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We used to onboard our new team members the same way as other organizations. Now, we dedicate nearly a full week for onboarding, where every single hour of the day is scheduled and planned towards training. The result of this effort was honestly unbelievable.

How We Onboard Our Remote Engineering and Product Management Team

We used to onboard our new team members the same way as other organizations. We made sure they got their laptop, set up their email, had badge access, talked about benefits, etc. That took about half a day, and the rest was meeting with their team, then they were on their own.

Now, we dedicate nearly a full week for onboarding, where every single hour of the day is scheduled and planned towards training. Instead of throwing our team right into work, we invest in their training. The result of this effort was honestly unbelievable.

The short-term impact was immediately noticeable. Every new team member was ready to go on the fifth day. They had fewer questions and made a bigger impact on project work faster. The longer-term impact was even more substantial. We’ve noticed a stark difference in our team members that were onboarded our old way vs. the new way.

What’s interesting is that at the end of the training, our employees will usually remark about how amazing the onboarding was and how they had little to no onboarding at previous companies.

Here are two quotes that stand out from our new hires who just finished onboarding.

"Honestly, I loved the mix between docs, recorded sessions and meetings. It was great to meet the CEO and have a chance to talk with him about our core beliefs."

"The onboarding was a lot different than my last company, and that’s a good thing. It was great to get a real picture of what we’re building, and the team behind it. I really appreciated how organized and structured the process was from start to finish."

Yes, a little humblebrag there, but I really believe that being intentional about onboarding is the core of our growth.

So, at a high-level, here are our principles.

Every hour of the day should be planned and scheduled before the new hire joins

This means that by the time they open their email for the first time, their calendar is already full.

In this schedule, we cover the following topics:

Workspace logistics and operations onboarding (where most onboarding starts and stops)

 — Provide access to all the tools they’ll be using for communication, productivity, project management, etc. It’s also important that our team sets this up prior to them visiting. All they have to do is log in.

Get to know the culture of the company, and ask questions

 — This is why we created the "Foxbox Way," which is our culture handbook. It details exactly what the culture of our company is. We give them this document and give them a dedicated time on the calendar to discuss what questions they have about our culture and how we operate.

Project management/product management works (video)

 — We run a tight ship on our projects. We don’t like to leave anything up to guessing, and we give each new hire a detailed view on how we manage projects and deliver software, and what we expect from them. We provide them with a pre-recorded video about how it works. We find a video works great in situations where details don’t change much. It makes sure we don’t miss anything in a live onboarding.

 — Every new hire gets a buddy they can ask questions to. Not entirely a novel idea, but we’ve found by actually telling them, "This is your buddy," instead of, “Ask anyone a question, we’re a lovely group of people,” new hires are more likely to speak up and get their questions answered.

 — Facebook used to have a policy where new engineers would make a code commit to their public website on the first day. This allowed their engineers to get familiar with the coding environment, and also make them feel like part of the team on day one. We have a similar concept with our “core app” that is internal to us. We introduce them to the app and have them work on a planned backlog of new features.

Coding standards/pair programming sessions

 — For our engineers, we walk them through our defined coding standards, and also schedule a single pair programming session with one of our developers to get familiar on how we do things.

We used to assume that if our developers worked in an Agile environment, that they were familiar with point estimation, sprint planning, and retros. They usually were, but they weren’t familiar with how we do it, which is the most important.

So, when we put together the calendar, we try not to make any assumptions on their exact knowledge. If we assume, then the new hire might be too afraid to ask simple questions and reveal their lack of knowledge on a topic that everyone assumed they know.

We solve this by putting it on the calendar and "re-training" them on the core of how it works. It’s quick but super effective.

The Culture Handbook is the core of onboarding

A big reason we invested a lot of time in our culture handbook, "

," is because we didn’t want our new hires to guess what our culture is like.

They should know exactly how we communicate, how we talk to our clients, and how we work. They should know the story of how the company was founded and how they fit into our story. Instead of explaining this in a one-on-one meeting, we define everything in a document, and it’s the second meeting of the first day for a new hire.

