For years, Monday mornings meant welcoming new people into Paysafe for Vesela Koleva.
Alongside a colleague, she introduced groups of new joiners in Sofia to the company’s story and systems. There were activities, conversations and opportunities to meet the people starting alongside them. The aim was to make an unfamiliar first day feel more manageable.
Vesela remembers feedback from people who felt reassured by that welcome. Someone was there to explain where they had arrived, what to expect and where to turn for help.
She brought more than training experience to that work. Before becoming a product trainer at Skrill, she had worked in customer relations and merchant services. She later moved into learning and people development at Paysafe. Her experience of the business extended beyond the workshop room.
When we spoke about the evolution of onboarding, one question kept returning: how do you help new colleagues see the company’s values as relevant to the way they will actually work?
Vesela and the team had spent years exploring that question. They tried different activities, changed the format and adapted to an increasingly global organisation. Their search eventually led to AhaPlay.
An engaging workshop was not always enough
The earlier onboarding approach included an introduction to the company and HR systems, a product-portfolio session and a four-hour values workshop.
The values workshop already involved discussion and group activities. Participants explored the principles and connected them to behaviours they could recognise in their own work.
Still, some people remained sceptical. Vesela recalls participants who questioned whether corporate values were anything more than abstract statements. Others wondered why they were spending time discussing them at all.
For her, the challenge was not simply to keep the room entertained. She wanted people to leave more convinced that the values were worth thinking about and could mean something in their working lives.
One experiment used a Titanic-themed board game. Groups worked through situations intended to prompt discussion about communication, speaking up and decisions made together.
Some participants found the connection meaningful. Others became distracted by the setting: why the Titanic, and what did it have to do with their work?
The same exercise could help one person see the relevance and leave another questioning it. Making the activity engaging did not settle the question of whether its meaning would carry back into work.
Going online changed the constraints
The pandemic brought a move to virtual delivery. The values workshop became shorter, with activities and breakout-room discussions adapted for an online setting.
That made remote participation possible, but parts of the group dynamic became harder for Vesela to see. Some people spoke readily. Others stayed quiet. A discussion could appear active without making it clear whether everyone had found space to contribute.
Meanwhile, the demands on the small L&D team were growing. Vesela describes wanting the team to contribute through design and advice without personally delivering every recurring session. Paysafe’s move towards more globally coordinated processes also increased the importance of a consistent approach across locations.
For the values experience, several requirements now had to work together: relevance, active participation, global delivery and less dependence on someone continually prompting the group.
Why values still needed a conversation
Elsewhere in onboarding, a different format made sense.
The product overview moved into seven short, self-paced modules. New joiners could explore information relevant to their role and return to other parts of the portfolio as their work brought them into contact with different products and colleagues.
Vesela saw value in that flexibility. People wanted to understand the business and how their own work fitted into it. At the time of our conversation, the team was still developing its assessment of the new modules through participation data and feedback.
But when I asked whether values could also be explored entirely alone, she returned to the experience of joining a community.
People needed to hear how others thought, reasoned and understood the same principles. Values were a personal compass, she explained: they informed what someone considered important and how they made decisions.
“It is good to calibrate that compass with other people.”
That was the distinction I took from her answer. Learning the organisation’s stated values was one task. Discovering how those values related to the people around you was another.
A new colleague could read the words independently. A group conversation also gave them access to other people’s interpretations: what mattered to them, how they approached a decision and what they expected in working with others.
Vesela connected this to the competencies the company expected and the confidence people needed in understanding those expectations alongside their colleagues.
The compass was her reflection on why the group mattered. It helped explain a choice the team had continued to make through several changes of format: preserve an opportunity for people to explore the values together.
Finding the combination she had been looking for
Vesela encountered AhaPlay at an HR conference, where she tried a workshop designed to work without a facilitator continually directing the session.
It connected with something she had already been seeking: a virtual group experience suitable for a global audience, in which the structure itself helped people participate.
