Six ways teams can improve onboarding
Onboarding is a transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar. New hires leave behind prior jobs or campuses where they were well-known and considered an expert to ramp up in an unfamiliar environment where they have more questions than answers. Put yourself back in the mindset you had as a new hire. What were your first few weeks like?
Through Changing the Story, I’ve interviewed early and mid-career women to learn about their early experiences in tech and how they shaped their overall experience at the company. Read their stories and set your team up for success with these tips to improve onboarding.
1. Clarify Expectations
Early on, it’s important to be very clear with expectations. When you think you’re being clear enough, add just a bit more detail. The norms and expectations you have on your team may not be obvious to the person joining your team. This ambiguity can lead to miscommunications and stress.
One big area of this stress is expectations about onboarding speed.
“I expected that the first few months would be onboarding and then after that you would completely know what you were doing. Even as an intern, I put a lot of pressure on myself. From speaking to friends at other companies, a lot of people feel newer for longer than you think. Even when you’re not new you can still not know things.”
Another area of ambiguity is expectations of prior knowledge which can come in many forms including your company’s jargon or acronyms.
“When they brought up jargon I didn’t understand, it was hard to know if that was something I didn’t know because I was inexperienced verses something that wasn’t relevant to my role.”
This is especially important to look out for when someone is onboarding to a less common role at your company.
Expectations to spell out:
Availability —Detail working hours, vacation policies, and working from home processes.
Communication —Clarify when to use slack verses email and when to set up a meeting. Specify what questions should go to the team verses the manager.
Role — Clarify what they should focus on for their role compared to others they will be interacting with. Specify how deep you expect them to dive into certain areas. (Ex. team architecture)
Goals— Detail what should they accomplish in their first week, month, and quarter and share when you expect they will independently contribute and what that will look like.
2. Provide Structure
A lot of onboarding is reading documentation, running into issues, and finding yourself blocked until you can get assistance. You can improve on this process by making sure you have a Launch Plan with detailed setup instructions and clear learning paths for the core elements of the job. The material should be a mix of content that can be completed independently, content they will learn from experience, and structured trainings.
“At my last company, all the new engineers spent a couple of weeks reading a book on OCAML and learning OCAML. Having that dedicated learning time was nice.”
Work backwards from the job description or from where you expect them to be in one year. What skills and experiences will they need to have and how can you slowly build those skills over the next year?
“My first or second day on the job they sent me instructions to set up my computer. One of them was to install PHP on your computer. I asked the team’s tech lead how to do that and he sent me back a ‘let me google that for you’ link so I asked someone else.”
“I felt so lost, I had to have people explain the code to me but they didn’t want to. It made me feel stupid, nobody was guiding me. I felt like I could do nothing all day and nobody would notice.”
“When I first joined a lot of what I had to learn was very adhoc. I spent a lot of time talking to people on the team to learn about architecture. I had to try hard to learn things that were seemingly basic. But now we’ve added a lot of talks and concrete structure. I learned things later than I wish I had.”
It can be tempting to keep your onboarding process adhoc and flexible. After all, every new hire is different. But having a process that relies on learning this way can be stressful and lead to a lot of gaps. Ask yourself: Is your current process really working? What is the cost of creating the documentation compared to having a new hire operating at 50% capacity for their first year? For the essential elements of the role, it’s worth investing the time.
3. Empower New Hires
Whether your new hire is coming from the industry or college, you hired them because they have a lot to offer. Support your new hire, but also empower them to contribute and share their ideas as early as you can.
“One of my first meetings, I was shadowing my boss. I was at the meeting expecting to be the helper. My boss said when I took a break, ‘I see you nodding, you should speak up, you’re welcome to speak up.’ She saw me as an expert alongside them.”
One of the most natural places to do this is asking their feedback on onboarding or having them mentor other new hires.
“We ask the new people to keep these notes and show which things are confusing and then we incorporate this feedback into the next person’s onboarding plan.”
“It was initially intimidating that so many people joined after me that I had to help people early, but it was a confidence boost. Being an intern mentor early on was also helpful.”
Just be careful not to allocate too much of their time to ramping others up. The goal of onboarding is ultimately to facilitate their contributions to the team’s larger goals, not just to onboarding.
4. Foster mentorship
Supplement your launch plan with an onboarding buddy, someone who has been through the process and can serve as a mentor and guide. This person should be excited to support onboarding. If you force someone into this role, you risk creating a negative onboarding experience.
Outside of a formal onboarding buddy, consider setting up areas for informal mentorship. This could involve physically seating the new hire near senior engineers they can learn from or it could involve facilitating projects that will allow them to collaborate early on with someone more senior.
“I shared a cubicle with a senior guy who was helpful and let me talk out my ideas. The engineer was very receptive to my questions and sympathized with the challenges that would happen in the course of development. In the beginning it was a huge company and it was hard to email people I didn’t know. He would help me.
For technical roles, incorporating pair programming can provide a mix of structured onboarding and mentorship.
“My last company had a huge culture of pairing which I loved. No one would bat at eye that we were pairing every single day. That was an amazing way to ramp up.”
5. Create Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety is a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking and that if you make a mistake, your team will have your back. Psychological safety develops over time, but it is important to lay down the foundation early.
“One time I broke the deployment. It was a set of scripts and took 30 minutes. I remember the shame. It was a merge conflict. No one said anything to me but I felt so horrible. Then someone said ‘at my last company if you break the build you get a rubber chicken.’ I felt so ashamed. No one made mistakes that were obvious there.”
Moments like “breaking the build” are key for developing psychological safety. Use mistakes to model empathy and to demonstrate how problems are solved as a team. A broken build can be approached and fixed together. Demonstrate that mistakes are something to learn from with curiosity and collaboration rather than blame. This is the building block of creating trust on the team and with the new hire.
Another key onboarding moment is addressing early problems as an ally.
“I had to work with a lot of people who didn’t really disguise their contempt for having a female coworker who was outspoken and not afraid to express her opinions. I had a colleague that was at my level and we worked together. He had to constantly prove he was better than me. My manager was a real ally and would tell this person ‘She’s your colleague. Don’t act that way.’”
“My first couple of months I was dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome. I would cry in the bathroom convinced I would get fired. Thankfully I had a nurturing manager who recognized that I was suffering from imposter syndrome and that I had a lot of potential and was doing a good job and that I was a very valuable asset to the team. He really looked out for me. He realized when someone needed some extra reassurance and when they might be feeling down about something and knew when to boost them up. He had constructive criticism but made it clear that you were learning and going to get better.”
As a manager or team lead, these early moments are critical for developing trust.
6. Provide Community
Help your new hire find community at your company by facilitating introductions within the team and with stakeholders. Encourage them to set up intro meetings with as many people as possible. They can use this time to learn how they fit into the larger team and get to know their coworkers as people.
Share information about formal and informal team outings and events. This is a good time to evaluate whether your team events skew towards a certain personality or type of person. For example, happy hours, ping pong, and nerf guns, can have their place, but if these are the only social opportunities on your team, it may be time to branch out.
“I remember it being overwhelmingly white and male. That’s already hard to exist in. I felt a lot of peer pressure to fit in. To do the cultural things. Golfing was really big at the company. I would join the happy hours. When you don’t belong it’s hard because important decisions are being made over golf and other things.”
Recognize that many new hires will feel pressured to attend events and outings to fit in and establish themselves on the team. Be as clear as possible when things are optional and offer alternatives, like staying for part of the event, or non-alcoholic beverages for events involving alcohol.
By building an inclusive culture with a diverse series of events and activities, you will provide a more welcoming environment for new hires.