We schedule the meetings so they get exposure to different team members.

Our CEO, Rob Volk presents the Foxbox Way.

Our Head of Product Management presents the PM onboarding process

And our VP of Engineering presents the engineering onboarding meeting. We also schedule follow-ups with them every day to see how they are feeling. Even though this isn’t necessarily on the calendar, we make sure that we answer any questions during the on-boarding directly.

This process alone has made our team members more productive and effective. I highly recommend that your team creates one as well. Don’t leave your culture up for guessing.

Every person gets a personalized schedule

If they are an engineer, they get the engineering onboarding. If they’re a PM, they get the PM onboarding.

I would estimate that 50% of onboarding is the same across the board, but we make sure the other 50% is unique to their role.

Also, the actual number of days of training depends on the role. Engineers tend to have the longest on-boarding since there are many tools and processes that they need to be familiar with.

But, what we also do is make sure we personalize it to them as well. Even if we hire two engineers with the same background and some role, we will incorporate special meetings we think they could add value to. For example, we had one engineer who likes to write blogs, so we connected him with our marketing team during onboarding to make him feel comfortable pitching blog posts he wants to write or needs assistance in writing.

In Notion, we create a general onboarding document for each role type, but we also create a new onboarding document for each person. That will dictate the calendar invites being sent out.

The question "Have you met Kelsey yet?" should mostly never happen

With our old onboarding process, which was essentially HR/Logistics onboarding, new hires would often only meet people that were on their project. This ultimately meant they didn’t meet a lot of people on our team who were potentially useful resources for them.

So, in some situations, our engineers would have a challenge that they struggled with and didn’t know there was someone in the company who’d already solved that same problem before. This sometimes led to weeks of productivity losses before someone stepped in and said, "Have you met Kelsey yet? She could solve this problem for you in minutes."

During onboarding, we show them our organizational chart, and the breakdown of members per project, even the projects not relevant to them.

One of the main comments with the developers during our 1:1’s is that they are not aware of what is happening on other projects, and so our hope is that by showing them early what everyone else is working on, it will give them more context of where they can be helpful.

We do this to show them where they fit within the organization, but how the rest of the company is laid out. During our monthly town hall meeting, we also make sure that we present our newcomers, and announce them on our #general slack channel.

By being intentional about our onboarding process and scheduling meetings beforehand, we introduced new hires to anyone that had a direct impact on their role, and resources they most likely will need down the road. By setting up a video call with the relevant resources during onboarding week, they were able to establish an early connection.

We recently moved to Notion for our "wiki"-style knowledge base and are absolutely in love with it. Notion is one of the first things we give our new hires access to. It’s a massive upgrade from our ad-hoc Google Docs storing of documents.

The biggest benefit of using Notion is that it’s really easy to find things and link to other documents we’re working on. With the navigation on the left, the new hire gets a complete picture of their onboarding and other things they should be looking at.

They can look at notes from previous town hall meetings, status meetings, etc., right away.

For onboarding, we like to list out each activity per day, as the screenshot shows. Bullet points work great, and we link to any documents or media relevant to their onboarding process. This way, the new hire knows exactly what they need to be doing, with little to no help from our team.

No extra work during onboarding until they "graduate"

We are very careful not to assign them project work, even if the project is waiting for them. We’ve made that mistake in the past, and it’s never turned out to be a good idea. We take our time with onboarding because we know the impact is worth it.

So, if you’re going to create an onboarding process, it makes a lot of sense to protect their time and not overload them with client or project work. Let them onboard, and then put them to work.

The week long onboarding process might seem excessive, but it works phenomenally well

I don’t think we’ll ever look back from this process.

Now that I’ve seen the short-term impacts on employee happiness and the long-term impact on productivity, this onboarding is one of the best decisions we’ve made.

We had two cultural goals we assigned to ourselves this year.  Choosing a tagline that reflects who we are as a company that reflects why we do what we do was one of them.  Here's a peek into how we did it.

