Onboarding is a Funny Word
To some people in tech, it’s automatically associated with customers, the people who use your product. To anyone in People Ops or HR, it’s a vital part of the candidate experience, taking a new hire and getting them ready for whatever you’ve hired them to do. Small companies and startups only continue forward if revenue comes in. But that healthy obsession with customer lifetime value can often give you blinders to employee lifetime value, or how to make sure you get what you pay for with your team.
Let’s say you hire your first developer. They stay with you for three good years, and spit out an impressive amount of work product. Then, they leave, at which point you have five other developers. Do they know the information that was rattling around in developer 1’s head? Did developer 1 document everything, or just buzz along without notations because the goal was speed, not foundation? In these scenarios, companies learn a painful lesson. Documentation is crucial to avoiding knowledge loss, especially from original employees who are valuable for their institutional knowledge but might not want to stick around as your company matures and scales into something bigger.
Inexperienced hiring teams assume that someone will sign their offer letter and sit down to work the next day, knowing absolutely everything about the product and how to build and use it. In smaller teams, the few people sitting next to one another in a room can casually demo and answer questions. That model does not work when your team is 100, 500, 1000 people, and is hard at any size for remote companies. Plus, if a newer hire is feeling overwhelmed and poorly looked after, they’re more likely to job hunt and leave you for someone more organized. Keep in mind, it’s much more expensive to replace an employee than it is to keep an existing one. Think about the time and investment it takes to set up onboarding as a cost-effective way of retaining your talent.
What Makes a Good Employee Onboarding Program? 👋
Empathy
Put yourself in this person’s shoes. Even if they’ve had a job in your industry before, or if they’re coming to your team from another team within your larger organization, they’re going to have to learn new information. Learning by doing is a solid way to build competency, but is it kind to just throw them into the deep end on day one? A sentiment I hear frequently from startup teams in periods of growth is You’re lucky, when I started I didn’t even have a [insert industry-relevant, simple expectation here]. Even if that’s true, don’t revel in your own history of incompetence. It’s everyone’s job to try and make things better for the next employee you hire.
Setting Expectations
New hires are excited to get going, but often afraid to look stupid or inexperienced in front of new people who will be their coworkers. Set expectations for how questions can be asked and answered. Leadership that models open communication and the concept that there are no dumb questions will reap future rewards tenfold when that employee’s knowledge has grown. If they’ve been conditioned to pose questions without fear, their open declaration of gap in understanding will be nuanced, and beneficial for the whole team.
Tone Setting
For remote teams especially, quality documentation that a new employee can follow is crucial for a good onboarding experience. How you communicate that information in documentation is entirely up to you and your company, but is also an often overlooked tool for building culture.
A new hire will be trying to get a sense of who you are and what you stand for from day one. Plenty of onboarding involves regulations and legally-significant information. But that doesn’t mean that it always has to be delivered with boilerplate. Which is a better way to direct them to set up their employee profile?
Enter your full legal name and contact information into this spreadsheet. Failure to do so will result in non-payment for hours worked.
or…
Follow the prompts to share your personal contact info in this spreadsheet. Until it’s filled out, we can’t pay you! Consider this a priority–do it first before your tackle your other onboarding tasks.
Both options communicate the same information, but each has a distinct tone that conveys the culture and vibe of the organization giving the directions. I know which I’d rather work for, from just a few sentences.
Feedback
Your employee leaves the nest and becomes a full-fledged contributor–congrats! Now it’s time to collect their feedback to iterate on their experience. What was unclear on day one, 30, 90? What’s something they wish they’d known or been told in their first week?
Good onboarding for high growth companies requires frequent revision and review, updating your materials and processes to ensure that what you’re communicating is current and effective. Of course, feedback is useless unless it’s read, digested, and actioned upon. Commit to following through. 🤝
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