The Power of an Onboarding Process
“Well lad! Welcome to our amazing company! I’m ya manager, and this is your team. Take a seat over here. Alrighto, so here is our ticketing system, and this is the project you are gonna be rocking on. Let’s grab this task for the start. It was estimated to 10 hours — ergo, if you make it in time, that would be grand! Should you have any questions, just ask around. Delira and Excira? Cool beans! Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to bounce, got another bizzo. Have fun, ma dude!”
If you can relate to at least some parts of the scene described above, trust me, you are not alone. Zero onboarding, hands-on from Day #1. Even in 2021, Onboarding Experience in IT is still a neglected division, just after Employee Experience and Talent Acquisition. You can read dozens of articles about customer retention, business strategies, and speed of delivery — all profit-oriented topics. Education, onboarding, and regular training seem to lag behind.
There is a dangerous mentality of expecting new hires to start delivering once they get their foot in the door without any opportunity to acclimate to their new environment. Senior workers live in a false assumption that everyone is as smart, and as disciplined as they are — wrong!
Bad onboarding happens all the time, and when it does, no one benefits. Even if you hire a super-senior engineer who can learn everything along the way, it doesn’t mean no supervision is needed.
As a person who has gained several years of experience in onboarding and education, I would like to share the insights I’ve come to on my journey of becoming a Bootcamp Manager in an international IT organization. So, let’s talk about the Onboarding Experience!
What New Hires Need
First of all, what is onboarding? It is everything a new hire experiences after they have accepted the offer before they join their team. We can divide the whole process into the following categories:
- Organizational Onboarding — where to park, how to use the coffee machine, etc. This is mostly handled by the office manager.
- Company-Wide Onboarding — introduction to the company’s mission and values, benefits, company-wide meetings and ceremonies. This is handled by the HR manager.
- Department Onboarding — how to use dedicated tools, how to wrap one’s head around all processes — roles, planning, cross-team cooperation, and the like. This is often handled by reading internal docs, if at least.
- Technical Onboarding — filling the gaps in new hire’s hard skills through workshops and challenges. This is wrongly solved by spontaneous self-education in spare time.
- Team Onboarding — projects and tools the hire’s future team uses, data structures, business logic, and pair-programming sessions to name a few. Very often it only means reading READMEs, asking around, failing, and asking again.
High-quality onboarding should cover all of those, not just the first two. From this standpoint, the whole process can’t be limited to a single PowerPoint presentation or a few meetings with the OM/HR/DevOps department. The transition from the onboarding phase to the on-the-job phase must be gradual, and above all, enjoyable.
New hires need initial training, study materials, guidance and attention from a dedicated mentor, and last but not least, regular feedback. Therefore, they need to be driven in the right direction, they need to get excited about their new role, and if everyone is busy doing their own stuff, who can pull that off? That’s where the Bootcamp Manager comes into play.
The main role of a Bootcamp Manager is to make sure every engineer (not necessarily a newcomer) knows everything they need to know for carrying out their day-to-day work and help them extend their skill set gradually. Lack of knowledge is no longer an option!
Onboarding Roadmap
So, how to make a resourceful onboarding roadmap? Categorically, there is no all-purpose model, some degree of customization is always necessary. No hire comes with the same skill set and mindset — what one can learn in a few days, others will learn in weeks. Moreover, what some lack in hard skills, they make up for in communication abilities, and exponential organizations need a combination of both.
I had been trying for years to optimize enduring practices and establish a generic model that would be abstract enough that it could be applied to anyone’s case. A great deal of improvisation was involved, though. Luckily, with every new hire, everything could start over, as well as the opportunity to make gradual adjustments to the process. Finally, a few years later, a quite stable onboarding roadmap has emerged. Let’s go over all steps one by one.
-1 Week
To get the newcomer curious and gather some valuable data at the same time, we send them an e-mail with a rough agenda for their Day 1, along with an Experience Survey that contains questions about the newcomer’s previous experience. For instance, how familiar they are with RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, React Hooks, Grafana, and the like, providing 3 possible answers — None, Basic, and Advanced. This helps us a lot to arrange learning workshops accordingly.
Day One
Day one is split into four parts — OM intro (office walkthrough), HR intro (company vision and mission), introduction to the team, and Dev setup (workstation, VPN, credentials).
Each new hire’s arrival (if it’s not remote) is celebrated with a team tradition, usually by having lunch or BBQ at the terrace.
As for the technical part, it’s important to point out that no newcomer touches a single line of code during their first day! The real deal starts from the second day.
First 2–4 weeks
How to properly use git rebase? How does Scrum work in our company? What are the responsibilities of Feature Tech Owners? How do we utilize PI planning? How do we manage code reviews?
