The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams
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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for People & HR Teams
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The Ultimate Guide for People Teams


With Coda, spend time on your people, not your tools

I’m Raechel and I run the People Team at Coda. Prior to Coda I helped scale Box from 200 to 1500 people. In my current role, I am focused on and passionate about helping Codans grow, succeed, and thrive, emphasizing a culture of transparency, collaboration, and well-being. I’ve made my career out of finding the right people and guiding them to success, with over a decade of experience in recruiting and people operations.
Through my experience and in talking with many other People leaders, I’ve learned that the most effective People Teams spend the majority of their time investing in their people. Building trust, connecting, enabling, coaching, and celebrating. Strengthening the company’s most important asset as individuals and as a team. This is what moves a business forward. This is what People Teams want and should be able to do.
However, as a fellow People Team leader, I know our time and focus gets sidetracked by tools and processes that don’t actually move the needle for the business, they just allow us to stay afloat. Often, this is because the tools we use aren’t able to adapt to exactly how we want to run the team and/or only cover a sliver of what the team needs to do.
That’s why, I’m convinced we need more flexible, more all-in-one tools that streamline, not complicate, the efforts of our People Teams, and allow us to spend more time on our people. After looking into numerous HR tool stacks, I am confident Coda has to be part of, if not the main tool, for People Teams. It’s a flexible, all-in-one platform to run just about any process you want — again, allowing your People Team to focus on what matters— your people.
[alt: However, as a fellow People Team leader, I know our time and energy often get bogged down by the wrong tools. After talking with numerous other People Team leaders and exploring a myriad of HR tools, I’m now convinced Coda has to be part of every People Team’s tool stack. It consolidates 10s of tools into one flexible, easy to use yet powerful tool for your entire team. Coda will give your team the time back to focus on what matters- empowering your people.]
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In this guide, you’ll find templates to run all the major parts of your employee lifecycle— from onboarding, to team management, to performance and engagement, to off-boarding all with a lens for diversity, inclusion, and equity. However, this is just the start of what you can do in Coda. If you can imagine it, you likely can build it in Coda. Just ask Coda AI ✨ or visit our
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. You can also find the Recruiting Team Ultimate Guide here.

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1. Automate and spend WAY less time on onboarding, off-boarding, and headcount approvals.

The two most common processes that exist for every People Operations team is the onboarding and off-boarding workflow. From welcome emails, shipping equipment, knowledge share for your company’s structure and policies, sending exit information, adding then removing them from proper systems, the list goes on. It’s time consuming but yet so important. With Coda, you can automate emailing new hires and their managers, with auto-filled information to expedite the process. In the same doc, you can keep all of your to-lists and even set up automatic reminders for those as well— taking all the burden off of you.

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More on Onboarding
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More on Off-boarding
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More on
(V1) 2. Onboarding & Offboarding
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and
Off-boarding
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In a similar vein, I don’t know someone who has gone through headcount approval processes without a slight groan. It’s often a nebulous and cumbersome process. With Coda, it can be as easy as managers filling out a super quick form, and all the backend views for People, Finance, and Leadership are built out for you leading to a simplified and streamlines process.

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More on this in Team Management
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2. Reduce repeat questions and guide your employees towards self-service.

If you’ve ever wished you could just clone yourself…. You are not alone. Likely, a huge chunk of your day taken up by one-off questions from employees. Until we created these self-serve, easily accessible and easy to update resources, ours were too. In Coda, you can create a living wiki with automatic notifications when an employee asks a question, a ticketing system that’s simple but not yet another piece of software, and guides for managers and employees alike to find all the information they need. You will finally have the time to put your focus where it belongs, on your people.

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More on Internal Wiki
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More on this in
RT Alt Internal Wiki
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3. Make building an engaging, inclusive environment a supportive and fun (!) team sport.

tktk - based on what Clare & Leah write

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More on Employee Engagement
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More on this in
(V1) 4. Employee Experience
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4. Align your team and consolidate 10 tools into one Team Hub.

Most teams have hundreds of docs, presentations, and spreadsheets tracking the information they need to operate day-to-day. That’s ridiculous and is way too much overhead. Teams should instead have one Team Hub that has everything they need to know and can continue to evolve it as their team and the company evolves.

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More on this in
(V1) 1. People Team Hub
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5. Empower HRBPs and managers alike with tools to engage and enable top performance

Does your team have hundreds of Slack threads with stakeholders on the performance of their talent? Wouldn’t it be nice to have that all in one place as a source of truth? YES. From that one source of truth you can have on-going discussions, designate owners and next steps to keep talent engaged and performing.
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Similarly, calibration processes are often run in docs, spreadsheets, or heavy tools. In Coda though, you or your HRBPs can run the exact type of process you want, all-in-one place, keep records of past sessions, and use the data to inform future decisions around talent.

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And with all this said, we know performance conversations should be happening on an ongoing, frequent basis in 1-1s, led by each manager. To enable effective 1-1s and avoid the dreaded doc of notes on notes on notes and lack of helpful conversations, would highly encourage you to check out the way Square has facilitated this important people process.

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More on Performance
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More on this in
(V1) 5. Performance Management
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Archive

[old]Two of the most common processes that exist for every People team is the onboarding and off-boarding workflow. From welcome emails, shipping equipment, knowledge share for your company’s structure and policies, sending exit information, adding then removing them from proper systems, the list goes on. These are time consuming and have a ton of moving pieces that are often done manually across multiple team members. Things get dropped or delayed leading to a suboptimal experience for the new hire or employee, and a frustrated team behind the scenes.
[old] automate emailing new hires and their managers, with auto-filled information to expedite the process. In the same doc, you can keep all of your to-lists and even set up automatic reminders for those as well— taking all the burden off of you. You can also set up
[old] If you’ve ever wished you could just clone yourself…. You are not alone. Likely, a huge chunk of your day taken up by one-off questions from employees. Until we created these self-serve, easily accessible and easy to update resources, ours were too. In Coda, you can create a living wiki with automatic notifications when an employee asks a question, a ticketing system that’s simple but not yet another piece of software, and guides for managers and employees alike to find all the information they need. You will finally have the time to put your focus where it belongs, on your people.
[old] In a similar vein, I don’t know someone who has gone through headcount approval processes without a slight groan. It’s often a nebulous and cumbersome process. With Coda, it can be as easy as managers filling out a super quick form, and all the backend views for People, Finance, and Leadership are built out for you leading to a simplified and streamlines process.
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