Effective Onboarding allows new joiners to start contributing to your team’s results in a productive way quicker. It bakes relationship building with key colleagues into everyone’s beginnings and ensures that your direct report’s behaviors align with cultural norms and expectations. Thoughtful leaders invest in their onboarding to accelerate productivity and maximize retention. Modern onboarding practices include standardized checklists, buddy systems, and a built-in continuous improvement mechanism.
- Standardized checklist: At the core of any onboarding process is a list of todos that new hires have to complete. While virtually all mature companies offer general employee onboarding checklists and handbooks, HR can’t know your org’s jobs and technical environment as well as you do. Different roles require different guidance and it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the information pouring in. Standardized checklists exist to tame this chaos by providing a clear timeline with manageable tasks, most commonly in the form of 30/60/90 day milestones.
- Buddy system: Having a dedicated guide - who isn’t the supervisor - serve as the first point of contact for new joiners is critical. This prevents a situation where the manager becomes a bottle neck for multiple new hires. By teaching newcomers, buddies also internalize existing knowledge, carry a greater responsibility in scaling culture, and build trust with their colleagues quicker. Lastly, they serve as a “plan B” in case the onboarding checklist inevitably shows gaps.
- Built-in continuous improvement mechanism: Every onboarding process is a work in progress as every organization, its people, and its products are constantly evolving. Therefore, you have to rely on a mechanism to constantly improve your onboarding process based on the people who’ve completed it. You may feel proud about how you guide new hires, but this feedback is the key to an onboarding process that remains effective over time.
Recommended Resources
First Meeting With New Direct Series - Chapter 1 - First Day Meeting: Manager Tools shares one of my favorite real-world examples for setting clear expectations from day one. They teach how to lay the foundation for a professional relationship by focusing on honesty, kindness, and results. Note how this is part of a longer First Meetings podcast series. (58 min listen)
The Manager Tools Onboarding Checklist (Part 1 & Part 2): If you’re wondering just how detailed an onboarding checklist can be and how many details you can prepare, Manager Tools has you covered. You probably can’t use everything they are sharing, but this is solid inspiration and can serve as a foundation if you’re starting from scratch. (56 min listen)
A Career Cold Start Algorithm: Andrew “Boz” Bosworth with a delightfully simple approach to onboarding himself to a new team when experiencing a knowledge deficit. This is a powerful recipe for leaders looking to onboard themselves particularly when there’s little existing guidance, which is typical in complex or startup environments. Imagine turning this approach into your onboarding process! (3 min read)
Mattermost Handbook - Onboarding: The people working on Mattermost - an open-source alternative to Slack - shared one of the few publicly available onboarding guides. I recommend digging further into Engineer onboarding and Manager onboarding to learn more about how such documents can be structured and what content may be sensible. (15+ min read)
Executive Onboarding: Shishir's Tips & Best Practices: New executives can struggle with cultural fit yet come equipped with significant authority. Coupled with how infrequent executives join an organization compared to a high number of individual contributors in similar roles, the organizational risk for a poor ramp-up or transition is significant. Shishir Mehrotra shares not just one of the best executive onboarding articles, but also a template you can use and customize for yourself or other execs. (15 min read)
ℹ️ Manager Tools has over 10 additional podcasts on Onboarding with various topics.