Onboarding new employees: The two most valuable strategies I've learned
As a new employee at a new company, I’ve been onboarded five times.
As a hiring manager, mentor, and coach, I’ve directly and indirectly onboarded new employees over fifty times — from individual contributors to managers to C-suite folks.
I’ve made plenty of rookie mistakes — from forgetting to obtain user access to an important system, to inadequately planning a welcome lunch, to not setting clear learning goals and deliverables for the first 90 days.
Out of everything I’ve learned from previous managers, peer managers, and my own experience of trial and error, here are my two favorite strategies that yield disproportionately high value to cost.
Side note: as a new employee, you can implement these proactively as well!
1. Schedule 30-minute Q&A check-ins with your new hire at the end of every workday for the first two weeks.
Tell them this space is to act as a catch-all bucket for any and all questions that have arisen from their day of trainings, reading materials, and meeting people.
Their job is to capture and bring a list of questions they want more clarity on. Your job is to answer those questions or point them to the people who can.
Tips:
Let them know that no question is too small or stupid and that nothing is off-limits. When in doubt, add it to the list.
Focus on providing the most important information based on what they need to know right now. Share links to relevant documents as follow-up reading. Schedule additional conversations for topics that need more time to unpack.
Set the intention to go through every single item on the list from that day. “Clearing the queue” will bring a sense of calm by minimizing lingering questions from one day to the next.
I recommend keeping track of the questions/topics in a shared document so that you can both add notes asynchronously and follow-up down the road.
For topics you really want them to understand early, ask them to take a stab at explaining them to you, then fill in any gaps. For example, after the first week I ask them to draw a simple org chart of all of the teams and people that interact with our team and verbally outline the role of each.
Benefits:
Improve their ability to learn effectively. You remember what it’s like to start a new job, right? Not only is there a feeling of overwhelm as tons of information is thrown at you, you’re also trying to make good impressions with everyone, show you can add value, and not look stupid. This simple practice goes a long way to helping your new hire feel more supported and less stressed as they ramp up, which improves learning, memory, and integration of new knowledge.
Sharpen their thinking. Your new hire will likely approach the onboarding process with more critical thinking and thoughtfulness. As they go through their day consuming information, meeting people, and learning about how things work, their minds will be primed to ask, “How well do I understand this?” and “What other questions do I have?”
Nurture a learning-focused culture. Time invested here helps build rapport with your new hire and cultivate an environment where it’s safe to ask for clarity, take risks, and admit mistakes from the get-go. Google studied over 180 of their teams and found that psychological safety was the most important trait of high-performing teams. An excerpt:
Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave the company, are more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, bring in more revenue, and are rated as effective twice as often by executives. (emphasis mine)
There’s no way around the feeling of drinking from a fire hose, but this practice can help the process feel more manageable — and dare I say it, enjoyable.
2. As your new hire goes through the onboarding documentation, ask them to make updates that reflect the current state of the world.
I mean, who better to evaluate the effectiveness of onboarding docs than a pair of fresh eyes with no prior internal company knowledge? :)
Tips:
Set the goal as bringing the onboarding materials up to speed in terms of accuracy, clarity, and completeness — in that order. It’s lower lift to make sure everything stated is still correct, then to see how a paragraph could be rephrased more clearly, and finally to consider what might be missing (especially if the company’s been growing quickly).
If the scope seems too large, have them focus on team-level docs before company-level docs.
Generally, I encourage people to go ahead and initiate conversations with others as needed and make updates to anything they deem worthy. Give them full ownership where possible. Ideally, they’ll feel proud of the end result.
For HR/People Ops and IT/Security related information, default to notifying the appropriate representatives if something is outdated vs. making changes yourself.
Benefits:
Lets them add value quickly. It allows new hires to feel like they’re making early contributions to the team, something we all strive to do early on.
Decreases ramp time. Coming in with a discerning lens will accelerate the learning process by reinforcing understanding and connecting dots. The added work of then translating new learnings into clear, instructive content (for the next new hire) will amplify this even more, making your new team member more effective sooner.
Opens the door to developing relationships. Updating certain processes that have evolved, like how a change request ticket is submitted or how a new sale is recorded, will naturally foster conversations with current stakeholders. What’s more, the approach of “I’m here to learn about this process so I can update our docs” is largely positively received and has often resulted in real-time workflow improvements and cross-team alignment.
Your onboarding docs don’t suck. Last and certainly not least, your documentation will be updated to the point of your most recent hire. Not too shabby.
Give these a try and let me know what you discover.
What other strategies and tips have you picked up along the way that have been helpful? Feel free to share in the comments.