Onboarding and adaptation at Vivid
Vivid is growing. Grow with Vivid. It’s a pretty clear statement. Our teams keep growing as the business does. In order to hire great talent, Vivid’s Talent Management and Culture team has been working hard to ensure that the onboarding process, regardless of whether online or offline, is effective.
Vivid was launched in Germany during the pandemic, so it was a no-brainer to create an online and offline onboarding process. We needed to create an onboarding process that would work optimally in both cases, taking into account the constantly-changing pandemic situation and government regulations.
Onboarding employees in a new remote location can be a challenge. Two years ago, we were skeptical about this format. Now we are quietly hiring employees across Europe and successfully managing the onboarding process and sharing our experience with you.
Here is our recipe to success when onboarding employees, no matter where they are.
Pre-onboarding
Make the new employee feel welcome from minute one. That’s it.
Just imagine: before the first working day you open the newly created Vivid mailbox and see a welcome letter, together with the details of your onboarding, which indicates the necessary accesses and general information about us. By the way, we don't want to stop there, we also launched a totally Vivid-branded landing page summarizing the onboarding process at Vivid. This is a win-win situation: the employee gets to see how their onboarding will be, and for the Talent Management and Culture team, we put across the entire process in an engaging visual.
Equipment? Our IT Support team makes sure that the new employee gets their needed equipment, and determines if it needs to be picked up or sent home.
We also offer a welcome package. We make sure that all new employees get excited to join us (as much as we are) by providing a cool Vivid kit:
First day at Vivid
On the first day, the employees are presented with an onboarding presentation by our HR manager with all necessary information to kick off the best time of their life at Vivid. Key for us is to keep optimizing this presentation and make it truly personalized to the employee’s location and conditions depending on their team.
Afterwards, our newbies start meeting with their managers and key stakeholders and get slowly introduced to their work. They also establish main goals for their first three months of employment.
What about all of those non-work-related topics that the newbie needs to get acquainted with? We have developed a Buddy program. A Buddy is for us a newcomer's friend at Vivid, who helps the newcomer acclimatize to the company. A Buddy is always ready to help and answer any question, offer guidance regarding day-to-day aspects and introduce the new employee to our company culture.
By the end of the first week
The newbies and the managers sit down and set up goals for the probation period. “What needs to be achieved? What is expected from me? What are my KPIs?” Yes, those are all discussed well in advance. These plans work wonders to clarify and summarize all important work-related blocks. Typically, the plan includes the study of internal regulations, GDPR training, familiarity with products or technologies, internal processes, projects and/or tasks to complete.
By the end of the first two months
Key meetings as part of the onboarding are essential to ensure that the employees are familiarized with the product, their manager, key stakeholders, policies and ultimately, to even get to have lunch with our founders!
This is a sneak peek of our onboarding key meetings:
- Knowledge Breakfast. One hour dedicated to presenting different teams and scope of work to the new Vividians. Cross-functionality is how we do things at Vivid.
- Vivid App Introduction. What does our app look like and how does it work? This meeting provides insight into it.
- Call with HR. Our HR Managers take over and have a chat about how the first two months at Vivid felt for the employees.
- Lunch with Alexander Emeshev. Lunch with one of our co-founders, digitally or face-to-face, why not? ;)
Lunch with Alexander Emeshev
By the end of the first three months
We do have company rituals, of course. It is always exciting for our newbies to get to experience these for the first time:
- Monday talk. Company wide meeting in which latest company updates are shared by respective involved employees.
- Open talk. Q&A time! Time to show our Radically Honest value. “When is our next team event?” or “How can one follow a Learning Path on our LMS?” - those are all welcome.
- Townhall. Classic.
After this 3-month process, the employee has become a true Vividian and is ready to take on any challenge.
Has this article awakened your interest in Vivid? We have plenty of open positions in different fields and locations. Take a look.