How We Chose "Move Purposely" As Our Tagline

This is part two of our culture series, where we give you a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re building our culture and brand.

 of this series, there are two things we set out to create towards the end of 2019:

: An employee handbook that explains our company culture, so new hires and existing employees have a frame of reference for how to succeed. You can read it and download our company handbook at this link.

An externally-facing marketing tagline and what our “core beliefs” are

: We wanted to let our customers and the public know how we operate as a company. It’s an inside look into what it’s like to work with us and what we stand for.

We actually started by creating the company handbook before the tagline. We thought creating the handbook was more straightforward, and that turned out to be correct.

Here’s the process of creating our tagline and core beliefs.

Our new tagline is Move Purposely, and it is accompanied by our core beliefs, which you can find in the next section.

I know many companies go on for years without ever creating a tagline, and in many cases, a tagline isn’t created until the company is very successful and popular. But I wanted to create a tagline to communicate what stands us apart and to give our prospective customers and potential hires an idea of what it’s like to work with us.

I didn’t want to be just a software development agency. The world doesn’t need another company that can build software. So the biggest reason was to differentiate us and communicate our value proposition.

What’s the point of documenting our core beliefs?

Core beliefs are statements that describe “what your company believes in.” In a world where most companies talk about 

 we do things the way we do them. We recognize that the work we do is somewhat commoditized. There are thousands of other companies who could claim to do the same work as us.

But our secret sauce, the core of what we do, the reason why we outperform many other agencies, is our why. And we wanted to communicate that internally and externally.

We also knew our why would fuel the creation of our tagline, so we started with creating our core beliefs before our tagline.

We relentlessly pursue the truth with a deep focus on solving the problem at hand. We do our due diligence and gain a deep understanding of the problem we’re solving before a single piece of code is written. We ask a lot of questions to uncover the real problem and verify the impact of the problem when we solve it.

We cut once, measure twice. Once we start coding and architecting a digital solution, we will already have confidence in our direction. This means no false starts and no over-promising and under-delivering. This also means we take calculated risks if we see an opportunity for further success.

We have a bias for exploration. We will continue to find different ways to solve a problem until we’re confident there will be little to no side effects. Instead of relying on brute-forcing solutions, we rely on our collective minds to uncover problems and solutions. Our work is not done until it has made an impact.

We structure engagements to allow our entire team to be dedicated to individual projects and focus on making the biggest impact possible. We maintain a deep focus in order to solve problems.

We have a passion for overcoming challenges. We might spend a little more time upfront to understand what puzzle we’re solving, or how to solve the puzzle, but once we do, we’re filled with joy and fulfillment. Our team is stacked with problem solvers.

We find our way around and adapt to every environment we’re thrown into. We’ve had the pleasure of working in every type of business environment (from large enterprises to scrappy, chaotic bootstrapped startups), and in every situation, we keep our cool and find practical solutions to big problems. We embed ourselves within the client, whether that’s onsite in their offices or within our own confines.

Yes, we are engineers at heart, but we are more interested in solving problems instead of just writing code.

Now, the tagline. Here are the steps we took to create our tagline, Move Purposely.

I feel like every tagline creation process starts with a Google search. And, of course, you end up evaluating the most famous ones like Nike’s “Just Do it” and Apple’s “Think Different.” These taglines have stood the test of time.

But we aren’t a billion-dollar company, so we went back and forth on what our tagline should encompass.

It has to represent who we actually are as a firm

: If the tagline sounds great but doesn’t deeply represent us, then we have to pass on it. I’ve seen too many companies with mission statements and taglines that they don’t actually live by or stand by. I wanted our tagline to have meaning and depth. I didn’t want it to be a token marketing ploy.

It should be unique, memorable, and ideally two words

: I’ve seen some longer taglines, but I’ve always been a big fan of shorter ones. The more words in a tagline, the less memorable it would be, in my opinion.

