Onboarding and training remotely at Nubank

The Learning & Development team’s mission is to nurture and develop Nubankers’ careers from Day One, and part of that work goes through the onboarding – or the “Nubank 101” training. This means to provide the best immersive experience for new hires, so they can truly feel what it’s like to be a Nubanker.

From the office environment to group meals and first interactions with other squads: our onboarding is all about creating connections. So… what happens during a pandemic?

Nubank turned to remote work on March 12th, becoming one of Brazil’s first companies to adopt home office during the pandemic. The health and wellbeing of employees, partners, and service providers is our top priority, so it was a natural decision to pivot towards being a fully remote company in a matter of just a few hours.

Our work had to go on with almost three thousand people working remotely, many for the first time in their lives.

Nubank’s 24/7 customer service, relief campaigns to help customers in need, the launch of new product features, and, of course, initiatives focusing on our Nubankers… All these projects needed to keep going – and so did our onboarding. But… In a remote setting, how to protect such contextual experience?

“Investing in people is one of the most important things a company can do right now to get through these changing times”, says Deborah Abi-Saber, Learning and Development team leader at Nubank.

And so, it was time to reinvent some rituals.

Deborah shares that when she sat down to discuss a fully remote onboarding “there were many doubts on how to make things possible, but the mission has always been clear: to provide the best experience to each new hire starting at Nubank in such a challenging time”.

And so it happened: in March we had 78 new Nubankers going through remote onboarding, and in April that number jumped to 98 people from 9 different countries.

The focus on developing the remote onboarding was:

1. Guarantee people had everything they needed to start working – including computers, software, and any other equipment.
2. Ensure they felt embraced, connected and welcomed by Nubank
3. And make sure this would be an awesome experience.

And that’s when it hit us: we should borrow from our own expertise with WoWs.

At Nubank, we’re used to delivering WOW moments to our customers – letters, gifts, or cards sent whenever there is a meaningful connection between our customer support teams and clients. Some of our WoW moments are so powerful that they end up in the press.

We deep-dived into the how of the experience, adapting the welcome kit and even testing how it felt to open it.

All of our new employees received a package, filled with purple items and a welcome letter. We made sure everything was properly sanitised and sent to people’s houses in a safe way – so everyone would be able to receive their machines and equipment together with this special “welcome” box.

Aside from that, it was crucial to ensure that area-specific onboardings transpired smoothly – after all, that’s when new Nubankers get in touch with the tools, the projects and peers and have a true feel of the challenges that lie ahead.

Good communication and new rituals

In such an unstable scenario, our work is to ensure that onboarding into a new role is as little concern as possible. It is crucial to be near (even when physically distant) to make ourselves present and provide all the support people need so they can feel safe, at least in the professional sphere of their lives.

Establishing connections and opening communication paths can be harder during home office, which is why we asked managers to increase the number of welcome rituals.

Even in this unprecedented setup, the feedback received has been outstanding, with an NPS score of 9. We couldn’t be happier with the fact that so many new Nubankers felt welcomed and empowered to kick off their journey with us.

But the work doesn’t stop there. It’s not only about onboarding new Nubankers, but also about nurturing everyone already onboard.

Another considerable part of the L&D team’s scope is to work on developing Nubanker’s careers inside the company, and much of this goes through training.

During the pandemic, we understood that our first priorities were:

• To support our leaders – so they could better support their teams
• Support our customer excellence teams – since working directly with millions of customers during a highly volatile time could take an emotional toll on them

Regarding leadership, we delivered two training sessions focused on people managers: “How to manage people and projects remotely” and “How to lead through times of uncertainty”.

For customer excellence, we offered a “Critical Cases and Emotional Health” training.

And, in the spirit of improving communication, we delivered training sessions to over 2.000 people on how to write feedback and self-assessment.

Talking about technical details: to guarantee people could join these talks, we scheduled various options for attendance and recorded the trainings/presentations for those who could not join.

Being mindful that people’s schedule working from home might be different than the one they had at the office is key to making content more accessible.

“Now is the time for companies to look after their teams – to look after the people in them” says Deborah Abi-Saber, L&D team leader.

“It is the time to make new hires feel genuinely welcomed and embraced by the company and their peers, and to ensure that the people who have been by your side for a long time also have the tools they need to thrive in this new working reality.”