How was your first day of work? Can you tell if this company cares about who you are and what you value? Do they care about your experiences and see you as an essential employee of the company? You can tell a lot from an onboarding experience.

You should receive a seamless red-carpet experience from day one, right? Yes! The technological experience should definitely be impressive, especially when you’re joining a biotech or capital management company. You should have all your tools laid out to plot your next big projects and goals! You should be left with the feeling that your new company is proactively working to make their employees’ lives easier. At the end of the day, it’s a realistic approach to investing back into their own company.

I’m a projects engineer at Pliancy, with a focus on helping our life sciences and finance clients create impressive onboarding experiences for their new hires. My position was brand new when I started here. It was a bit intimidating to engineer my own role, but once I started strategizing, it got really exciting and my ideas kept growing and growing (even though not all of them were the best, ha). After laying everything “onboarding” out in front of me, the first step was breaking the concept of onboarding into components: what are the key milestones and expectations of the onboarding experience on both sides of the relationship?

When we first take on a new client, it requires onboarding an initial set of employees, then becomes a rolling admissions process of new employees as they join the client’s company. I started with what I knew. What had I experienced in previous positions when I was being onboarded as an employee? How did I want to make it better? What did I want to understand earlier that wasn’t made clear to me? What would have helped me become better at my job faster?

To Scale

I listed all the things a person would do when they first join a company, or what the particular client should do for their first-time users. They would introduce the hardware, the software, all the equipment they’re using, the company standards. I made so many lists. I gathered all the information, ran it by teammates and asked for their input, and then began grouping the information into a process that I could start streamlining.

From there, I created a basic presentation laying out the essentials every client needs when they onboard new hires. But I knew we needed to go deeper. So much of the Pliancy experience is tailored white-glove service. Every client is unique. Onboarding according to individual client needs is a must for us, but it seemed really labor intensive to recreate the wheel every time we worked with a new client.

So my next question became: how do we make this scalable and tailored for all our clients? The answer was automation.

Start With What You Know

I started by automating the client onboarding presentation I had created. I was familiar with Google Slides already, and I knew there was some way to make template functions. So I researched like crazy to figure out how to manipulate the fields inside the slides to automatically pull the client data. I ended up creating a form for consultants to use to fill out their client information. This form generates a slide for a client, and also generates folders within the Pliancy G Drive to organize the new material.

So now, the presentation ties everything together in a neat package: everything a new user needs to securely and confidently do their jobs using their company’s technology applications. They know who to contact and how. They know how to access everything they need to access. It’s something they can refer back to throughout their relationship with Pliancy, and it’s easy for us to update as we evolve their technology stack. And it only takes about an hour for us to create a presentation that’s perfectly suited to the client.

Gathering Data, Simplified

We want to help our clients go deeper in onboarding, instead of just introducing the standard software and application practices to their new hires. As a team, we wanted to perfect communication and data collection, even before the new employee’s start date.

The next problem to solve was: how do we collect the client data to fill out these fields without bugging people? We have to make sure we get all the information we need about the user— when they first joined, what applications and permission levels they need, etc. I’ll meet with recruiting managers to determine what usually happens after users are created.

I created a different form for that. It automatically generates and sends a request to IT saying, ‘we need to set up these accounts and this computer for them with all these applications.’ Things like making sure they have their access card, or making sure they’re properly entered into the finance system for payroll and benefits.

So whenever users are created, not only does this form send the proper requests to IT, it creates a checklist of all these things. And then it assigns each task to whomever is supposed to do it. We can go back to that list and say, ‘Okay, what’s the status on this new user? Are they ready to move to the next task or is their onboarding complete?’

My teammate Wesley introduced me to different integration tools like Integromat and Zapier. They allow you to create different processes and integrations. I really enjoyed learning to use them, because they allowed me to achieve things with technology I’d only been able to conceptualize before. The applications could now all talk to each other, creating smooth, seamless onboarding and ALSO off-boarding experiences. Processes could be made for every part of the employee lifecycle!

Closing the Loop

First, I started with the client’s employee onboarding. Then, I started opening the realm of client employee off-boarding. Now, I have started learning about the actual client onboarding and off-boarding as well. Taking part in onboarding a whole client and working with all their standard applications has been so fun and insightful!

