New employee onboarding
Teams famously do not invest in good onboarding and induction, and the reason is often that there isn't enough time to do it. Paradoxically you will loose even more time letting a newly hired staff member just figure it out, they will need more hand holding, will make more mistakes, and will take longer to come up to speed.Â
Onboarding and induction is also difficult for teams to deploy because most teams don't invest in good documentation, and sadly the human brain forgets what it struggled with before it got competent.Â
For me, a good way to look at onboarding is to view it like an asset. The more you invest in it, the more you will benefit from it, and it doesn't have to be hard if you approach it smartly.Â
What it should cover
Onboarding document you stretch from as far back as before the new hire starts and stretch as far forward as their first three weeks.Â
For the people closest to the new hire, the hiring manager and the staff member who will buddy with them, you need to keep a list of everything you need to prepare, prior to their first day. That could be access to systems, laptop, other accessories, and if the company has specific onboarding tasks like a group induction and a walk around the office by the facilities team, you need to book that in advance.Â
I recommend that each new hire get their own onboarding checklist that you give them on their first day for them and their buddy to walk through. I normally make a spreadsheet, but whatever works for you is fine. This may contain a list of systems and programs to log into, people to meet, health and safety things to do, mandatory e-learning modules, etc. So prior to them coming on, make a new one of these and make sure it's accurate to their position. Obviously, if you get into saving these documents someplace central, the job gets easier with every new hire because you just open up the template, check it for anything that's out of date, update it, and save it ready for the new hire's first day.
Now that you've gone through all the stuff you need to prepare to get them into the building and get them started, the next step of onboarding should be focused on how to get them up to speed as quickly as possible.
Break down everything they need to read, learn, practice, and do in the role over the next few months and get it written down. Start thinking about how I can get my new hire across all these topics in the right order so that they hit the ground running, not drowning.
In my experience, this tends to be a hodge-podge of a bunch of different things, and I've either made a massive list of links, written up a wiki or Sharepoint page, or just made a document and a folder where the team stores their things and dumped everything in there.
Realistically, that's going to look like:
- Important company strategy documents to read
- Important documents pertaining to the team's strategy, policies, and procedures
- Links to e-learning or other learning materials
- Practice exercises for more technical roles, organized in the right order with the correct supporting documentation, so you are stepping up their abilities bit by bit.
- A glossary of all the jargon people use
- A list, map, or diagram of your stakeholders and how the team fits into the organization
- A brief on the major projects underway, why they are underway, and what's involved
- A list of who to go to in the team for what topic, especially your SMEs. This could also include SME members outside the team.
- Guides on commonly done tasks, such as raising a ticket with IT, how to log an expense, and how to book leave
- Information on commonly occurring meetings and stand-ups, why they occur, and in what forum certain questions are more suited
- Information about non-work-related things like whether the team does a daily quiz, whether there are staff drinks every month, whether the company does a Christmas function, etc.
I know it looks like a lot, but these are the things your new hire is going to either learn the hard way, making lots of mistakes and coming up to speed slowly, or with some investment from you and your team prior to them starting, you can get them up and running in no time. My personal best record is getting a new member of staff working on normal work within four weeks because they ran through things in the right order, were able to pick up a piece of work, and when they got stuck, they knew what documentation to read and who to lean on.
If none of this collateral exists, you just need to bite the bullet and get it done. Divvy it up amongst the team or work through it yourself (I've done this a few times). Like I said, once it's done once, all that's left is to keep it up to date, and you have an asset that will pay dividends quite quickly. You never know when you're going to hire someone new. Sometimes a year passes, and it feels like you're not getting that return on investment. In one of my jobs, we got a budget to triple the team size, and so by hire number 3, we were seeing the results we had invested in.
How people learn
It's a common fallacy that anyone can teach. This is codswallop; people are actually notoriously bad teachers because they often forget the struggles they faced when they were learning, they forget the context that is now inherent to them, and they also forget that how they learn and operate is not how others may learn and operate.
You need to be mindful of this in both how you grow your existing staff and how you onboard new staff.
If you are not already familiar, there is the conscious competence model, which is the stage of understanding people move through.
