⚙️ Ops Playbook #55

Hi Operators ⚙️

Thank you everyone who has applied to Cornerstone in the past week! Cornerstone is our COO and operation executive membership. With Cornerstone, you get:

• Monthly meetings with 7 other operators led by an expert facilitator

• Digital community

• Events such as workshops

We’ve been running virtual events the past 3 months, but will be launching our first physical chapter in NYC. Apply here to secure your spot.

Anyways… we’re gonna try something a little different with the Thursday edition for the next month. Usually, we focus on a different topic each week.

Until now.

For the next four weeks, we’re going to focus on automations for different areas of operating your business. From financials to funnel-building, we’ve got you covered 💪

Today, we’re exploring automations for your employee onboarding process.

(If this is a terrible idea, then reply to this email and tell me)

Here's what we've got going on:

• Set Up Your Onboarding AI → Let the robot field the questions.

• Automate Team Intros → At least you’re not the one making awkward intros.

• The New-Hire Newsletter → No guarantees it will be as good as The Bottleneck! 😉

Ready? Let’s dive in 👇

P.S. Building a business can be lonely. Let’s connect on Linkedin

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Operator’s Library

• Automate repetitive employee questions with your own custom-made (and no-code) chatbot (Lenny’s Newsletter) 

• We found a ChatGPT cheat-sheet that will save you hours every day (Abhishek)

• 6 employee management tools to help you automate your workflows (Pyn)

• If you’re implementing new employee-facing automations, you’d better prepare your team (Forbes)

• How automation will make your employees love you (Sam Momani) 

I. Set Up Your Onboarding AI 🤖

Insight from Zapier

New hires ask a lot of questions (as they should!).

If we’re being honest, a lot of the time they’re the same questions that dozens of new hires have asked before.

Centralizing onboarding information is nothing new. But what if we got ✨ fancy ✨ with it?

Enter: your Onboarding AI 🤖

Using Zapier Chatbots, you can upload all of your relevant onboarding docs (handbooks, FAQs, etc.), and create a fully functional onboarding chatbot for your new hires to direct any basic questions to.

You can then add it to Slack, and integrate literally any other app so that automated actions take place in response to certain queries or responses.

New hire needs a laptop shipped? The chatbot can create a ticket for your IT team.

Fresh team member needs project access? The chatbot can add them to relevant Trello boards.

If you really want to go the extra mile, try:

• Customizing your bot's tone to match your culture. 

• Uploading a “lore” document as one of the knowledge sources so that it knows your company history (and all the inside jokes).

• Adding a quick survey at the end of each chat. Use the responses to refine your bot and onboarding process. Continuous improvement, baby!

Here’s Zapier’s guide for getting the chatbot set up

II. Automate Team Intros

Insight from CultureBot

Now, as useful as your chatbot will be, we should also get your new hire talking to real people 🤝

If you’re a remote-first team, this might be easier said than done.

Lucky for us, we have other robots to help us with that too.

There are a host of bot integrations for Slack (and other comms platforms) that initiate randomly matched intro-meetings between folks from different teams.

Let’s look at CultureBot, as one example of how these work:

CultureBot introduces new hires, starts conversations/“virtual coffees”, and notifies relevant team members to connect, all with a quick set up.   

All you have to do is decide how often you want these connections to happen, which channel to host them in, and what pool of employees the bot should select from.

Now, before you roll your eyes too hard, I’ve actually been in some Slack workspaces that use tools like this (we used Random Coffee). 

Can’t guarantee an absence of any awkwardness, but they do work well in breaking the ice. 

III. The New-Hire Newsletter

Insight from Rameel Sheikh

Information overload is a real thing.

That first week or so at a new job can feel like drinking from a fire hose.

Here’s a way to space out all of the less crucial (but still important) information during the onboarding process:

Try building a “new hire newsletter” sequence.

Write 6-8 editions of a “newsletter” for your new hires and build an automated sequence that sends an edition 1-2x/week.

In the first week, you can focus on practical information. Explain the org structure, introduce team leaders, and highlight important policies. Consider including a FAQ section addressing common new hire questions (and maybe link to your new chatbot 😉).

Use the second week to dive into company history and culture. Share your startup's origin story and core values. Get into the lore a bit.

In subsequent weeks, spotlight different departments. Have team leads share current projects and goals. This gives new hires a broader perspective on the company's operations, who the major stakeholders are, and where they fit in.

If you want to get cute with it, you can brand the newsletter and add challenges/scavenger hunts (that way you actually know who’s reading 🤓).

How am I doing? 👋

I take all feedback I receive to heart. Keep it coming! Just hit reply and let me know – I'd love to hear from you!

Cheers,

Rameel from The Bottleneck

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