Epoch | [Webinar] Pooja Desai at Stripe 🌟

[Webinar] Pooja Desai at Stripe 🌟

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Welcome back to our NEW Webinar Series! – Experts on Employee Experience! 🎉 It is a monthly webinar series where Jade Choy, Epoch's CEO, has conversations with leaders and innovators in the employee experience and engagement space.

In case you missed it, here are some key learnings and takeaways from our May Webinar featuring Pooja Desai, who works in Onboarding and New Hire Experience at Stripe! View the full recording here. Scroll on for notes!

Meet Pooja! 👋

Pooja Desai is a people person with experience working in the technology and healthcare industries. She is also in charge of Onboarding and New Hire Experience at Stripe! Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses.

Pooja currently co-owns end to end onboarding operations for AMER new hires at Stripe. ✨ In this Webinar, we will get insights from her shared experiences, tips, and insights on how to make Onboarding and Employee Experience a successful journey!
Pooja is based in Hayward, California and uses she/her pronouns. 💙

Webinar Topics 🎙

Share more about how your onboarding playlist got together and the thinking behind it.

Pooja started an onboarding music playlist when she was thinking about humanizing the onboarding experience from early on. In the beginning, she noticed that as everyone was joining and settling in their seats, there was an awkward silence in some meetings.

To solve this, Pooja decided that playing nostalgic and popular hits would help energize her audience. She also had the intent of playing music where the lyrics would match the theme of each meeting. This was a fun activity for Pooja during her Onboarding and All Hands Events!

What does employee experience mean to you?

Pooja believes that the meaning of Employee Experience has changed a lot over the past 10 years, which was very interesting for her to witness firsthand. To Pooja, Employee Experience defines the relationship between a company and its employees. She observed the transition from providing great company 'swag' and snacks, to companies genuinely caring about employee well-being, flexibility in time management and locations, cultivating connection opportunities, making sure employees feel a sense of belonging, and productivity in the workplace.

Pooja also learned from her previous position at Heroku that having a design element is important and can convey the aforementioned feelings.

She outlines that empathizing and understanding employees’ unique needs, fostering community, culture and connections, and creating an organization that values inclusion, belonging, equity is part of the Employee Experience bucket. Making sure employees feel energized through deep connections and intrinsic motivations, and recognizing them for their work also falls under this Employee Experience umbrella.

What are some successful mental health programs you have experienced?

At previous companies, Pooja noticed that mental wellness programs were effective, so having a dedicated person to manage employee well-being is important. Some wellness program ideas that Pooja has experienced and suggested are:

Pooja shares that having workshops and spaces for employees to be vulnerable is beneficial; creating some sort of community and safe space promotes connection and empathy, allowing people to bring their authentic selves.

At Stripe, Pooja appreciates that they provide Wellness stipends and benefits for Therapy, showcasing that awareness of mental health doesn't have to stop with formal programming; giving resources to leaders is a great way to promote healthy and productive work environments.

How did you kick start these programs and keep them up?

Pooja looked up to her Manager at Heroku and learned a lot from their strong and passionate values towards Health and Wellness. She explains that Health and Wellness was extremely embedded into everything done at Heroku.

In terms of ideating programs, Stripe, who is very data-driven, looks carefully at the feedback they receive from their annual employee satisfaction surveys and monthly pulse checks for a subset of people, and bases their event planning on this.

An example of this can be sending out surveys after every Onboarding class and analyzing the different root causes and trends to start brainstorming event ideas.

In terms of getting stakeholder leadership buy-in, what have you seen work and are there any challenges you’ve faced?

Stripe has a very heavy writing culture and documents everything in a memo or project brief. Pooja loves completing these tasks as she sees it as a way for one to prove a theorem by showcasing everything they can outline. These outlines include problem statements, milestones, challenges, anticipated risks, budget, cost benefit analysis, timeline, etc.

Stripe also has a very heavy feedback culture. Pooja describes that employees are part of a company’s success and that it is important to acknowledge that they really want something meaningful in return. To ensure this, make sure programming hits all the targets that the employees have provided feedback on.

