The WonderLeon Awards

Scaling stories: SpeachMe

What do we do? We’re a cloud-based knowledge transfer solution built to empower your employees to collaborate, communicate and be more productive.

Onboarding a new team 9000 Kms away

SpeachMe was created in 2012. At the end of 2017, we raised 10 million euros to develop operations in the US and open a US office from scratch…fast! Onboarding a new team 9000 Kms away in one week: challenge accepted! 6 members of the FR team, from strategic departments (Customer Success, Sales, Marketing), flew to Los Angeles for a week of training, having inspirational talks, co-creating sessions and doing team building.

The Little Stories Behind the Scaling Story

Step #1: Intensive onboarding week in Los Angeles facilitated by 6 members of the FR team.

Step #2: During the onboarding week, building team cohesion between FR and US teams was key.

Step #3: Setting up our offices at We Work Santa Monica.

Step #4: Offsite to co-create the local strategy.

Step #5: Strategic operations moving to LA with CEO, Najette Fellache.

Step #6: Managing 9hr-time difference with collaborative tools including Google Hangout-and also all the Speech created through our internal platform, we managed to spread all key information.

Key learnings & anecdotes

• Set up your onboarding session early on (in the first month of recruitment).
• Choose your key people who facilitate the training.
• Allow formal and informal bonding time.
• Don’t neglect preparation (including food!) and what happens next (off-site, strategy, collaborative tools, weekly meetings).
• Adapting your management to the American culture is a MUST (providing feedback-home officestarting the day very early to be able to leave the office early too).
• It is impossible to copycat the success story from one country to another.

During our onboarding week in LA, we organized a game where everyone was asked to put a fun fact about themselves in a hat and then each person picked a paper and had to guess who it belonged to.

Here are some interesting ones to share with you:
• Kader, our COO used to watch Michael Jordan’s games before a big exam for motivation.
• Charline, our Head of Customer Experience in France, pretended to everyone for years at school that she had a twin cousin.
• Calvin, our VP of Customer Success in LA, was a shepherd for a few months in Pakistan.