It’s not hard to have a great employee onboarding program, start with these 5 simple steps
By Emiliya Trakhtenberg
A new member of your team is your most important user — you are trying to create an experience for them to fit into your team and ultimately stay on your team and continue growing with the company.
Do you remember how you felt the first day of your job? I was eager, excited, nervous but playing it cool, and above all, I was ready to jump right in and hit the ground running! Naturally, there was a whole lot I needed to learn about my role, the company, our processes, and our technology before I’d be able to tackle my first project. As a new employee, finding answers to all of my questions was tricky, because I wasn’t always sure who to ask and I felt bad repeatedly asking my teammates for help and clarification. Even though everyone on the team was extremely friendly and supportive, I couldn’t shake the guilty feeling of taking up a good chunk of their time or interrupting their workflow.
As I settled more into my role, I started thinking about how I could create more structure around the onboarding process for future hires so that they would feel more confident and self-empowered from the get-go. I got started by doing online research around best practices and conducting informal “interviews” with the latest members of our team; our onboarding process was still fresh in their memory. From there I started making a list of action items, prioritizing them by effort and impact. Turns out, to nobody’s surprise, the least effort item that could drastically improve our onboarding process was documentation.
So, here are the five steps my team did to improve our onboarding experience:
1. Create onboarding documentation
Just write it down, it is that simple! You might think, “More Google docs? I can simply teach them as things come up.” You probably can, but from my experience, something will always slip your memory. In addition, onboarding documentation empowers new hires to learn independently and become self-sufficient quicker. At IAS we have two main documents that we share with our new hires: an onboarding guide and a team working agreement.
The onboarding guide is a quick reference list of relevant information to your team, such as: company and team sites, email lists, Slack channels, a list of all the software the team uses, etc. Here is a sample to get you started.
A team working agreement is a detailed document outlining all relevant information to the rhythm of your team. Our team at IAS held two separate one-hour sessions to write our agreement, it is seven pages of detailed content on availability, working hours and PTO, expectations around work, description of team rituals, Slack etiquette, how to file bug tickets, asking IT for software/hardware, and more. Yes, ours is 7 pages long. Yes, I know that nobody likes to read long documents, but believe me that your new hire will appreciate it since it will give them a pretty good idea of team dynamics and answer a significant chunk of their general questions. Here is an abridged version of ours to get you thinking on what themes and topics are important to the rhythm of your team.
2. Go over the team’s process
Sit the new hire down and walk them through how projects are prioritized, broken down, and executed so they know what to expect before their first project. At IAS we created a deck outlining each step with recommendations on quick and detailed UX methods, example deliverables, links to templates, and more. We also included tips and tricks such as how to get product managers and stakeholders in a room with you to review requirements, especially if their calendars are booked weeks in advance. ;)
3. Create a standardized first assignment
Ideally, you want your new hire’s first assignment to be something that will familiarize them with the product. At IAS every UX new hire does a heuristic analysis of our platform. This exercise is great because:
i. Your new hire will be looking at the product with fresh eyes, bringing a new perspective and spotting things that perhaps you missed in the chaos of feature releases, testing, and QA.
ii. Through their exploration and analysis of the product, they will learn how it works and be better prepared to ask questions.
iii. It gives them a quick win. While ‘real’ projects may take weeks or months to design, build, and deploy, this type of assignment gives them the opportunity to find a relevant bug that could be fixed relatively quickly.
As years passed, we have been compiling all heuristic findings for our product at IAS in a single Excel file and assigning each one points for effort/time, as well as the impact it will have on our product. We’ve gotten a fair share marked off the list and continue to improve our product and ensure that it meets industry standards.
4. Create a 3 Month Plan
This tip comes from a co-worker of mine, whose manager created a 3-month plan with her to help guide her and stay focused during the first couple of months. They used the template by Alissa Briggs outlining broad themes, goals, and expectations. For example, one big theme could be Relationships, the goal of which is to get to know the team and stakeholders across the organization that you will be working with soon. Key action items for the first month are to attend UX standups and all other team rituals, meet 1:1 with your manager and get introduced to product managers and relevant developer teams. Here is a Google sheets template to get you started.
Speaking of relationships, at IAS we have a Slack channel called #coffee-meetup. All members of the coffee-meetup channel get randomly paired up every 2 weeks for a coffee/tea/beverage meetup. This is a great way to meet new people and learn about different departments in the company! If your company uses Slack, you can get the Donut app to set this up.
5. Give them a warm welcome!
That person you just hired, they are human, they just started a new chapter in their career, in a new office (or not, maybe they are full-time remote), with new people — a warm welcome will help them settle down quickly and encourage them to engage in company culture. The UX team at IAS always prepares a small welcome package for the new hire, we get them company swag, snacks, and buy them an office plant, usually a succulent, but we tried something new with our newest hires and got them ZZ plants.
Bottom line, onboarding a new hire is hard, and vice versa, starting a new job could be daunting. Regardless if you covered it in the documentation or the 1:1 meeting, your new hire will most definitely have questions. That is fine, because no Google doc will replace hands-on mentorship, but by taking these 5 simple steps you can ensure that your new hire feels well informed, independent, and confident when coming to you with questions.
This content was originally created for and presented at the 2020 Vista UX Summit.
