A Cut above the Rest: How Papercut Uses a Values-first Approach to Onboarding
PaperCut is a global tech company based on a strong culture and commitment to their values. What started as an idea to fix overflowing recycling bins is now an innovative print management software provider that allows users to track, control, and enable more thoughtful printing. They have impacted over 50 million end users, in 180 countries across 60,000 organizations,... and have saved trillions of pages in the process.
We caught up with PaperCut’s Employee Experience Advocate Julie Starovoitova to learn more about their onboarding journey.
The Problem
This isn’t going to start with an engagement horror story - PaperCut already had a strong culture and understood the importance of onboarding before Enboarder became part of their business. They were executing a great experience for new hires, but they had some challenges that they wanted to address head on.
Challenge one - consistency and scale
Some managers were very engaged with the onboarding process, but others were not. Having doubled the size of their business in a relatively short time across the globe, the PaperCut team wanted to be able to scale and replicate the onboarding experience they had built in Australia across all their locations to ensure all new hires had the same positive experience regardless of who their manager was or where they were located. The team wanted to make sure that the traditions, culture and ‘essence’ of the business was being communicated in an engaging way to new hires.
"We wanted to deliver a consistent onboarding experience regardless of team, location, or department. We wanted to define a baseline that absolutely everyone experiences when they join us."
Challenge two - manual processes
The manual nature of their onboarding preparation left room for human error.
"Our People & Culture team had to spend a lot of time chasing up people in the business and it’s easy for little things to be forgotten when you have to remember lots of details and tasks that make up the onboarding experience for one person."
Julie said that the time required on the manual process side of the onboarding program was full on. For each new starter, the People & Culture team would need to arrange and confirm a mentor and a culture buddy, design and print off the new hire’s PaperCut ‘Boarding Pass’, organise their tech set up, line up the necessary training and culture activities (including barista training!). This all added up to at least two hours of preparation for each new hire.
"Our people are picky, we couldn’t introduce a system that looks like it’s from the early 2000s - it wouldn’t fit our business and we knew that our people would refuse to use it."
PaperCut is a tech company, and the People & Culture team knew that any onboarding system would need to be modern, flexible and provide a flawless user experience.
"We wanted to be able to spend as much time as possible on creating engaging experiences and coming up with new ideas, rather than having to spend all our time on the manual details and worry that a human error would impact negatively on a new hire’s onboarding."
Julie’s team wanted an onboarding platform that worked well, was mobile-optimised, flexible and scalable - so that the team could execute quickly and iterate on the process rather than taking on an onerous system that took a very long time to roll out.
“We wanted to be able to spend as much time as possible on creating engaging experiences and coming up with new ideas, rather than having to spend all our time on the manual details and worry that a human error would impact negatively on a new hire’s onboarding.”
The Solution
The team at PaperCut assessed several onboarding technology options looking for a solution that provided consistency, scale and process automation with an emphasis on user experience and employee engagement.
Julie wasn’t just looking for a ‘tick box’ platform to digitise administrative tasks.
"One of our core business principles is ‘relationships through delivery’ and Enboarder enabled this in the best way - it’s a creative and flexible solution that would help us to really craft an optimal experience for new hires. It wasn’t just about efficiency, but also about building relationships and engagement within the business."
Papercut uses Enboarder to deliver and manage their global onboarding and offboarding. Different locations, and remote workers, have their own workflows with content reflecting their specific needs.
With Enboarder soon to be integrated with Lever (PaperCut’s ATS), employees will be automatically launched into their relevant workflows as soon as they accept their offer letters. Enboarder’s ability to coach managers with timely reminders and nudges has provided a great solution for PaperCut’s onboarding consistency challenge.
"When something is missed, notifications remind the team and actions are followed up easily."
The Results
The People & Culture team have onboarded 74 new hires in the past year, and have experienced a 50% reduction in time needed to prepare for each new starter. When Julie reflects on the original challenges that the business was trying to solve for, she can clearly see the impact that Enboarder is having.
"We can see that our new hires have consistent onboarding experiences, and our managers are actively involved and completing their tasks. Our managers are also now more aware of just how important onboarding is, and they are very engaged in making sure they do their best to create great experiences for new hires."
In terms of employee NPS, PaperCut is seeing really strong results - sitting at 80 eNPS at the one month check in point for new hires. Feedback about Enboarder from employees and managers at PaperCut has been overwhelmingly positive.
What their employees are saying:
What the managers are saying:
The team also report that they are getting more job referrals from employees, with their people recommending PaperCut as a great place to work (as shown by their regular employee engagement surveys), and they are seeing an increase in positive reviews on Glassdoor.
Ultimately, Julie and her team have the peace of mind knowing that they are delivering consistently-amazing onboarding experiences that truly reflect the culture and values of the business.
"People walk in the door and they are excited to be here, and that’s exactly what we want."
"Our managers are now more aware of just how important onboarding is, and they are very engaged in making sure they do their best to create great experiences for new hires."
The PaperCut People & Culture team have experienced a 50% reduction in time needed to prepare for each new starter.
"It’s been a wonderful journey working with the Enboarder team. I’ve been an advocate of the platform since its early beginnings and it’s had a huge impact on our ability to deliver great employee experiences."