Designing an onboarding experience
The first moments that a new hire spends inside your organization are crucial. By designing the experience, you set people up for success.
👋 Hey, I’m Milan. This is Organizing Automation, my newsletter on building state-of-the-art digital products and the organizations that deliver them.
When I first joined my employer, one part of onboarding was a 30-minute chat with the CEO to get acquainted and hear his vision on the company. Despite the company having 500+ employees at the time, this was a part of each new hire’s onboarding. It told me a lot about the company’s priorities and made me feel appreciated from day one.
Now that I’m more involved in back-end processes within the company myself, I see that even more care is put into streamlining the invisible parts of onboarding. And for good reason: onboarding is the first real impression that employees get when starting their new job. It sets the tone for their work. Doing it right shows the employee that you care, and allows you to set clear expectations.
Building up an onboarding correctly is a challenge. I will show you that a good onboarding is shaped like a pyramid, and clarify which parts the pyramid has in my view. I will also explain what the issue is with missing a step. This guide is especially useful if you’re thinking about hiring more juniors.
Administration
Have you ever had to wait days for your laptop to arrive when starting a new job? There is almost nothing worse.
The base layer for onboarding is the administrative part. When done right, this happens without the onboardee’s help. Accounts need to be created, licenses need to be assigned, and one or more devices need to be arranged.
The administration layer is essential and if done right, the new hire will not even notice it. If, however, administration is not completed on day one, that is a major detractor that could ruin onboarding from the start.
The involvement of HR and internal IT are essential here. These departments know that their work is thankless: if they do it right, you don’t notice the work they’ve had to do. But make no mistake: their contribution is essential for the onboarding experience.
Organization
Once the admin is out of the way, the goal of onboarding is to make sure the new hire can start their work. For this, it is essential that they understand their new company’s context: the mission, the vision and the core values. They will have done some research on your company, but it is essential that you tell them the story about the place they’ve just stepped into, and what that place asks from them. Knowing what the company strives to achieve and which values they intend to follow is essential.
Having the company’s story conveyed by a high-ranking person in the organization underlines the importance. It does not always have to be the CEO (although it does make a great impression), but make sure that it’s someone who can speak on behalf of the company - ideally a senior leader.
If the organization is large and many people start on the first day, they can receive information about the company all at the same time. It allows new hires to find fellow newbies. The content of the company explanation should be general enough that it’s relevant for everyone, so combining all hires is a good idea.
People
Armed with a laptop and an idea of the goals that they will aim to achieve, the next step is to meet the people they will do it with. While it’s good to get acquainted with many people in general, the focus should be on the key persons:
Manager: to set expectations and further discuss the organization and the new hire’s role in that story. Meeting with the manager early helps someone feel supported - they know more about their place.
Collaborating team: to start working together, a new hire must meet their direct colleagues. It is a good idea to take some time for this initially to say hi and get acquainted. Throughout the weeks, each team member should spend some time with the new hire to build a better bond. A team must decide if a new hire gets one assigned buddy or can just ask any question they have to anyone in the team.
Teams in proximity: it is helpful for a new hire to know about the teams that are interacted with most. Even a quick introduction can make future communications smoother.
It is unavoidable that a new hire speaks to direct colleagues quickly, so the people step is never fully skipped. But taking some time to get to know each other and also those in the vicinity can help save a lot of time later on. It also builds onto the context of the company: knowing who does what in the immediate surroundings allows an employee to understand their place in the organization better.
Work contents
With a running device, a clear view of the company, and a connection with close colleagues, onboarding can move to actual content of the work.
Within this step, start broad and work your way down to details. Get an architect to share the big picture with you, then zoom in to understand where your team fits. Near the end, leaf through the team-specific ways of working, and ask your buddy questions that you have. Just because you’re new, does not mean the old way of working is perfect.
Especially in complex projects where getting started is not as simple as cloning the repository, teams that I’m a part of have an onboarding guide to clarify all the quirks to get the system working and find the important things on the right environments. One useful rule is that the person going through the onboarding guide reviews it as they go. They are the target group, so if they see unclear sections or missing info, they are the best to add it. A review after going through it also lets you know which parts of onboarding need improvement.
This is the part most teams default to: diving into actual work. But without the context laid in earlier steps, even great explanations may miss the mark.
Process
Consider customizing your onboarding for whoever’s coming into the organization. As a consultant, I often go through a very slim version of onboarding, which does not contain much about the organization. While it’s totally understandable that my onboarding is shorter than that of internal employees, it should not skip steps. Less depth is okay, but if the basics are not set at the start, I’ll have to find the information myself. This takes more time than a standardized presentation would.
A core process like onboarding should be evaluated constantly. Ask for a quick review after about a week, and then again after roughly 2 months. The first round will give you immediate feedback about how onboarding went, and the second round may give extra insights into what was missed during onboarding, that did end up being relevant.
You now have all the elements to build up your own onboarding pyramid. Additionally, you know to set up regular reviews to improve the process. Now is a good time to evaluate your own onboarding process: how well does your onboarding align with the pyramid? And how can it be improved? Let me know your thoughts!
During my onboarding to a research project, my manager deliberately did not go into all work related quirks and details, but kept some things vague in the first weeks, because as a newcomer I still had a fresh mind and was more objective. And it worked out: I was able to come up with new ideas for problems the existing team was stuck on for years. So I think onboarding done right can be a great opportunity, but when done wrong also a enormous waste of potential fresh ideas (especially important for more creative/knowledge jobs).