The first weeks are literally stuffed with learning sessions around such topics. Technical workshops, organizational workshops, and of course, challenges. We maintain our own coding challenges that help the newcomers get familiar with our tech stack, as well as our data structures and the infrastructure as a whole — everything will fit together at a slow pace, so the newcomers won’t get overwhelmed with too much complexity. Furthermore, every challenge is carefully inspected during a code review phase, which also provides valuable feedback.
The newcomers are also invited to company-wide and department-wide meetings as observers, where they can discover more about how the company works.
1st sprint
Once all important topics have been covered, and the Bootcamp Manager has considered the newcomers ready to join the team, they will get a dedicated mentor who will walk them through all projects the team is working on. Each team has its own ways — either by scheduling a few pair-programming sessions or by assigning simple warm-up tasks. This phase is still supervised by the Bootcamp Manager, who can prepare a few additional workshops, if the need arises.
2nd sprint
At this point, the basic onboarding officially ends. It’s a good opportunity to officially wrap up the whole process by giving mutual feedback and ask the newcomers how things are going, how can we be of service in the future, and what should have been done better.
4th+ month
Once the probation period ends, the newcomers are assigned an entry-level and their manager will explain the expectations for the upcoming quarters, and set short-term and long-term goals. From this point henceforth, the newcomers are considered fully-fledged contributors, and the onboarding transits into the education & development process.
Alright, that’s our amazing onboarding workflow. Nothing magical, right? Now, let’s point out some tips that could help you boost your own onboarding.
Onboarding Tips
Know who is coming
Read through the interview conclusions, ask them about their tech stack, educate yourself on your hires’ cultural background. A few years ago, Gretchen Rubin outlined four main categories in the workplace — upholders, obligers, questioners, and rebels. Each of these categories has varying degrees of response to any particular situation, and knowing how to handle them will provide you with a strategic advantage.
Be available
In the first several weeks, the newcomers should be your primary concern, especially in cases of remote hiring where there are not many networking opportunities. Be there for them, connect them with other people, help them acclimatize.
Prefer in-house workshops over online courses
Most online courses aren’t optimized for personal needs, as they focus primarily on completion rather than performance. Learning sessions must be collaborative with individual follow-ups to keep the newcomers motivated and excited. Give them some challenges that offer a perspective worth clinging to. Not everyone is a learner by nature, and studying online courses with no interaction is simply boring. They should only be used as a secondary source of education.
Ask questions
Very often, people have a lot to ask but volunteer little. You need to make the process as interactive as possible. You can also ask questions here and there to verify what the newcomers remember from the previous workshops. Furthermore, try to avoid asking binary questions like “Does it make sense?” or “Is everything clear?” Though, I ask these questions quite often by myself 🤦♂️.
Bring clarity
What have we learned? What have we yet to learn? The newcomer must know exactly where in the roadmap he/she is at every moment, what is ahead and what to do to get there. Joining a team must be viewed as a reward that the newcomer has proven himself/herself worthy of working on a team. There must be clear and measurable outcomes by which the Bootcamp Manager will decide if the newcomer is ready or not.
Standardize
Create a platform that would allow repeatability across the department. Should anything go wrong, you have another opportunity with every next newcomer, and the next one. It’s totally OK if something doesn’t work out, yet actions must be taken to make it better next time.
Balance
Too much direction and they will come to you with every single issue. Too little direction and they will get stressed out. Define goals and facilitate their achievement, but don’t press the buttons by yourself.
Communicate well
This is the biggest train wreck at many organizations. If the newcomer feels like they don’t need to report to anyone, you can expect some serious procrastination on their side. Communicate, communicate, communicate! Keep the newcomers focused and excited. Furthermore, keep their managers in the loop, keep the team in the loop, keep everyone in the loop.
Ask for feedback
Asking for feedback is necessary for further refinements of the process. In addition to that, scheduling a feedback session early on (during a newcomer’s first month) can provide a fresh perspective, before their insights transform into common perceptions
Never stop onboarding
Onboarding should never end. Once the newcomer joins the team and becomes a fully-fledged contributor, there are still so many things that can be done — career development and gradual education to name a few. Keep a watchful eye over them and provide assistance when needed.
Final Words
The need for the onboarding process is difficult to justify, as it has a second-order impact on delivery. Yet, once it has been well established, it will eventually reveal its purpose. Bad onboarding can result in losing a great hire because they were not given the right training and support. High-quality onboarding, on the other hand, will shape their first impressions and get them operational and motivated sooner than if they had to learn everything by themselves.
“You will either invest in your people to learn, and they might leave with your free education, or you don’t invest in them to learn and they will remain dumb.” John Maxwell