It shouldn’t be specific to the technologies we work with:

 Although a majority of our work is specific to React Native, we’ll grow to work with a variety of technologies. And I wanted our team to think bigger than just a specific technology, or even technology in general.

It’s something we stick with for at least five years:

 We wanted to create a tagline that would last a long time, if not forever, even though our company is only a few years old and creating a tagline might be jumping the shark. This rule ended up being the biggest constraint for us.

We also didn’t want to start with what we do, but instead with our why. Why we do what we do?

 Are our differentiators really that distinct from everyone else? “We do things better” isn’t a tagline or a differentiator.

How much of the company culture is derived from me, the founder and CEO?

 We also considered the personality attributes related to how I lead the company.

What are the attributes of a fox, and is there any relation to our name Foxbox Digital?

 Well, if you ever wanted to know why we named the company Foxbox, you’re not going to be too impressed. I wanted a name that hints at what we do without being obvious. There are beautiful, cunning foxes on my favorite ski mountain, and they stood out to me. We build things, and so a box represents what we build. We had to add “Digital” for SEO, and because it says that we’re a digital agency. That’s the truth!

When we were evaluating our tagline and core beliefs, we started to see if there were any attributes from a fox, the animal. This turned out to be 

Here is an excerpt I found online about the 

Flamboyance is not the fox's style; it prefers to remain inconspicuous in a small, cozy house, which is usually organized and neat. Choosing subtlety and cunning over brute strength, they are unquestionably hunter personalities and are usually in good physical shape and perform well in pastimes that challenge both mind and body.

Largely misunderstood to be a shy, retreating individual, it's the fox's stature as a small carnivore that defines its survival strategy. Because it cannot succeed using brute force alone, the fox must rely on its sharp mind and engaging personality to garner resources.

Their love of exploration dovetails with their passion for overcoming challenges, which is why foxes are often found mountain climbing or journeying to exotic, forbidden places.

This description of a fox, in many ways, represents Foxbox Digital. We were pleasantly surprised by this. It doesn’t mean we’re going to adopt a fox as a domesticated animal anytime soon, but it’s good to know we are alike.

All of this information gave us enough to move on to the next step, which is picking a tagline.

An archetype is an ideal example or model after which other things are patterned. It’s considered a typical example of a thing or person. There is no definitive list, but 

this site has a good list of 300 archetypes

Defining an archetype helped us come up with better tagline options that were meaningful and represented who we were as a firm. What’s interesting is that we actually created our archetypes based on my personality instead of the firm’s. It was easier to do the exercise based on me. Ironically, we uncovered that the people we hired all had similar personality types and technology backgrounds.

We identified that I fall under three archetypes:

I have a big fear of mediocrity, and I’ve been a creator all of my life, so this one hit home. Being a co-founder of several tech startups before this, my DNA is to be creative, imaginative, and not conforming to the status quo.

As a technical leader for most of my career, I found myself being an equally good communicator. Communication is one of my strong points, so I knew this archetype definitely represented me.

I’m actually not a real gambler, by any means, but I am an entrepreneur at heart. And risk-taking is part of what I do every day. This made it into our core beliefs where we talk about taking calculated risks. We measure twice, cut once, but we also take measured risks we think will benefit our clients.

So now, up until this point, we have our core beliefs, archetypes, and rules for creating a tagline defined. The next step is the easy part, right? The tagline.

Iterating tagline options and picking one.

The hardest part of picking a tagline is falling in love with one. I thought the right tagline would just stand out, and we would have a “this is the one” type of moment, but that wasn’t the case.

We liked the word purposefully. So, once we decided on that word, we created more versions to see what would stick.

We all decided that “Move Purposefully” best represented us, which we ended up shortening to “Move Purposely” in the end. We also really liked “we relentlessly pursue the truth” as our tagline, but it was too long and vague.

It took a few weeks for the right tagline to digest. And as I bounced ideas off our team, it took them extra time as well. We started going through several versions of taglines.