In terms of leadership buy-in, it is crucial to understand what the leader is interested in, their vision and values for employee experience, and what aspects they are focused on. She believes that culture can be top down; if a leader genuinely cares about a topic, it will likely become a company ritual.

Because you lead a lot of onboarding, you’re super intentional about doing user interviews with employees. Can you talk about that, especially at high scale and high growth companies?

Stripe recently revamped their Onboarding program and created net new content. To reach this, she facilitated focus groups by analyzing data from their higher recognitions and looking at people nominated for stripe-wide company awards, which embody the company values and outstanding work.

She also consulted Employee Resource Group (ERG) leaders and site leaders, totaling around 150 people in her focus groups, which Pooja found beneficial!

One aspect she particularly enjoyed from these focus groups was the surveys received. Pooja prefers these surveys to be non-anonymous and transparent to engage in deeper discussions with the participants about their feedback. In some cases, she noticed that feedback sometimes stemmed from participants airing grievances rather than genuinely expressing their experiences at the company.

Overall, at a company like Stripe with around 8,000 employees, collecting survey data is crucial! Even at a smaller level, it is essential to gather a subset of people to conduct focus groups.

What questions have you found to be successful for surveys and focus groups?

At Stripe, they send out bi-annual surveys to understand different motivations and whether people are learning and growing. An example is sending out the survey question, “on a scale of 1-10, Stripe motivates me to go beyond what I would do in a similar role elsewhere.” The goal is to ensure that people have learning opportunities in their current roles, regardless of tenure and years of experience.

Another effective survey question is, “I feel empowered to take thoughtful risks.” This is crucial for Pooja to know, as risks are important for company growth, and employees must feel empowered and well educated about the company’s values to make these thoughtful decisions.

For onboarding, Stripe keeps it simple to ensure that new hires grasp the fundamentals, such as asking employees to describe a product or two that they carry. This way, Pooja can assess if they are effectively performing their work.

For focus groups, depending on the topic, Pooja enjoys including “Spicy” questions. First, she ensures that she reminds participants that it is a safe space and they shouldn’t name anyone when discussing earlier topics, while establishing a code of conduct. Then she asks challenging questions that may yield difficult feedback but provide significant opportunities for improvement.

What are your thoughts on learning, onboarding, and how they tie in together? Or the trends you’re seeing in terms of what employers are interested in?

Pooja is passionate about Learning and Development (L&D). She believes onboarding sets the tone for employee experience, shaping what employees will learn and be exposed to in the workplace; it is essentially the beginning stages of an employee’s L&D journey.

Ensuring employees are learning & growing is vital to engagement and career development. Pooja emphasizes setting up employees effectively on their first day and beyond; smooth onboarding leads to a better overall experience.

She compares this to life: if you’re not learning and facing challenges, you may not feel fulfilled and reach your full potential!

In terms of L&D experiences, enabling managers and coaching is essential. Observing how managers learn effectively and communicate to ensure their team feels psychologically safe through enablement tools is something people have been requesting.

How do you deliver content; what have you seen to be successful and what are some challenges?

Pooja has dedicated a day at Stripe for company culture events that include a variety of series such as:

As the face at onboarding, how do you navigate being super positive and hyping everyone up on the days when you are tired?

Pooja highlights the importance of setting boundaries. The onboarding team is encouraged to set boundaries for themselves as well. Finding what works personally is essential; some may feel comfortable blurring lines by reviewing work materials during personal time, while others prefer strict boundaries.

Pooja meditates daily to stay grounded, and this helps her manage her internal experience. She enjoys longer walks or extended meditation sessions at least once a week to understand her emotions and energy, which may be more challenging for those who are parents or caretakers.

Being strategic with time is also crucial. Scheduling draining conversations during optimal times and incorporating breaks can help manage energy levels effectively.

What are your thoughts on humanizing the employee experience?

Pooja recognizes it can be daunting to shed titles and executive presence to become vulnerable at work during workshops. However, deeper connections foster greater empathy. Moreover, having different viewpoints in discussions can lead to more productive conversations rather than combative arguments.

Do you have any final thoughts or advice for everyone here about employee experience?

Pooja encourages everyone in this space to embrace trial and error, as those experiences can provide valuable learning opportunities! 💙