In today’s global economy, companies are looking overseas for new talent. By investing in overseas talent, companies not only save money, but also establish a presence in these emerging markets. Hiring a writing team overseas can be challenging, but hiring the team is only the first step. Once hired, the new team needs to be brought up-to-speed, often from thousands of miles away. This talk describes a rigorous process for onboarding a global team. This process involves commitment from both a mentor and a new employee, and provides a means of measuring a new employee’s progress along the way. Following this process resulted in improved retention and time to productivity for our global team at IBM’s Systems and Technology Group.

1. Onboarding process for
overseas technical writers
Beth Hettich (beth_hettich@intuit.com)
Laura Walech-Roth (walechroth.laura@mayo.edu)

2. Introduction
• To be viable in today’s global economy, companies need to have a presence in
emerging markets.
• With the troubles in the economy, companies are looking to save money and
having global workers is one way to do it.
• To compete in these developing economies like Brazil, India, and
China, companies today need established footprints in those countries.
• This trend is not going away, so it’s imperative to embrace it and to cultivate a
team that will be successful and will further the mission of the organization.
“Economists who study global labor trends say companies create jobs outside the U.S.
not just because labor costs are much lower, but also to pursue sales opportunities in
new markets. They want to be closer to the economies that are growing the fastest and
to be able to hire locals who understand the cultural and consumer trends. “
(businessweek.com, July 12, 2012, “Bloomberg View: In Defense of Outsourcing”)
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14

3. Our experience
• We hired a global team of writers to author documentation for a systems management
product
• Timeline:
– August - we were told that we were going to be hiring a global team (12 writers)
– October - we started reviewing resumes
– February - we had hired 5 writers
– March – hiring was frozen
• Other teams we knew that had hired global teams had abdicated control of the hiring
process to programmers or execs overseas who don’t know anything about information
development.
• We knew that to be successful, we had to maintain control of the hiring and onboarding
process.
• Even though the team of writers we hired was smaller than originally planned, the
collateral we created was created with a larger scale team in mind.
• Because we worked for a large corporation, we had the benefit of having some level of
administrative assistance overseas during this process.
• The process and collateral were created to ensure that we built the best possible team.
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14

4. Onboarding as a contract
Mutual assent The offer was that the US employee or mentor would bring the
new employee up to the level of knowledge or experience that
would enable the new employee to be productive in their new
role.
Consideration The new employee’s commitment to expend the effort to learn
and do everything that was included in the offer.
Capacity The capacity of the mentor is established to perform the work
themselves and to teach the new person how to do the work.
Legality What was being offered and exchanged was reasonable—the
knowledge or skills that were transferred were reasonable, and it
was reasonable to do that knowledge transfer in the time
specified.
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14

5. Onboarding process
Transition checklistOnboarding checklist
Start
Progress scorecard
Access/Authorization
Tools installation
week 2week 1 weeks 3-x
Mentoring sessions
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14

6. Onboarding collateral
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14
Onboarding
checklist
• Used when: weeks 1 and 2.
• Completed by: new hire
• Description: checklist that includes information about:
• Authorizations needed.
• Software and tools needed.
• Education modules that could be completed during any down time.
Transition
checklist
• Used when: beginning of week 3.
• Completed by: mentor
• Description: Checklist that includes information about the project being transitioned.
This checklist included the following:
• General information about the topic collection
• Detailed information about each of the deliveries of the content.
• Information about any dependencies
Mentoring
sessions
• Used when: iteratively, starting week 3 until employee is onboard.
• Completed by: mentor and new hire
• Description: Meetings to introduce the new writer to a particular type of work needed
for the project and transfer skills.
Progress
scorecard
• Used when: iteratively, starting week 3 until employee is onboard.
• Completed by: mentor
• Description: Included descriptions of all of the tasks that a writer would need to perform
along with criteria for mastery of those tasks. Used to ensure that everyone involved was
aware of the skills needed and to measure the progress of new writers.

7. Progress scorecard
• Included descriptions of all of the tasks that a writer would need to
perform along with criteria for mastery of those tasks.
• Points scored based on the level of mastery the new writer had achieved.
• The scorecard was divided into the following sections:
– Design documents
– Topics
– User assistance
– Messages
– Defects
– Content quality
– Work habits
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14
Snippet of the Topics section of the progress scorecard

8. About us
Beth Hettich is a Staff Business Analyst on the Buy Experience team at Intuit. This team looks at
providing a seamless purchase experience for customers by evaluating all related website, in-product,
and email interactions. Beth works across the teams that create these interactions to ensure that they
are clear and consistent
Before working for Intuit, Beth worked as a content architect and strategist at IBM. In this role, she led
an international team of writers that created integrated and Web-based information in support of the
Cloud Systems Software product family.
Laura Walech-Roth is a Project Manager in the Department of Laboratory and Pathology Medicine at
Mayo Clinic in Rochester. At the Mayo Clinic, Laura manages extramural lab projects in collaboration
with a team of project managers, business analysts, programmers, system engineers, quality assurance
testers, business stakeholders, and physician sponsors, using PMBOK, Agile and Lean methodologies.
Before joining the Mayo Clinic, Laura worked as a project manager and people manager at IBM where
she led and managed various teams, including programmers, testers, graphic designers, user interface
designers, and technical writers. Along with a pattern of solving complex business problems, and
building organizational capabilities, Laura analyzed requirements to define solutions, and secure buy-
in, while capitalizing on the potential of a multi-disciplinary team to achieve goals.
Onboarding process for overseas technical writers - #stc14