Onboarding

A team lead’s walkthrough of bringing a team onto GembaKai: inviting members, what they see on their first sign-in, logging the first activity and running the onboarding mini-walk together.

Recommended owner: The team lead or administrator who will facilitate the waste walk. You’ll need an admin or team-lead role in GembaKai, an organization with a team already created and the email addresses of everyone on the team.

Goals

By the end of onboarding:

Everyone on the team has signed in at least once and belongs to the right organization and team.
Everyone has picked a role and, in the mini-walk, logged a real day of activity, including at least one DOWNTIME call.
The team has talked through a handful of DOWNTIME calls together, on the mini-walk board, before the real walk starts.

Budget forty-five minutes for the session itself, plus a few minutes a day or two ahead for the invitations.

Step 1 — Invite the team

Invitations come from the Users page. Click Invite User and the Add New Users dialog opens. Two fields matter more than they look:

Organization and Team. Pick both. Anyone who accepts the invitation joins that organization and that team automatically, which is what makes the rest of this guide work. Leave them blank and the invitee gets an account with no membership at all, and you’ll be adding them by hand later.
Auto-add new users to all open sprints. Leave it checked if the team already has a waste walk open or in planning, so new members land in it without a second step.

Paste the addresses into the email box, separated by commas, and click Send Magic Links. Each person gets an email with a Sign In button. The invitation remembers the organization and team you chose and applies them the moment the link is clicked.

The Add New Users dialog with the organization and team fields and the Send Magic Links button highlighted — Invite from the Users page — set the organization and team so new members join automatically

Know what the team sees, because the questions you’ll field in the session are mostly about these three screens.

Clicking the link in the email lands on a Welcome back page with a single Sign in button. The “Keep me signed in” option is sensible on a personal laptop and not on a shared one. One click and they’re in.

The Welcome back screen that completes a magic-link sign-in — The invitation link ends here — one click completes the sign-in

The home page follows. The one control a new member needs is the Log activity button under the three cards; everything else on the page can wait.

The GembaKai home page with the Log activity button highlighted — Log activity is the button that matters on day one

Clicking it the first time opens Getting everything set up instead of the logging screen, because GembaKai needs a role before anyone can log. The role (technical, business, leadership, product, design or quality) shapes the list of activities the person will see, so it should describe their day-to-day work, not their title. Two other fields are on the same page:

Display name. The default is the first part of the email address, which is fine for jane.doe@acme.com and useless for z008@fastmail.us. Ask people to put in a name the team will recognize on the board.
Time zone. Activities and reminders are based on it. Remote members should check it.

Get Started saves the role and drops them into the activity view.

The Getting everything set up page with the role list, the display name field and the Get Started button highlighted — A role is required before logging; a recognizable display name helps everyone else

Step 3 — What logging looks like

Before the mini-walk, it helps to show the team the logging screen so the exercise isn’t their first look at it. Project these screens and talk through them; nobody logs anything yet.

Logging happens in the week view. Clicking a day opens the activity panel: a duration, set with the plus and minus buttons; an activity picked from a list that depends on the person’s role; an optional DOWNTIME category and how much of the time it took; and a comment. The description under the activity list explains what the category covers (every activity has one), and reading it aloud is the quickest way to teach the categories. The figure shows a fifteen-minute stand-up logged as Ritual, which covers stand-ups, retros, demos and the like, with DOWNTIME left blank.

A fifteen-minute daily stand-up logged as a Ritual activity, with the category description shown — An activity: a fifteen-minute stand-up logged as Ritual, with the description explaining what the category covers

Now the same stand-up, except it ran long. Thirty-five minutes instead of fifteen, because a technical discussion took over. The duration goes up, Was there DOWNTIME? is set to Extra processing and the slider marks the twenty-five minutes that were waste. The description changes color and explains the waste category, the same way the activity description did, and the comment carries a line of context. The app nudges for that comment, and the comments are what make the readout vivid later.

The same stand-up extended to thirty-five minutes with twenty-five minutes marked as Extra processing DOWNTIME — The same stand-up, run long: twenty-five of the thirty-five minutes marked as Extra processing, with a comment explaining why

This is a good place to introduce the DOWNTIME categories with examples the team will recognize. Extra processing fits a meeting that produced nothing beyond its first fifteen minutes; waiting fits the hour lost to a blocked build; defects fit the afternoon spent on a customer bug. The team will probably argue about the edges, and that argument is most of the point of the session.

A day that has been logged looks like the figure below: planned work in green, DOWNTIME in yellow with its category on the card and the day’s total at the top of the column. When a day comes up short, GembaKai offers to fill the gap with PTO in one click.