She and the team developed values-onboarding sessions using the platform.
Participants moved between individual activities and group discussion. They had time to consider questions for themselves before returning to the group to hear and discuss other views. Instructions and tasks guided the progression, while the conversation remained between colleagues.
For Vesela, that rhythm was particularly valuable.
“I think this is a great advantage: the combination of individual and group activities.”
She felt that time to form a view individually gave participants more confidence to contribute when they returned to the group. She also reported more open discussions as people became comfortable with the experience.
Mixed-location groups added something else. New joiners could hear perspectives from colleagues outside their own office, rather than having the entire conversation within one local group. Vesela found that this enriched the experience.
A common structure made space for different perspectives. Those perspectives were part of what she valued, not something the programme needed to remove.
Learning what new joiners needed
The pilots also showed that a structured experience did not remove every need for support.
New joiners were unfamiliar with the format and often unfamiliar with one another. Some waited for someone else to begin. Clearer invitations and introductions helped explain what would happen, why participation mattered and what people were being asked to contribute.
Vesela found that the first discussion could need encouragement. Once participants understood the experience and saw others taking part, the conversation tended to become more natural.
She reported substantially less active facilitation than in the earlier in-person and conventional virtual workshops. More of the process was carried by the instructions and activities, leaving her to observe and intervene when needed.
The pilots she described were not fully unattended. She could still be present, and some groups needed prompting. Early technical interruptions also sometimes disrupted the momentum and required help to get the group moving again. Closing the session offered another opportunity to reconnect the activities to their wider purpose.
Those observations made the implementation needs clearer. New joiners needed a good introduction to the format, understandable instructions and a reliable experience. Reducing continuous direction did not mean abandoning support.
For Vesela, the value remained the combination: space to think individually, discussion with real colleagues and less need for her to carry the entire process.
Where AI could help next
After exploring the changes she had already made, we turned to what might come next.
Vesela could imagine AI helping new joiners find information, navigate company resources and answer questions as they arose. We also discussed role-specific scenarios and role-play, giving people opportunities to think through situations they might encounter at work.
Within a group session, spoken instructions or well-timed prompts might help people understand what to do next. These were possibilities we explored, not features whose effects had already been demonstrated in the pilots.
But the conversation returned to the compass.
“I don’t think AI needs to tell you what the values are, or what you should understand by them.”
Her emphasis was on people recognising the relevance for themselves and exploring it with others. Hearing actual colleagues was part of the purpose of the experience.
We considered what might happen if an AI became the main participant in the session: the person everyone addressed, questioned or tried to persuade. Would that help the colleagues understand one another, or would their attention shift away from each other?
That was a question we explored, not a conclusion that AI could never support a group well.
For this experience, the design priority was clearer: use technology to help people reflect and participate while keeping their exchange with one another central. AI could help with parts of the process. The colleagues still had something important to discover about each other.
Why she would choose it again
When I asked whether she would choose AhaPlay again, knowing what she knew from the experience, Vesela’s answer was clear: “Yes, I would.”
She connected that choice to both the group experience and the organisational context. Her team had been searching for a different format, and Paysafe’s move towards more global delivery created a setting in which mixed-location sessions made particular sense.
AhaPlay brought together several things she had been looking for: individual reflection, meaningful discussion, perspectives from different locations and less continuous facilitation.
Her account is grounded in the pilot sessions she observed, rather than a company-wide evaluation of long-term behaviour or performance. The pilots explained why she considered the approach worth pursuing. They also helped identify what still needed care.
Vesela’s story is not about finding one format for every part of onboarding. Product information could be explored individually. A human welcome had its own value. And the values conversation had a particular reason to remain social.
After years of changing the format, she kept returning to the people taking part: what they understood, what they found meaningful and what they could learn from hearing one another.
The values came from the organisation. Making sense of them was something people could do together.