The Furniture Pile

I onboarded a thousand people to Shopify. And here's what I can tell you.

Picture this.

It’s your first morning of your first day of your new job. After some sort of hoop-jumping, multi-month interview process that evokes the feats in the Beatles’ Being for The Benefit of Mr. Kite, you finally got the call, finally signed the papers, and there’s a decent chance you got on an airplane and traveled through many timezones to finally arrive at Shopify’s shimmering Waterloo office for your first morning of work.

You’re led down a hallway with a group of 12 other eager people who’ve been through their own version of the hogshead-of-real-fire and are gingerly holding their medley of hope, fear, and expectations. You might try to spark a light conversation with the person beside you as you walk down this well-lit hallway, actually it’s quite likely that you’ve at least attempted to start a few conversations because everyone is feeling nervous and excited and wants a great beginning.

And it’s in these hyper-fertile conditions that the vast majority of companies begin their onboarding experience. Yes, they pick a moment so pregnant with human anticipation and fill it most riveting experience imaginable: IT Setup. Here’s a computer! And now your email! Log into the VPN! Need to print something? And on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on…

With my full appreciation for IT people and the work they do – this is like building the perfect campfire, adding kiln-dried kindling, dousing it in high-octane kerosene, and just when it crosses your mind to bring out the matches, you instead decide to take a large, wet blanket smother the whole damn thing.

This is not how I ran onboarding.

As the eager bunch walked down Shopify’s well-lit, plant-adorned hallway, we finally rounded a corner into our onboarding room, which I affectionately came to call my Living Room. In the middle stood a pile of absolute chaos. Our newest crop of employees with Spa Water in hand, beheld chairs, tables, and cushions piled in a 2-metre heap. An armchair upside down. A sofa on its side. And on a whiteboard, simple instructions scrawled in green marker: Arrange the furniture so everyone can see as many faces as possible. That was it.

I would place myself next to the door after kindly escorting everyone into the room, stand back, and watch the group’s character reveal itself. This would offer a good preview of our next few days together: the people who quickly shared their ideas; the observers, who’d stand next to the action, perhaps too tentative to offer their suggestions; those other folks eager to feel useful and lend their strength to others’ ideas; those bold few who’d butt up against others’ ideas because they got a rush out of conflict. They were usually in sales.

Within 3 or 4 minutes, the group was seated (or to my UK & Irish readers, the group were seated), slightly out of breath, excited, and connected in a way that would take … a very long time of IT onboarding to otherwise achieve. They’d just solved a problem together. “The Adult” was not very present, and they became The Adult together. I could feel the group’s glow as I found my place and cordially welcomed them. And then we were off to the races.

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Yes, I realize I’m picking on IT a whole lot, and it’s such an easy target. Within a couple hours of the furniture rearrangement we had our IT crew come in for a 1-hour computer setup. They were a great crew and did a very necessary job, this being a technology company after all, and each employee’s MacBook being their main tool. Much like carpenters being given their first hammer. The point in my incessant IT teasing is that we didn’t begin with their session. It was a necessary task, it happened, and was neatly tucked into the right spot.

I need to include this disclaimer not only so you get the real gist of why I’m writing all this – to think clearly about your own experience design – but also because these IT people are the wizards of the digital universe and I’m certain they can suddenly make my computer start doing erratic things if I besmirch them too deeply. How well would you sleep, talking shit about Gandalf within earshot?

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During a ~3 year stretch beginning in June 2017, I onboarded a thousand people to Shopify. My team and I overhauled the program on two different occasions, and I was constantly tweaking the experience, like with the grand furniture opening that became a trademark. There were a number of specific pieces of information new employees needed so they could hit the ground running; it was a testament to Shopify’s employee experience design during those years that they allotted the first couple weeks of a new employee’s time to nothing with immediate outcomes, and everything with an eye to the medium- and long-term. I spent the first three days with the new crop of Shopifolk, helping them understand the culture, the product, the business, and experience a whole bunch of other specific things like the beloved IT setup and learning to make a latté. Yeah, it was the late twentyteens and this was a tech company.

But that’s not actually what I was doing. Those were the details if you asked me the agenda, and I was happy to have an agenda chock-full of details when some hard-charging, impatient senior leader wanted to know what in tarnation this furniture pile was all about. What I was really there to do was take peoples’ sense of belonging in their new job from 0-60 in three seconds. Or three days. 0-60 in three days would be a pretty dismal acceleration for a vehicle, but it’s dizzyingly fast for a group of humans to go from strangers to comrades.

This is where I may lose you business-buccaneers who clench a knife between your teeth as you hunt for the ROI of everything. Belonging?! Ha! We might as well invest in a room full of puzzles!

I’m not going to address the puzzles, that was someone else’s decision. But think about this for a minute. There’s absolutely no way to give people all the information they need in just three days to perform their job. Everyone struggles with feeling like an impostor, and even in the best of times asking for help can be really hard and make you feel like a moron. It’s that much harder if you’re already questioning whether you belong in this place. So you’ll immediately observe a drop in productivity because people are hacking through their new jungle feeling alone, maybe only metres from a well-trodden path. And they’re certainly going to do this if they’re unsure whether asking a question will get them excommunicated.

But that’s just the surface level. Much of what I did for Shopify’s onboarding during those years isn’t suited for the Shopify of today, and much less so for another organization. Like everything in a thriving culture, it needs to grow sincerely and consistently out of the core. Shopify’s focus was building a tool to help people express themselves in a commercial medium. Trying to yield all sorts of businesses built by people who’ve maybe felt like outcasts in other areas of their lives, but with Shopify they can make an impact. The store that sells the queer Tarot cards. Or the one that builds obscure, old school custom BMX bikes. And a few million more.

If you’re going to build a tool for these people to build their businesses, and encourage these entrepreneurs to really lean into their identities, into their experiences, into their strengths… those are some pretty good dimensions to evoke in your employees, wouldn’t you say? The intent behind every part of a great onboarding – and with no shyness, I will tell you bluntly that mine was great – should be to amplify those dimensions your culture cherishes, so people feel as connected as possible, as quickly as possible.

In other words, they belong.

Coming out of the first three days of this onboarding experience that took years to refine, people would feel they were plugged into the group. They could bring their ideas and their quirks forward, and everything benefitted. Communication, innovation, alignment, all those other things you pay consultants a gazillion dollars to improve once they start breaking down. And, everyone benefitted: thousands of people spending countless hours of their lives working and not feeling like turtles, and those millions of merchants using a product built by people who could show up to work in a very different way than they maybe ever had.