Onboarding Remotely
I have been leading remote teams for many years, but this is my first time doing it in a pandemic. Here are a few observations about…
I have been leading remote teams for many years, but this is my first time doing it in a pandemic. Here are a few observations about onboarding new team members, which is an essential element of successful remote work.
I was talking recently with somebody who was about 6 weeks into her new job, and I asked her how things were going. She said that recently she was starting to feel a little bit better.
I got the impression that she had possibly been feeling a little bit lost and uncertain about how things really worked. Recently she was spending a lot of time “shadowing” her new colleagues in their daily work, and through that she was gaining insight and confidence into what was normal and expected.
A couple of things struck me hard about this. First of all, I strongly empathized with her experience. I remember being new on the job and feeling lost, being unsure of what was expected of me, and not feeling like I could ask anybody.
You’d like to believe that a new employee will ask questions, but let’s be honest: Nobody really wants to ask questions about what seems obvious to everybody else! That’s a bad feeling.
I think it’s the responsibility of leaders to try to minimize that “lost” feeling for their team. Or, we can put the burden of “if you don’t know, ask” on our employees. Which kind of leader do you want to be?
Better to work backwards from the experience that we ourselves would like to have.
In my current role I am fortunate to work with Pearl Chen who is amazing, and who did a lot of hard work to put together a great Product Manager onboarding program for our team. For me, “shadowing” is the greatest innovation to come out of that. Thanks Pearl!
Shadowing simply means we send our newbie along with a seasoned teammate to one of the senior’s meetings. Lots of companies pair new people up with a “buddy” for a few months. I think it’s cool for our newbie to shadow their buddy to many if not most of their meetings for that time.
Perhaps you have a list of people that your new person should meet during their first few weeks. You might suggest they shadow everybody on the list for 1–3 of their meetings.
Does this sound like a lot of meetings? For me, that’s part of the point. I think a good goal would be to have our new employee’s calendar booked about 70% full of these meetings for the first four to six weeks.
I’d like to hear your feedback on this, but my objective is for them to spend as much of that time as possible building connections, which I think are a strong predictor of success.
I think the goal of the onboarding should be to provide a calm, steady, social experience that builds connections and confidence. Let me know what you find works for you.
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