This is part four in a series on Engineering team growth.
Research has shown that proper onboarding can make a huge difference in employee retention and productivity, so it’s important to get it right. There’s more to onboarding than ensuring employees have the information they need: you also need to make sure they feel valued and welcome.
How you get employees as productive as possible as quickly as possible may vary a bit from company to company, but here are the tools I’ve found most useful.
Showering with affection
Onboarding starts when the candidate accepts the job offer. As soon as that happens, there’s no substitute for filling their email inbox with emails from employees who are excited to meet them or start working with them. I recommend keeping these short and simple and not mixing detailed info or instructions in with the affectionate emails. You can also do this when making the job offer to encourage them to accept.
Day one information sheet
I like to create a single page document with everything they need to know on day one. I like to send it a few days before their first day, and include the following:
- Logistics (eg how they can access the building/slack/whatever they need to start their first day, when they should arrive1, etc)
- Team info, including who’s on their team (name, role and contact info). Highlight who they are reporting to, who will know the most about getting started, and who can help with different kinds of questions. Make notes of anyone on vacation.
- Who their “onboarding buddy” is. (see next section)
- Extra contact info for people they can reach out to if they are stuck (especially important for remote employees)
- What they should try to accomplish first. (eg make sure their email and slack are setup, 2FA, etc)
- What project they will be working on first, and what they are likely to be working on next
- Any Day-1 goals.
I also think it’s important, and google research agrees with me for the hiring manager to meet with the employee on day one. If the hiring manager is truly unavailable (sick or on vacation) be sure to have someone give them some individualized, day-one attention.
Onboarding buddy
I like to make sure that every new hire has someone besides their manager they can go to with onboarding help. Sometimes all they need is someone to check in, but other times they need more help with things. I also like to have the onboard buddy explicitly be responsible for helping them fit in socially, which can be a source of anxiety for many new employees.
If you are hiring somewhat frequently, it can also make sense to pair new employees with other new employees. It’s nice to feel like you have someone to learn the ropes with.
Onboarding checklist
Onboarding doesn’t finish after one day, and new employees continue to need guidance about how things work at your company, which documentation to read and how to navigate the different teams, and departments. This takes time. I like to give them a checklist and schedule for the coming weeks and months including who they should meet, what systems they will need access to, what codebases they should learn, what meetings they should schedule, etc.
You can give this schedule directly to the new hire or to their manager. I prefer to give it to the new hire and include a few names of people to ask if they don’t know how to do something. It’s more work for the new employee to do it themselves and slows them down, but by the end they’ve met more people and gotten a bit more of the lay of the land by doing it themselves. I’ve always gotten good feedback about doing it this way.
Scheduling meetings and introductions may be handled by the manager, the department or by someone in HR or Ops. Either way, it’s important for all employees to understand how the business works. There’s no substitute for meetings with leaders and the chance to ask questions. Of course, larger companies try to replace this part of the process with documentation and videos. While that’s probably necessary, I think it’s one of the things that makes larger companies feel so impersonal.
Pairing
Pair programming, with the new employee on keyboard, is the best way to get them familiar with your codebase and able to do real work. Pairing can be quite draining for some developers, so you may want to limit this to a few hours a day, but whatever time you spend will be worth it. I highly recommend having them pair on day 1 if you can, and regularly after that until they are comfortable with the codebase.
Feedback session
Once a new employee is onboarded, I like to meet with them and see how things went. Even a good system can be improved! If you are hiring many people, you may want to do this as a group, in which case, be sure to give each employee a little individual attention. I also check in with their managers to see if there were any problems from their perspective.
Footnotes
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a lot of new employees are eager to arrive early, and they often wind up sitting around until someone who can help them gets in. This can be anxiety-provoking so I like to tell my new hires to arrive sometime significantly after I plan to arrive so there’s someone to welcome them. ↩
