When it's your first day at a new company, what you don't know comes to mind before what you have to do. I was like that too when I joined the AX team in August. In front of my new laptop, the accounts I needed to set up and the questions I wanted to ask were piling up, but I had no idea where to start or who to ask.
At that time, the first person to talk was not a person but an orca.
“Not sure where to start on your first day at work? Don’t worry!”
At first, I thought it was an automatic notification message. However, the message that followed included what I had to do and the name of the colleague in charge who would do it. On the first day, when I was at a loss, I tried to follow the first quest that Orca gave me.
Each time you clear a quest, a company map appears.
The first quest was an office tour and registration for Algocare, a personalized nutritional service. I followed the person in charge around the office and obtained small pieces of information such as “How is this space used” and “How do you usually spend your lunch break?” The office was an unfamiliar place before joining the company, but by the end of the tour, it had become a map in my mind.
In the next quest, we set up Slack and Notion, and were informed of the security guide and company rules. If I had read the document on my own, I would have just scrolled down because I didn't know where it was important, but I understood it much more clearly when the person in charge pointed it out along with when it would be used in actual work.
As I went through the quest where I was introduced to products and tasks, I was able to gradually picture the context in which I would work as an AX consultant in the future. Onboarding was not a checklist of things to do, but a time to learn the language and how Corka works.
Wherever Orca took her, there were always people.
The subject of the quest and the person in charge you had to meet were different every time. At first, even finding the person in charge was a small challenge, but as I completed each quest, the more faces I recognized at the company, and I began to have a sense of what and where to ask.
This was especially helpful for someone like me who hesitates to ask questions to people they've just met. “Are you probably busy right now?”, “Isn’t this a too basic question?” Before you think about it, Orca connects you with the person you need first.
So, the thing that stayed with me the longest after completing onboarding wasn’t the bot’s message itself. Rather than being a bot that gave me all the answers, Orca was more like a guide that took me to the person who could tell me about the company. Now, whenever I get stuck on something, I have a colleague’s face that comes to mind. For me, who had piled up questions on the morning of the first day and didn't even know who to ask, the change was quite big.
Old ideas, until day one
Orcabot started out as a service that members created while wondering, “What would a more effective onboarding look like?” Orcabot, introduced in 2022, also had a work system, Corca's culture and values, and a method of dividing tasks into quests and connecting them with colleagues in charge.
Even as time passes, the core of onboarding remains the same. Rather than leaving new colleagues to learn the company on their own, we allow them to meet the people they need when they need them. I, who joined the company in August, also had the experience of starting my first day at Corca in that way.
Now that I've completed onboarding, I know more people's names and faces than I did on my first day following Orca. Someday, when a new colleague comes along, I want to be one of those people that Orca tells to “Ask this person.”