People start with any topic, whether it be learning to drive or learning to code, with unconscious incompetence, which is very much "I do not know what I don't know".Â
Then, as they gain a bit of awareness of what they are trying to learn, they move into conscious incompetence, which is "I know what I don't know."
Then, as you grow their ability and confidence, they become conscious competence, which is "I know what I know. They can do the task, but they are thinking about it. Think back to when you first learned to drive and got to the point where you could drive but still had to think about everything.
Then finally, people move into unconscious competence, where they are so fluent at the task they do it without thinking, aka "I don't know what I know. Ever driven somewhere and entirely forgotten about the drive? It was that trivial to you (or so I believe; I'm not a good driver).
This is why you need to slowly build people up with tools, documentation, and practical, stage-appropriate, hands-on experience. Whether that be a practice exercise or some easy work,
This model of competence is why I say not everyone can teach; getting someone who is at the last stage of their ability to teach someone in the first place doesn't always work out. It would require a tremendous amount of self-awareness, which not everyone possesses.
There are two good tips I can offer here.
- Get your new staff member to buddy with both your most junior member of the team and an appropriate senior member of the team. This will provide an avenue for someone who has more recently been in that position to remember how they solved X problem when they were new, and then your senior staff member is there when both are stuck.
- Get your new hire to contribute to the onboarding process as they are going through it. They may be able to edit guides to skip a step someone thought was obvious or add something that was missing.
The first day and week
Don't leave them alone. Too many times I see new hires, myself included, be brought in, shown a desk, and then given a tome of stuff to read through while the rest of the team, manager included, goes back to their busy schedule. That isn't going to help them.
For the first day, have nearly an entire day of hands-on conversations booked in. My preference is that the hiring manager spends the whole day with them (schedule in some breaks) and walks them through a lot of the high-level stuff.
Then, as the week goes on, I still prefer that the hiring manager be hands-on with a lot of face time to walk through other things and answer questions, but you should also book in conversations with other people and include some down time so that they can read what they need to read and get working through the onboarding checklist they have; this normally includes requesting access to things and doing those mandatory e-learning modules.
If you are going to book them in with other people, don't let them wing it. Tell them exactly what you want them to cover with the new hire. I remember one job where my first meeting with a senior member of the team, a product owner, walked me through a product I didn't touch for another eight weeks, and this enthusiastic product manager had me thinking this product was the most important thing ever, and I started centring myself around it, thinking it was going to be core to my job. Make sure you book these things in advance, as people do have busy calendars.
I would also like to note that I personally never expect new staff to work a full day in their first week. Learning is tiring, and at some point, their brains will stop absorbing things. I often get them to come a bit later on the first day, like 10 a.m., and then for the first day and the rest of the week, I send them home about 330 p.m. In my country, I have the authority to do that and still pay them for the full 40-hour week; however, different countries have different rules, so use your discretion wisely.
The following weeks and months
As time goes on, your need to be as hands-on as possible grows, especially if you've set them up with a good buddy and your amazing onboarding process is growing them steadily. Even if you have booked a regular weekly or bi-weekly 1:1 with them, I still recommend checking in with them more frequently. If there's something they aren't quite getting, it's best to catch it early.
As well as all the meetings they should attend, don't be afraid to bring them along to other meetings you or members of your team may be having. By watching how you and your staff interact with the business, they can pick up a lot of contextual-based learning that may help fill in gaps or cement some of the million things they've learned by now. I used to make an effort to ensure that new staff did the rounds of all the projects our team was working on and sat quietly in those meetings. This enabled them to put a face and a name to key stakeholders as well as see some of the things they may have learned in action; for example, if they have read about X project building Y system, then being in that meeting should help place that in some real context.
Work with whomever is responsible for handing out work, if it is not you, to ensure that as time moves on, your new staff member is picking up work of increasing complexity. It's tempting to leave them handling small, irrelevant, or easy work that's been piling up, but that's only going to grow them so far. Keep stretching their abilities in a constructive way so that they get up to speed safely and hopefully quickly.
The next sections cover one-on-ones and career development, so that should show you how to continue their onboarding journey and get them growing in the role.
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