Kaitlyn Heiss from Flatiron Health recently joined us for a fireside chat to discuss her team’s experience optimizing their onboarding process.

“We are a healthcare technology company focused on expanding the possibilities for care solutions in oncology and using data for good to power better care for every person with cancer and to create a better, more connected oncology ecosystem,” Kaitlyn shared.

Over the last 4 years, Flatiron Health has onboarded over 1,000 new employees globally. Employee experience is a major priority for the team.

“We are a hybrid company, so we have people in offices across the United States, in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and we have a lot of people who are also fully remote working from home. So when we’re creating onboarding, we want to make sure this is an experience that is equally great if you are in an office or if you are remote, no matter where your location is.”

Challenge: Onboarding Sustainably

At an earlier stage in the company’s growth and before more HR team members began to join the team from other locations, Kaitlyn owned many onboarding tasks directly.

“A couple years ago, when we were first building out these offices, I was the one doing all the onboarding coordination,” she shared. “So I would join at 8 p.m. at night to onboard a new hire in Japan. I’d wake up at 5 a.m. to check in on the new hire in the UK. It worked for a little bit, but then I was like, hey, this feels like it might not be sustainable. This might not be the best solution going forward. Luckily, we were starting to hire some folks in those offices that were part of our larger HR team, so I was able to partner with them, talk through what we were doing, and get them trained up so they could take on the responsibilities I had in their country.”

As anyone who has been involved in setting up an onboarding process knows, a significant amount of coordination is essential to a smooth experience. According to Kaitlin, things like adding people to calendar invites, drafting messages, and scheduling those messages — among many other things — can take up a significant amount of time.

Solution: Flexibility and Automation

These days, the team uses Donut for significant portions of onboarding coordination. This means Kaitlyn finds herself with more time to focus on other priorities.

“Now that we have Donut fully set up and supported for our needs, I just have a quick 15 minute reminder on my calendar. I go into our tracker, take the new hires that are starting, put them into Donut, assign the template to them, and I’m all set and ready to go,” Kaitlyn said. “Then I have just a couple quick check-ins with managers. A whole morning versus maybe like 30 minutes tops is a huge game-changer. I’ve been able to take that time and really focus on thinking about our content and our resources and really figuring out how we can continue to improve what we offer to folks, especially as our business evolves.”

Challenge: Multiple Global Locations

Flatiron Health operates across multiple time zones, countries, and languages. It’s essential for Flatiron Health’s onboarding processes to adapt as necessary — from different security requirements to offering certain resources in different languages.

Solution: Scaling Support in Each Country

“We really want to make sure that these new hires have someone that can support them that is in their same location and their same time zone,” Kaitlyn said.

Donut is configured as needed to ensure a consistently engaging experience for each new hire.

“Donut allows us to scale operations by sending the same message to each new hire. So, I’ve created one just standard onboarding message cadence. I can make a copy of that and translate it if needed to another language, but either way, those same messages will be sent, I can make changes across the board easily, and we can schedule those messages to send at the new hire’s preferred time zone. They can get it at 9 a.m. their time, no matter where they’re located, which is super helpful. If they get a message at a time where they’re most likely to read it, that makes them more likely to actually get the information and do something with it,” Kaitlyn shared. “The overarching goal is to make sure that everyone’s getting that same level of service and support no matter where they’re located.”

Challenge: Delivery of Important Information

There’s a lot of it!

Alongside messages from Donut, a key aspect of how Flatiron Health shares the important details of a new hire’s onboarding experience functions in the form of guidebooks. Managers and new hires receive guidebooks that offer a full view of the onboarding process, tailored to their roles.

“Just one place to go to see all the information you need,” Kaitlyn described.

Her team also uses a guidebook that outlines all the steps ahead of and after a new hire starts.

However, the team has to consider avoiding feelings of overwhelm while making sure important tasks are completed and key information is retained.

Solution: Intentional Structure & Reminders

Kaitlyn’s team reflects on the experiences of everyone involved in the process when planning cadence of messages.

“When we think about the coordinator perspective, like, what do we want to see? How much is helpful for us? And then replicating that for our new hires,” Kaitlyn said, referring to her own team’s coordination of the tasks involved in onboarding. “We probably have two to three messages a week that go out at most for a new hire, and then managers get a lot less. They’ve been at the company a bit longer. They kind of know a lot of the things already. So it’s just quick checks. Like, ‘Hey, remember to check this resource. Remember to do that thing that you’re already doing with other new hires.’ Scaling it to how much information someone might need. And then also thinking about, you know, if I was in that position what would I want?”

4 Years of Success

Flatiron has now been onboarding at scale for some time. After 4 years and 1,000 new hires, over 17,000 messages have been sent using Donut, with nearly 4,000 tasks assigned and almost 2,500 polls delivered.

With healthy processes and structure in place, time for the team to focus on what matters, and a flexible approach, Flatiron is more than set up to handle their continued growth with success.

Start building your own onboarding program with Donut’s Prebuilt Journeys, featuring suggested to-dos, structure, and feedback collection.