For years, Monday mornings at Paysafe meant one thing for Vesela Koleva: welcoming new people.
Every Monday there was a new group, at least ten people and sometimes twenty. They sat in a room with her, sorting cards with words on them into sentences about the company they had just joined: Paysafecard is based in Vienna; Skrill started in 2001. Between 2015 and 2020, when Paysafe was growing fast, that added up to around 600 new joiners a year, and Vesela and one colleague welcomed them in person. For most of them, the two of them were their first impression of the company. “Even now,” she says, “I honestly wonder how I managed to do it for so many years.”
She had joined in the Moneybookers and Skrill days, before Paysafe existed, and took over onboarding around 2014. People told her the welcome made them feel good and at ease on an unfamiliar first day.
One part of onboarding, though, was much harder to get right: the company’s values.
“This is total nonsense”
The values workshop came within a new joiner’s first three months: half a day, four hours, led live in a room, with group activities, discussions and even competitions between groups.
Some people still didn’t buy it. Values sounded like small talk to them, and some said so out loud.
“We had people who actually told us, ‘Come on, this is total nonsense.’ And professionally, that challenges you to think hard.”
When people heard there was a session about values, she said, it felt to them like time wasted on small talk. “And that’s something I definitely wanted to change.”
She tried a lot. One experiment was a Titanic-themed board game about speaking up and making decisions together. Some people found it super interesting and got the point: human mistakes, shared in time and in the open, help a team avoid disaster. Others got stuck on the setting: “But why the Titanic?”
Engaging wasn’t enough. She wanted people to walk out convinced the values mattered for how they work.
Going online changed the constraints
Then the pandemic moved everything online. The values workshop became shorter, with tasks in breakout rooms.
In a room, she had seen something powerful: even someone who wasn’t interested would get drawn in by seeing the rest of the group listening, excited and taking part. Online, that was much harder. Some people talked, others stayed quiet, and some quietly dropped out of the group. A discussion could look lively without her knowing whether each person had really thought it through.
Why values need a conversation
Elsewhere in onboarding, people could learn on their own. The product overview became seven short, self-paced modules, and that made sense: people could come back to them as their work brought them to new products and colleagues.
Values were different. When I asked whether values could also be learned alone, she returned to what it means to join a community. Values are a personal compass, she explained: they shape what people consider important and how they make decisions. And when you join a new company, you want to see how the people around you think about them.
“It’s great to have that compass checked against other people’s.”
On your own, she said, you still get something out of it, but you won’t see the bigger meaning. That is the heart of her answer. Learning the company’s stated values is one thing. Discovering what they mean to the people around you is another.
“I’d really been looking for something like this”
Vesela came across ExecuteOS at an HR conference, where anyone could try a workshop with no facilitator. She had been searching for exactly this kind of thing: virtual, built for a global audience, without a facilitator who has to keep prompting people, “where people get drawn in by what’s happening on the screen.” “I’d really, really been looking for something like this,” she said.
She and her team built Paysafe’s values onboarding on it. The invitation set the tone: “Ever been in a workshop with no facilitator? Want to find out what that’s like?”
In the first sessions, the new joiners did what new joiners do: they waited. “They wait a bit to see what happens,” she said, laughing. Then someone would loosen up, turn on their camera and say what they really thought. “Then they see there’s nothing scary about it,” she said, “and someone just jumps in.” And once a few had spoken, the others started coming out too.
What made the difference was the rhythm: new joiners move between thinking on their own and discussing in a group, a combination she calls “a fantastic advantage”. In a standard virtual workshop, she said, some people just don’t take part and drop out of the group.
“Here you don’t drop out. At every moment there’s something there for you personally to think through and hear. To me, that’s a unique advantage of this format.”
“There were much more open discussions,” she said. Time to think alone first, she felt, gives people a bit of confidence to speak up when they come back to the group, and it gives her more certainty that everyone has actually thought it through.
The groups mixed new joiners from Sofia with colleagues from the US, the UK and other offices, which enriches the experience: some colleagues are bolder about speaking up, and that pulls the others in too.
And her own role changed. In the live workshops, she put her facilitation at 80 to 90 percent of the time; in the earlier virtual ones, a little less.
“With ExecuteOS, I basically just watch.”
She stepped in when a group went quiet: 20 to 30 percent of the time, “dramatically less”. And the four-hour workshop became one hour. “A big optimization,” she said. “That’s no small advantage.”
Where AI could help next
We also talked about what might come next. Vesela could imagine AI helping new joiners find information and answers, a voice that repeats instructions at key moments, and role-play built around each person’s job. These were ideas, not things her sessions tested.
But the conversation came back to the compass.
“AI doesn’t need to tell you what the values are, or what you should understand by them.”
The whole point of the workshop, she said, is that people come to see it for themselves. There is an emotional side to it, connecting with other people, and if it all had to happen with AI, she thought that would be lost.
What it changed
The skeptics from the start of this story were the people she had most wanted to reach. This time, she said, most people were proactive: “they got it and saw the point.” She is “super grateful,” she said, that people are open and take part.
Her feedback form asks people, anonymously, whether they would recommend the workshop. The score was “super high”. To her, that says more than enjoyment: to recommend something, you have to have actually made sense of it.
The timing helped. Paysafe was moving to global HR processes and global teams, and the format fit that “perfectly”, letting her bring together new joiners from everywhere. Her team had been looking for something like this for a while, and in the end it arrived at the best possible moment.
When I asked whether she would choose ExecuteOS again, Vesela didn’t hesitate: “Definitely. A hundred percent.”
The values came from the organization. Making sense of them was something people could do together.
What we learned
Two lessons came out of Vesela’s first sessions, and they shape how we run ExecuteOS sessions today.
Values need a conversation
Information can be learned alone; values can’t, not fully. People need to hear how colleagues read the same values, check their own compass against other people’s and discover what the words mean in real decisions. That is why the values session is a conversation between colleagues, not a module.
New joiners need a nudge, at least at first
Vesela started out sure the workshop could run with no facilitator at all. With new joiners, especially in the first sessions, it couldn’t. “Only a nudge is needed,” she said: 10 to 20 percent of a facilitator’s time, at the start and now and then. Why new joiners in particular:
- They are strangers. Nobody knows anyone yet, so nobody wants to go first.
- They are new and careful. In their first weeks, people are wary of making a mistake, so they hold back what they think and wait to be invited.
- This is one of their first touchpoints with the company. A person from the company keeps the human connection: someone who welcomes them, explains why this matters and closes with a good feeling about what comes next. The role matters too: a host, not an examiner, so the company’s presence makes it safer to speak, not riskier.
- The format is new to them. They have, in her words, “no idea what you’ve brought them together for”. So the invitation and the introduction have to say what will happen, that they are expected to take part, that it isn’t a box-ticking exercise and that no one will evaluate them.
- Instructions get skimmed. Not everyone reads every instruction. A voice that repeats the key ones at the right moments would help, she suggested.
- Momentum is fragile. When a technical hiccup interrupted a great first discussion, it took a person to get the group going again.
So when can a session run entirely on its own? When the conditions flip: people who already know each other, in a company they know, who have been through the format before, with a reliable experience. Vesela expects that with an audience other than new joiners, a team that works together or a group of leaders, a facilitator may not be needed at all. That is what the format is designed for.