Onboarding events

Why (Onboarding) Events?

The first few days are essential to creating a welcoming experience that boosts your employer brand and helps new team members become productive faster.

However, we know scheduling sessions for department intros, ‘Ask me Anything’ (AMAs) with the CEO or Founders, some blockers for Onboarding days, or new hire meet-ups are a pain to set up.

The calendar of important people is always full, you need to keep track of all the people invited, sometimes the 1st of a month falls on a weekend or bank holiday and so on. Even if that all works out, suddenly the person that was supposed to host the event has no time. 🤯 Zavvy ends this madness.

How?

With Zavvy you can now set up recurring events that are automatically scheduled in the calendar of any person in your company (i.e, host). You name a preferred day and time, we check whether the person has time to host the event and whether there’s a conflicting weekend or a bank holiday. Once we find a suitable slot, we automatically schedule the session.

Beyond scheduling, we will automatically invite people based on the rules you specify. For example, do you want to invite every new hire of a given month to this month’s Onboarding days? Or everyone who’s new to the marketing department to the Intro session by the Head of Marketing? We’ll automatically invite them for you.

What can you schedule with Zavvy?

There are multiple events that help your new hires feel welcome and get up to speed faster. Here are just a few examples you may want to consider.

👋  Introductions

  • HR/People Ops Intros or People Onboarding
  • People Onboarding sessions are a great tool to help your new hires navigate the first days and weeks within the company. Usually hosted by the HR team in person the session is there to go through paperwork, any technical issues or any questions the new hires might have.
  • Office Tour
  • Help your new hires find their way around your office. Set up an office tour on a schedule you specify and make sure always every new hire is invited.
  • Department Intros
  • Avoid work in silos and help your employees connect and build their network quickly by hosting regular introduction sessions for every department. These sessions are a great chance for department leads to provide insights into their work and share current updates. Employees get a perspective on what all is happening in the company. Beyond looking outside the box, they also get a perspective of where they could develop vertically and horizontally. We recommend hosting a session every month.
  • Founder Welcome
  • There’s nothing more inspiring than hearing the history of how the company came to live. Beyond, it is a very personal experience to meet the people that are behind the vision, culture, and mission of the company. Set up a regular welcome session with the founders for new hire groups. With Zavvy you don’t have to figure out anymore how to find slots in their calendar.
  • People Operations office hour for new hires
  • A few weeks in your new hires will have many questions. Give them a chance to collect those questions and ask together in an office hour for new hires, e.g., in their third or fourth week.

🍹 Social Events

  • CEO Ask me Anything (AMA)
  • Ask Me Anything sessions are a key strategy to increase engagement and communication within the company. They establish the CEO as an approachable figure rather than as a name to look up to. New hires feel valued and welcomed.
  • To host a successful AMA just set up an event on Zavvy and make your CEO the host. Ideally you invite the HR-Team as guests so you can make sure the experience is smooth. Further, it is always a good idea to include a link to a form to collect questions from the participants in the event description. Just as a tip, it’s always a good idea to have some back-up questions ready. If you want to even go further, you can also think about including team bonding activities or intro rounds to make the session more interactive and personal.
  • New hire meet-ups
  • Help your new hires build social ties by setting up meet-ups. Ideally, they have a theme. For example, you can think of meet-ups for new hires within certain departments, locations, or countries. If in-person or online, planning team bonding activities like intro rounds or icebreaker games can help you create a more intimate experience.
  • New hire TGIF or Lunch
  • Starting out at a new company is a very unique and emotional experience. And what makes this experience better than when you share it with others? Help your new hires mix and mingle and share their experiences during their first days and weeks at your company with one another.
  • For this you can set up for example a new hire Thank God it’s Friday (TGIF) with snacks and drinks in the first week, or a lunch during the second week. Also for remote companies you can think about fun and interesting online events, ideally with interactive 1:1 break outs.

📕 Work & Focus time

  • Blockers for Onboarding Work
  • There are many administrative tasks a new hire has to take care of during the first days. Additionally, their managers and colleagues will want to know when they can start to kick-off project work with their new teammates. To help your new hires reserve time for admin tasks and communicate to the rest of the team when the new hire is fully available, you can block some time for them in their calendars to do so.

How to schedule your event

On Zavvy, navigate to the events page to create new and find your existing events. There are active events, inactive, and canceled events.

  • Active events
  • Zavvy currently schedules sessions and automatically invites participants to the next upcoming session.
  • Not yet activated events
  • Events you have created but never started. Zavvy doesn’t yet schedule any sessions or invites participants.
  • Canceled events
  • Events that were active and then canceled. All previously scheduled sessions are removed from the host and participants’ calendars and no one gets invited anymore.

In order to create a new event click the ‘new event’ button.

Event set up

Step 1: Add session details

First, you need to set up the title and description for your event, e.g., “CEO Ask me Anything”. Next, you need to set the host of the event. The host is the person whose calendar you want to check for availability.

You can invite any additional guests and add a Google Meet link.

All details will be visible in the session description in the calendar.

Step 2: Set up scheduling automation

Here you can specify rules for scheduling the sessions of the event:

  • Schedule: The schedule you want sessions to be scheduled (e.g., every 4 weeks)
  • Preferred time slot: The time you ideally want this event to happen if the host is free
  • Time zone: The time zone the event should be scheduled in
  • Duration: How long the session is supposed to take
  • Scheduling: Number of sessions that should be scheduled in advance in the host’s calendar

Step 3: Set up invitation automation

You can automatically invite participants on their hire date. If you want to invite new hires from specific groups (e.g., Sales, Marketing), you can filter for these groups. Once you activate the event, new hires will be invited on their hire date via the calendar (e.g., Google Calendar, Microsoft).

Activate the event

Once you’re done setting up the description, schedule, and invitation automation you can activate the event. Immediately after activation, we will...

  1. notify the host about the event being scheduled for them,
  2. schedule the sessions whenever the host is free, and
  3. invite participants for the upcoming sessionNote: We will invite new hires to the upcoming session. Once this session was held, we will invite new hires to the next upcoming session.

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FAQ

❓ Does Zavvy schedule on weekends?

Whenever a session (e.g., the first of the month) would fall onto a weekend, Zavvy schedules the slot to the next possible workday.

For example, if you set your event up to be scheduled always on the 1st of the month, Zavvy will schedule all slots that fall on saturdays and sundays to the next Monday (i.e., the 2nd or 3rd of the month).

❓What if the host has a conflicting meeting?

Zavvy only schedules sessions whenever the host is free. If there’s no free slot that matches the schedule and preferred time specified in the event settings, Zavvy will schedule the next possible option.If your events have higher priority than your host’s other meetings (or if you want to set up fixed onboarding sessions), you can use an extra email address with an empty calendar, invite it to zavvy and assign it as the host.  As the calendar is always free, we will automatically schedule the sessions exactly on your preferred date and time.If needed, you can still invite an actual host as a ‘guest’.  so they will still receive an invitation to the sessions.

❓Can the host reschedule a session?

The host can reschedule an event anytime from their own calendar. Once they reschedule, all participants will receive a notification about the new meeting time. New participants will be invited to the updated meeting.

❓What if I change the event details of an active event?

You can change the title, description, google meet link setting after scheduling an event. All updates will be reflected in the participants’ calendars. Also, participants will be notified via email from their calendar about the updates to the event.

❓What if I change the schedule of an active event?

Whenever you make changes to the schedule (i.e., preferred time, schedule, timezone etc.), all sessions will be rescheduled according to the new schedule immediately.