“Move Purposely” fits all of our criteria. It’s an exact representation of how we operate as a company. Since the day this company was created, we moved with a purpose. The way we build software, treat our clients, marketing, sales, etc., all revolve around us moving forward with a purpose.

Move Purposely it is! Now we move to the next steps.

Now what? What do you do after creating a tagline?

Here’s where it gets interesting and is a moment of truth for a company. We asked ourselves this question: Do we love this tagline so much that we’re willing to update all of our material to reflect it? This means creating new business cards, updating our website, letterheads, promotional materials, etc.

Every sales proposal and resource profile has our tagline and blurb about our core beliefs.

We are in the process of designing new business cards with our tagline at the center of it.

Onboarding: Every employee gets onboarded with the Foxbox Way and our core beliefs.

Lagniappes: A lagniappe is something given as a bonus or gift. We’re currently exploring ideas for products we can give to employees and clients. A sample idea is sending a custom puzzle with the Move Purposely tagline and a note about how we are puzzle solvers, which is one of our core beliefs. When it all comes together, it feels nice and genuine.

Blog posts: We weren’t going to let a good marketing opportunity pass us by.

In the end, the process was worth it, and I highly recommend it for companies of all sizes.

Actually sitting down and being intentional about the company we are creating, and documenting it, was a rewarding and humbling experience for all of us.

It gave us a chance to discover why we’re doing this in the first place, and uncover how other companies similar to us are doing it.

Based on the internal reactions from discussing the Foxbox Way, tagline, and core beliefs, they’ve been a huge benefit for everyone. New hires have a clear understanding of who we are and how they fit in. I hope our tagline sends a clear signal to the market about why we’re unique and what it’s like to work with us. I’ll report back once I have more data to share.

Thanks for being part of our journey, and if you have any questions at all, please feel free to 

As we grow as a company, we've made the decision to be intentional about everything we do.  Rather than leave the important task of building a culture we can be proud of up to chance, we opted to sit down and think about it. Here's what we came up with for our culture-first employee handbook, which we've dubbed The Foxbox Way.

Creating the Foxbox Way, Our Culture-First Handbook

When I started Foxbox in 2018, I wanted our team to be intentional about everything we do. I didn’t want to leave it up to chance or let the culture have a life of its own. In many ways, the culture of Foxbox is an extension of how I operate.

I needed a way to communicate this to our team and prospective customers. I wanted our outside to match our inside. Meaning, a potential hire or customer should be able to have a consistent experience before and after joining us.

So, there are two things we set out to create.

 Create an employee handbook that dictates exactly what our company culture is, so new hires and existing employees have a frame of reference for how to succeed.

Externally-facing tagline and “core beliefs”

: We wanted to let our customers and the public know how we operate as a company. It’s kind of like giving them an inside look into what it’s like to work with us and what we stand for.

For the purpose of this article, I’m going to talk about how we created our employee handbook. If you want the details of the behind-the-scenes of our tagline, Move Purposely, 

When we started down the journey of creating an employee handbook, we looked for public examples of companies that shared theirs. We looked at Netflix (who was the original inspiration for this), Basecamp, and Tesla.

Basecamp released their handbook around the time we started creating ours, and I thought it was great. It was in-depth and used extremely straightforward, transparent language.

The reason I loved it so much was because there were zero possibilities of an employee “reading between the lines.” The handbook wasn’t a blanket “do the right thing” statement that would mean multiple things to many people. It gave every employee direction on how they should communicate, how they should be working, and how they should be making decisions. It covered everything from A to Z. It’s perfect.

 “Anti-Handbook Handbook,” which I thought was interesting because it wasn’t supposed to be viewed publicly. Of course, Tesla’s handbook is the exact opposite of Basecamp’s in terms of expectations from their employees. But, the one thing they both have in common is their direct language. There was no chance someone could misinterpret what was expected of them, especially how to work and communicate.

Now, on to our handbook, which we call the Foxbox Way.