It’s easier creating a process from scratch now, throwing any preconceived or outdated ideas out the window. I’ve proven to myself that getting in the new employee’s or new client’s shoes is the best starting point for any great onboarding process. I meet with the client and ask how we can make their people’s lives easier. From there, it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it.

The finance industry has a rap for moving slowly with respect to technology—and more specifically—IT security. However, because finance companies potentially have billions of dollars in assets under management, they’re highly targeted by bad actors.

It’s also important for security technology to be managed in such a way that it doesn’t have a large impact on user experience. You don’t want “security theater,” where the IT infrastructure seems very obvious and secure to the user, but isn’t really. Hackers can see right through security theater. And security through obscurity is akin to putting keys under your doormat.

When we first begin working with clients, we unfortunately see many poor implementations for modern systems like Single Sign-On or Multi-Factor Authentication. The other thing we often see is weak email security—one of the biggest threats for companies in general, and especially for financial firms.

These are problems we’ve taken particular interest in solving as a team of technologists, and doing so in a way that isn’t obtrusive to the user. In general, you could sum up our entire approach by saying we build guardrails that encourage best practices with respect to security, while also precluding bad behavior. We aim to make it easier to be secure than it is to not be.

Many people view security and user experience as diametrically opposed. It doesn’t have to be that way. You just have to think creatively in how you approach security implementation.

A 360-DEGREE APPROACH

At Pliancy, we hit 100% Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) compliance, which means that every single user employs MFA across all of our clients. In the finance field that’s incredibly rare, especially because we also take the extra steps to make it a good experience.

Typically we have clients come to us with 7-10 different systems that they log into on any given day. They have a username and password for each system, all of which they have to remember.

So we set them up with a Single Sign-On: each user signs once into our platform, which is verified with Multi-Factor Authentication. Once they’ve signed in using just one username and password, they can launch any of their applications with a single click.

It isn’t cumbersome. They don’t have to pull out some physical token on a keychain and read off digits, or anything like that. It’s just a push on their phone—click yes or no. That allows them access to all their systems for the day; they don’t have to worry about it again, and it’s far more secure.

We engineer each client platform to consolidate audit logs and perform anomaly detection. This will flag anything that seems odd by the parameters of each user. For instance, a user suddenly has 15 random login attempts from another country. We’ve designed the system to block those attempts automatically instead of having to look manually for those kinds of discrepancies after the fact.

SECURITY VIA EDUCATION

We’re constantly looking for new ways to heighten security behind the scenes that are completely transparent to the user. We’ve done a lot of problem-solving to enhance email security. Email security is notoriously terrible, and notoriously intrusive to the user.

Sure, an overactive filter on your emails to catch phishing attempts or other threats probably does the job. And a lot of companies will try to solve email security with a purely technical approach like this. They install systems that filter email, scan for various things, etc.

But fundamentally, your best approach to solving that problem isn’t simply having that technical aspect in place: It’s layering that technical aspect with a user training process.

We’ve found there’s no technological substitute for informed users—those who are trained to identify emails that might be fishy. At the end of the day, the threat landing in your inbox isn’t going to compromise you. The breach happens when a user clicks on it. And that kind of stuff happens all the time.

So the approach we’ve taken is layering the technical implementation with a strong but unobtrusive educational component. We partner with a vendor that provides training materials, which we tailor to the client and review with them to teach them what looks suspicious, what looks legitimate, and how to tell them apart. We favor interactive training that employees can take at their own leisure.

We also send users test email campaigns that mimic common phishing tactics. Then we monitor the number of people who opened the email, the number of people who click on the links in the email, the number of people who filled data out on the fake page skinned to look like a Microsoft login page (for instance), and so on.

We track patterns and watch how they change over time with the introduction of security concepts through training. This allows us to tailor training to individual users who are struggling with specific security issues. Because nobody wants the mandatory three-hour training when they already understand the content, unless they need it for compliance regulation.

That’s just one example of how we can unobtrusively figure out where we need to focus our efforts to have the highest value. We know when clients are getting really good at identifying threats, because end users will start forwarding those test emails to our consultants and say, “Hey, this looks phishy. Did this not get caught by your system?”

That’s the goal.

We can all agree that attracting and retaining great employees is fundamental to running a successful business. Investing in the development of your employees is a no-brainer if you intend to keep them happy.