The week view after a day of logging: planned activities in green and DOWNTIME activities in yellow — A logged day — planned work in green, DOWNTIME in yellow and a one-click PTO prompt for the shortfall

Two more things are worth pointing out while the screen is up. The menu icon at the top left opens the sidebar, which is how a person switches between teams and waste walks. Only active waste walks are listed; Show closed brings back the earlier, now-closed ones. Start week view on Monday is a display preference, set it or leave it. And the Day toggle at the top right switches to a single-day logging view designed for phones. It switches on by itself on a mobile device, so on a desktop there is rarely a reason to use it, but it is there.

The week view with the sidebar open, showing the team selector, the list of waste walks with the Show closed toggle, and the start-week-on-Monday preference — The sidebar: switch teams or waste walks, show closed ones and set the week to start on Monday

Which brings up the phone. Logging from a phone is the easy way to keep up with a waste walk: the web app is mobile friendly, you can swipe between days, and an activity can be logged the moment it ends rather than reconstructed at five o’clock. I recommend it. Have people open gembakai.us on their phones during the session, so their first entry from a phone happens with help in the room.

The team logs for real in the next step, inside the mini-walk.

Step 4 — Run the onboarding mini-walk

Once everyone has signed in, launch the mini-walk from the team page (Teams, then the team). The Start Mini-walk button is in the top right. It pulls every signed-in member of the team into a one-week simulated waste walk, scheduled for the current week, and opens a board where every logged activity appears as a card. Nothing logged in it counts toward a real waste walk, which is what makes it safe to practise in.

The team page with the Start Mini-walk button highlighted — Start Mini-walk, from the team page, once everyone is signed in

The Mini-walk started dialog gives you two things. Copy the join URL (the copy icon beside it) and paste it into the team chat, so anyone who arrives late or wasn’t signed in yet can join with a click. Then open the facilitator board link and keep that tab in front of you for the rest of the session.

The Mini-walk started dialog with the join URL and the facilitator board link highlighted — Share the join URL in chat; open the facilitator board and keep it visible

Team members see the mini-walk as a one-week waste walk, Onboarding mini-walk, in their activity view. Days already past prompt for PTO, since there is no time logged against them, and a single click on Log PTO fills a day. Today prompts normally.

Now the exercise itself: have everyone log yesterday’s activities, live, together. Yesterday rather than today, so nobody gets pulled into logging in real time during the session. Every meeting, every block of work, a DOWNTIME call wherever one applies and a one-line comment on each. People who were out yesterday log PTO with the one-click prompt and then log the most recent day they worked. In the figure, Monday was filled with PTO in one click and the first real activity, an hour of release validation logged as Transportation with a comment, sits on Tuesday.

A team member’s week view of the onboarding mini-walk, with a prior day filled by PTO and one activity logged — What a team member sees: a one-week mini-walk for this week, a prior day filled with PTO in a click, and the first real activity logged

Every activity anyone logs lands on the facilitator board as a card: the comment, the duration and whether it was planned. This is where the session earns its time, so read the cards out. Ask who logged release validation as transportation and why. Ask what the PTO card teaches about days with no entries. Move cards around, add a note of your own with the speed dial, and let the team see that a one-line comment on a thirty-minute activity is worth more than a precise duration on a silent one. The questions that come up here, and the answers worth having ready, are in the waste walk guide’s mini-walk exercise.

The facilitator board for the onboarding mini-walk, showing each logged activity as a card — The facilitator board — every logged activity arrives as a card the team can talk about

When you’re done, end the mini-walk from the board’s Workshop menu. End Mini-walk closes the exercise for everyone and tears down the board. If you forget, it closes itself after two hours.

The Workshop menu on the facilitator board with End Mini-walk highlighted — End Mini-walk from the Workshop menu when the session is over

What the session should leave behind

The mini-walk simulates one day of logging so that the real walk doesn’t have to be the first time anyone tries it. Coming out of it, every member of the team should have logged an activity and a DOWNTIME call, seen their card on the board and heard the team discuss at least a couple of borderline calls. If someone couldn’t sign in or got stuck on the role page, you found out now, with the whole team on the call, and not on day three of the walk.

From here, follow the waste walk guide for the kickoff itself, the daily ritual that keeps logging alive and the handoff to the readout.

References

Waste walk — the exercise this onboarding prepares the team for: goals, the kickoff agenda, the daily ritual and the closing handoff.
GembaKai readout — the one-hour session at the end of the walk, where the logged data becomes a decision.