We had no choice but to move offices. Our best option was a 12,500 sq ft location in Rogers.

The biggest problem? The commute was roughly 25 minutes away from the current office…which may as well be 2 hours in Arkansas time.

When fall/winter arrived, SAD (seasonal affective disorder) hit us hard. In a post-COVID era of hybrid work, even though we moved into 2.5x more space, we probably had 2.5x fewer people come in.

The outcome? People stopped engaging. Organic water cooler talks and collaboration weren’t happening, folks stopped showing up to events, and social Slack channels started dying down. If folks did come into the office, they would leave right as it got dark around 3:30pm.

In addition to the work suffering, it just started not feeling like SupplyPike anymore.

⚡️ Inspiration Strikes

Since employee retention was the North Star metric for the Ops Team, we were already doing all the “textbook” things to combat this - hosting events and promoting them heavily, sending out surveys to ask what we could be doing better, etc., but we just weren’t getting through.

So, one day in Q4 2022, during a regular brainstorm, I pitched a crazy idea to my Operations Manager and partner-in-crime, Matt Vu.

He said yes! And the rest is history.

👩‍🔬 The Experiment

These were the 3 core beliefs about the SupplyPike team we were counting on:

1. People RESPOND to a little competition

2. People LOVE free stuff

3. People DESPISE FOMO

So…

1. Competition: We gamified engagement for the quarter
   ➡️ You had to participate in X number of events/surveys in the quarter to win

2. Free stuff: Only winners would receive a free SupplyPike-branded hoodie

3. FOMO: “Losers” would get nothing

We both agreed to try this experiment for one quarter. If it tanked, we’d never do it again. If it succeeded, we’d keep going.

And boyyyyy did it succeed! People went CRAZY for this. We were met with a literally overwhelming response!

• Since we created a check-in system to track “points,” people were asking us about their progress all the time. Eventually, our dev team created a Slackbot for us during a Hackathon to help with our response times 🙏🙏🙏.

• Since we didn’t have designs for the hoodie yet, people asked about it at every Weekly Roundtable. 💡 Pro-Tip: We learned that the mystery actually kept employees motivated throughout the quarter, so we intentionally did not confirm designs until month 3.

• Since we had typically only announced events on an ad hoc basis, people started asking for our events for the entire quarter so they could plan their PTO dates around us. 🤯 So, we had to learn to be more proactive when planning events each quarter.

Results

By the end of the quarter, folks were either bribing the Ops Team for bonus points, begging their coworkers for “black market” deals on their swag, or brainstorming (loudly) what swag items they wanted for the following quarter. (Don’t even get me started on polos. 👕🙄)

In addition to all the fun and passion we saw for this program, we had also met our ultimate goal of getting employees engaged again. It felt like there was a certain energy pumped back into the team - people were collaborating again, people were in the office again (by their own choice), and it was starting to feel like SupplyPike once more.

Needless to say, we continued with the program. 3 years later, people still have the same level of enthusiasm for the program as they did when we started. (And before you ask, yes, they did get polos.)

✨ The Program Today

After 3 years of feedback and adjustments, this is how our program stood as of 2025.

The Events

Each quarter would generally have 18 points possible, roughly breaking down to:

• Day in the Life Seminars (1x/month = 3 points/quarter)

  Day in the Life Seminars were our take on cross-training and increased collaboration across the org. Employees would present their backgrounds and showcase literally what their day-to-day looked like at SupplyPike. These events saw some of our highest attendance.

• Lunch and Learns (1x/month = 3 points/quarter)

  Lunch and Learns were employee-led sessions based on their special interests. We’ve had presentations on candle-making, karate, how to solve a Rubik’s cube, and even hands-on stained glass workshops! These provided a really fun way for employees to learn about new non-work topics and gave folks who maybe didn’t usually present an opportunity to share some cool knowledge.

• Company Events (1x low-commitment event/month + 1x high-commitment event/month = 6 points/quarter)

  Company Events were Ops Team-led events to provide space for socializing and bonding across teams. Typical low-commitment events would be very simple and short events on-site (ex: Chili Cook-Off). Typical high-commitment events would be after-hours and offsite (ex: Company Field Day).

• Surveys (1x event survey/month + 1x pulse survey/month = 6 points/quarter)

  Surveys were our way of receiving feedback from the team. Event surveys were focused on the delivery of our events. Pulse surveys were focused on the employee’s overall experience at SupplyPike.

• Product Series (1x/quarter = 1 bonus point)

  Product Series was product-led over 5 weeks. Each Product Manager had the opportunity to present on their own product’s performance, feature recaps, and upcoming releases.

The Reward System

Our typical reward breakdown would be:

• Complete 5 of 6 surveys = $10 gift card

• Participate in 11 of 18 events (60%) = “Small” prize

• Participate in 16 of 18 events (90%) = “Big” prize

Rewards would stack, meaning you could receive all three rewards each quarter.

Note: Remote employees could also receive the rewards if they also completed 60% and/or 90% of the remote-friendly options that quarter.

A Note on Inclusivity

Understanding that each employee is coming from their own walk of life, we designed our events throughout the quarter to try to encompass as many people as we could. I’m sure we were far from perfect, but we tried our best to accommodate our specific workforce. Some examples:

• Events during regular work hours to accommodate parents of young children.

• Virtual-friendly events to accommodate our growing hybrid/remote employee population, as well as employees who do not thrive in crowded environments.

• We partnered closely with ERGs to plan events throughout the year that were specific to that group. Ex: Lunar New Year with the Asian American ERG 🧧, Pride Drag Brunch with the LGBTQIA+ ERG 🌈, etc.

• We also requested feedback monthly, specifically on why employees did not attend our events to ensure we kept this top of mind.

👂For Your Consideration

At the end of the day, the point of this post is not to get every company using this specific point system with these specific events for employee engagement. If there’s one rule you’ll hear from Weekly Roundtable time and time again, it’s this: authenticity goes a long, long way.

Employees are the heart and soul of your company, engagement should never be performative or for the sake of just “having fun.” Figure out what your core beliefs are for your team, be brave, and try something new that might maximize the experience for them (and their output too!). You never know, you might find that next thing that will make your company the best place to work!

If you are thinking about implementing something similar at your company, here are some things to consider:

• Budget: Do you have the budget to purchase company-branded swag? If not, what non-monetary rewards might be available to your team? Ex: An extra day of PTO, or a special face-to-face time with your CEO, or summer Fridays.

• Time: Does your culture allow for events during the work hours? How would your company handle clocking in and out for events? Our hourly employees remained clocked in since our events were meant for team bonding and/or professional development.

• Remote-Only Teams: In this day and age, more and more companies are moving to remote-only. You can still implement something like this, but, obviously, make sure the events are remote-friendly. For global teams, try asynchronous events to account for multiple time zones. Ex: Step/fitness challenges, scavenger hunts, etc.

If you have any other questions you’d like to talk through, please start a conversation in the chat! I’d love to help!

Thank you for taking the time to read this post! Please leave a comment a program your company does that you enjoy or your plans for Valentine’s Day! 💕

Leave a comment

Have a wonderful week!
Christine

Christine’s Corner

• 📖 Read of the Week: I officially finished Iron Flame last week!! Now for a bit of a palate cleanser, People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry. If you haven’t watched the movie on Netflix, it had no business being that good.

• 🍿 Watch of the Week: Traitors Season 4 y’all!!!!! Please drop a comment if you’re watching too!

• 🎧 Song of the Week: I just went to a karaoke party where the vibes were immaculate ✨ and the last song we sang together was a classic and karaoke favorite of mine - Forget You by Cee-Lo Green.