Sadly, IT is still seen by many as a “cul-de-sac” industry. Usually the only way to move in an organization is out, not up. Think of a conventional IT department: the typical company doesn’t have a big IT organization, unless it’s a large Fortune 500 or technology focused company. Usually, the IT department is perceived to be similar to the accounting department, in that it serves as a utility for the company to do its business—but doesn’t directly serve the core of the company’s business.

IT professionals within that department are on a hyper-specialized professional carousel. They become technological gatekeepers to the busy, sometimes tech-averse professionals around them. They might wait for years, boxed into a narrow process, for the one manager position to become available. Becoming a manager maybe isn’t necessarily something they’re even interested in. It’s a real motivation killer, and it’s one of the dark industry-wide corners where the stereotype of the self-isolating IT nerd is born. Worse even is if you do develop the individual, or they take it upon themselves, you’re met with the other stereotypical results of low retention. It often feels as though the cards are stacked against you.

So in order to flourish professionally, they have to leave their organization. It’s not even necessarily the organization’s fault. They might love the mission and their leadership—they just aren’t connected to them anymore, if they ever were in the first place.

This is pretty depressing. Not just because it deprives the end users of better solutions, but because the kind of people who go into IT tend to be inherently creative thinkers. A “patch factory” process really stifles curious minds.

Disrupting the Cul-de-sac

One of the approaches we’ve taken at Pliancy to prevent the cul-de-sac problem is to encourage people to venture into every part of the business. So whether that’s finance, operations, process development, business development, whatever—we really want people to think outside their zone to apply their creative skills and knowledge of technology.

In many cases, once they begin to understand another job function better, the curtain drops and their natural curiosity can run wild marrying creative solutions to common business problems through the lens of a technologist. It’s a lot easier to think creatively when you can abandon the habit of doing ‘what worked before.’

Avoiding Burnout

Of course, Pliancy isn’t an IT department in a larger organization with a parallel mission. We’re a consulting firm. Our mission is to create incredible technology experiences.

But the other half of our mission is to always put our people first, and measure growth in terms of innovation and human achievement. And specifically in this industry, there tends to be a lot of burnout because it’s a competitive industry that often commoditizes itself. Which ends in a serious inability to keep good people and retain a culture of personal growth.

I never worry about whether developing our employees — or giving them space and resources to develop themselves — will set them up to leave for greener pastures. It’s the alternative I’m afraid of: becoming a dying pasture full of stifled people with nothing more to contribute each passing year. You have to train your people. You have to help them develop professionally. And if you’re really good at it, they’ll probably find value to add to your organization. They won’t want to leave, because they’re fulfilled.

We try to head off the burnout problem by instituting an employee development standard we call the 75/25 Rule. This means 75% of your time is billable to the clients and the other 25% you get to spend working with peers to develop new skills—to add more value to yourself and the organization, which is your true purpose.

Through this model (which is not particularly easy to execute), we find that we have more sustainability. Our attrition rate is probably the lowest in our industry. Not only that, but each person is now adding exponential value by doing things for the organization that impact multiple consultants or multiple clients.

One example is Emily from our Boston office. She embodies success for an IT person who’s dropped into an organization, given permission to traverse the whole company, and completely transforms everything she touches.

She was initially hired to improve the onboarding experience for new employees when they join a client we support. She took that in, went to the Nth degree with it, and leveraged the 75/25 Rule to build it out in a way no one had imagined. By engineering automation into the entire workflow, she saved time and money for all of us. She developed a kickass presentation. She figured out an innovative way to set meetings with these new employees and create an impressive onboarding experience, beyond just the technical aspects. She used the 75% to deliver an amazing experience to the clients she was directly servicing due to hyper growth, then leveraged the 25% to create a process around empowering the rest of the company to use the technology with their clients.

She branched out into every area of our company to scale a 2D process up to the 4th dimension. And she shaped a broader role for herself with more responsibility, to suit her interests. She’s still constantly surprising us with awesome new ideas and processes.

Growing Together

It’s a bit of a ouija-board effect the way people develop here. We’re often assisting others to develop solutions rather than working in a silo, so we tend to grow together as we inch towards new solutions. In order for people to accomplish this, we’ve taken transparency and inclusion to an extreme: across our five offices, the only doors that exist lead to our conference rooms.

So we’ve become kind of like a co-op— each member with his and her own specialities and a cohesive organizational mindset. And that’s proven to be a good solution to the cul-de-sac problem.

