What's your onboarding process when a new team member joins your team/company?

Slobodan Stojanović
9 replies
Our team at Vacation Tracker has three full-time members. Onboarding for the first team members was ad-hoc, and not scalable. We have onboarding procedures for our other company, Cloud Horizon, but I think that process needs some polishing too. We'll expand our team at Vacation Tracker in a month, and I want to improve our onboarding procedures, so our new team members enjoy their new job from day one. How do you onboard your new team members? What works? What's should be changed?

Replies

Sam Abrika
I just throw them in the whole codebase with no documentation and no right to ask any question
Slobodan Stojanović
@samabrika1 haha, that's an option, too. I tried that long time ago, but I want slightly better results now 😀
Abadesi
Depends on the team but for Community they will spend time shadowing folks, learning about ongoing projects and then have time to think about which projects they want to get involved with/start. What ideas do you have so far?
Slobodan Stojanović
@abadesi Well, I have a few ideas. I tried to start with the basic needs of the new team member. For example, each new employee (regardless of the company) needs: - Acceptable salary and being paid on time; - Get use to a new company as painless as they can (de-risk the process); - Be confident that you are doing right things at work; - Trust; - Have a promising career path; - Have a enjoyable workspace; Some of these needs can be part of an onboarding process (i.e., "Be confident that you are doing right things at work" can be covered with some reviews, maybe shadowing, etc.) But the onboarding process is not linear, so this is some early draft/start point (it is far from the final version, because it's missing a lot of things): .
Man Mohan Arora
Umm, The on-boarding process takes the first half completely. Which includes the below agenda : Introduction about the company Induction - HR, Finance, Admin and IT Buddy Lunch Introduction on the floor Ice breaker activity.
Slobodan Stojanović
@manmohan_arora this sounds great. What's an example of ice breaker activity?
Man Mohan Arora
@slobodan_ I'd say, anything which would help new joinee mingle up with current employees. Let's say we would ask them to collect 5 chocolates from the employees which was planned and distributed among good number of employees before the game starts. And the employees could ask them to dance, sing, stand up comedy or anything before they give off their chocolate to new joinee. I'm sure you have got the essence.
flo merian
@slobodan_ Hey Slobodan, great topic! When I had the opportunity to design the onboarding process for the marketing team, I made sure it's as enticing, educational, productive, and inspiring as possible. Above all, I enjoy sending a DM to future team members before they join, and helping them start shipping from Day 1. FWIW here's the welcome kit I use to onboard new team members ✌️