After analysis, we all agreed that the Foxbox Way needed to accomplish the following:

. We have an organized onboarding process, and this is a perfect part of our new hires’ first day activities.

It should be clear and direct—no fluffy marketing jargon.

It shouldn’t be about how wonderful Foxbox is but focus on the realities of our business. Basically, it should be a real representation of how we work, not a magical unicorn representation.

After that, we went to the races. After many meetings, several edits, and re-writes, here are the 17 core principles we came up with:

The client isn’t always right — challenge them gracefully

Treat every client like you’ll be eating Thanksgiving dinner with them 5 years from now

Client Satisfaction > Our Profits — make decisions accordingly

See an opportunity for us to improve? Take it and own it

There are some meetings you absolutely can’t miss

How you work and communicate with the team is up to you

Each principle was broken out into further clarification. The Foxbox Way serves as a framework for our culture and values at Foxbox Digital. Every single piece of code we write, every interaction we have with our clients, and how we communicate with each other are all part of the Foxbox Way.

 It is unique to us, and that’s why it’s the Foxbox Way.

As planned, we used this document for our onboarding process, and it was received well. Many of the new hires commented that they’ve never been part of a company that was this direct on expectations, and it gave them a much better understanding of how we work.

One note: we view these as a set of guidelines, rather than rules. We respect that everyone has their own individual personality, and these principles are the common thread that ties us together.

We’re only a few months into this, and so far it’s been great: new team members feel instantly connected to the company and we all seem to be working more cohesively.

And yes, this is supposed to be an internal document, but similar to Basecamp, I thought it would be a good idea to make this public for other founders or leaders who are considering being intentional about their culture.

So, if you would like to see our culture handbook in its entirety, 

REASON 1

You Can Create Great Native-Like Experiences Across Multiple Operating Systems

REASON 2

It Focuses on Developer Efficiency Across All the Platforms You Care About

REASON 3

It's Native, Really!

REASON 4

You Can Reload "Instantly" with Fast Refresh and Modern Debugging Tools You Know

REASON 5

It’s Developed by Facebook, but It’s Open-Source

REASON 6

It’s Flexible

REASON 7

It Has a Big and Active Community

REASON 8

Great Companies Are Using It

REASON 9

There Are Great Integrations To Make Your Job Easier

REASON 10

Amazing Resources Are Available Online To Get Started

IN CONCLUSION

React Native Is the Way to Go for Many Reasons

React Native created the ability to produce real Native iOS and Android Apps with a single codebase, and has changed mobile app development in a big way.

We’ve dedicated a lot of time to mastering React Native, and it’s by far our favorite framework of choice when developing mobile apps.

Here are the reasons why we love it, and recommend it so often.

React Native produces real Native iOS and Android Apps with a single codebase, and its changed mobile app development in a big way. This is why we love it.

10 Reasons Why We Love React Native *And Why You Should Too

We believe that in order to make an impact in the world, you must do it purposefully. We believe that having the determination to succeed and willingness to adapt to situations greatly increase the impact of our work. These are our core beliefs.

Our Core Beliefs

We believe that in order to make an impact in the world, you must do it purposefully. We believe that having the determination to succeed and willingness to adapt to situations greatly increase the impact of our work.

We’ve seen too many failed projects that never made the impact that was originally promised, because there was no underlying purpose for the project to begin with, or a misaligned vision for what the product was supposed to accomplish. When you approach everything you do with a purpose and a resilience to succeed no matter the circumstances, you’re able to make a positive impact everywhere you go.

This is why we only invest in talent who are determined to succeed, and partner with clients who are purposeful in their mission. We exist to make an immediate and long-term impact on our clients & those in need.

Inside the Box

Articles, updates, and ideas you can put to use.

How We Onboard Our Remote Engineering and Product Management Team

How We Chose "Move Purposely" As Our Tagline

Creating the Foxbox Way, Our Culture-First Handbook

10 Reasons Why We Love React Native *And Why You Should Too

Our Core Beliefs

The Foxbox Way