It’s also easy to promote people to new positions or give them raises, but that stuff only lasts about 6 months to a year, tops, before you’re back where you started. You really have to figure out a more sustainable way to keep people engaged.

We find that our platform has provided some of that, and our culture the other. Because helping others develop is oftentimes more rewarding than helping yourself. Especially for the caliber of team player we’re careful to hire.

By intentionally creating a culture of teaching others, people feel naturally engaged—and the more people we add, the more people they can impact. It’s somewhat self-fulfilling, in a way. I guess the bottom line is that it makes it that much more exciting to start work every day.

In most technology consultancies, your entire day is based around what you can bill. The standard is aiming to bill all your work time — 100% — to clients. If you work 40 hours, you’re expected to be able to bill 40 hours, or more if you can. Your bonuses are often tied to how much and how often you’re able to bill over your allotted work time.

The upshot of that is that there’s no time to develop, either individually as a professional or together as a team.

But Pliancy has a unique alternative to this industry billing convention. It’s pretty simple: consultants are only expected to bill 75% of their time, while the other 25% is ours to fill. We call it the 75/25 Rule. It was a major selling point to me, back when I was a candidate coming from another Managed Service Provider. And it’s been incredibly fulfilling in practice, both personally and professionally.

Finding Balance

When I started out as a consultant for Pliancy, I’d be onsite with my clients 32 hours a week, working through issues for them. I knew that eight hours of my work week would still belong to me. I could choose to develop my skills, read a career-developing book, help a teammate with something, or even just spend time with my team. Anything that betters me or Pliancy as a whole is fair game. The strength and character of our culture is huge at Pliancy, so chatting with teammates is encouraged.

These mental breaks from billable time have completely changed the way I’m able to focus and approach problems as an employee. It’s really strenuous making sure you’re billing 40 hours a week.

But with the 75/25 Rule, you know that once you hit that 30-hour mark of billable time, the rest is yours. Besides the fact that we only hire curious, driven people, this is the next biggest contributor to why we have an employee base that’s constantly improving upon itself.

The Freedom of Choice

It’s a sense of freedom. I have a blank slate to engage with my co-workers and help them take on projects, or to develop my interests. It also helps you build relationships with your clients because you have free time to work on other items for them comfortably.

So if we’re not encouraged to over-bill, on what basis does leadership determine and reward merit? First of all, we’re paid really well comparatively, so we probably wouldn’t feel the same need to bill more even if we were expected to. But more importantly, we’re a close team. That’s in large part because we have free time on the clock to connect with each other, including leadership. My leaders actually know and understand me: my strengths, my goals, my passion for what I do and the extra efforts I put into the company. Because of that, I know that any merit-based acknowledgment or promotion is based on true professional growth. It’s far more rewarding and empowering.

In my case, having that time helped me discover I wanted to develop my management skills. I managed a Verizon Wireless store when I was 18 years old, and I never thought I would want to get into management again because I didn’t really care for it then. I was happy as a consultant here at Pliancy, but as time went on, I grew into a new Managing Consultant role. Then I became Regional Director for the East Coast. Now, I’m Director of Consulting for Pliancy.

I had all this time for career development and personal reflection. And as I worked more with Marcus, getting to know him and developing a relationship with him, he helped me figure out my career goals. I realized I do actually like managing a team. I don’t think I would have ever known that before joining Pliancy, because I was so busy focusing on billable work.

It’s also really satisfying seeing others in the office develop. You get to help them grow and take on new roles, and help them move into a position they maybe didn’t know they wanted before.

How We Spend Our Time

In Pliancy’s Boston office, we’ll often spend that time together. Sometimes people will run to the store with someone else to pick up some IT equipment. It’s a great organic way to team-build and talk shop.

It also gives us a chance to collaborate on projects. All of a sudden, we might get drawn into a massive skill development powwow. We have some people, for instance, who are really strong in networking, some people who are strong in cloud infrastructure, and some who are awesome with computer deployments. Someone will casually mention that they’re working on this or that, but they’re having an issue. So someone else will respond with an idea or approach.

It definitely helps build our culture and our team, but we all just really like and respect each other too. And I feel like that’s because we get to spend time together, so we surpass basic coworker status easily. We’re coworkers and we’re friends.