Improve your remote onboarding with a retrospective
Remote onboarding
Onboarding new staff members during this strange time can be very different to your past onboarding experiences. Moving from a welcome greeting at reception and seeing the buzz of the office, to inviting new joiners to a video chat where they can only get to know their new colleagues as 2D figures 📹
As a company we have invested a lot of time and effort into making sure new joiners get to meet as many people around the business as possible and settled into the company over the first few weeks.
However, we can’t just leave it there and we want to make sure we are doing everything we can. With this in mind, getting regular feedback from new joiners to improve the onboarding process is vital to for our business and our new employees.
What is an onboarding retrospective?
If you or your company are adopting Agile practices, you might already be doing retrospectives with the team. If not, you can find out more information here. Ideally for this session, 60 minutes should be more than enough to get through the tops.
I went for a “Start Stop Continue” format for this session, asking the participants to add topics to all three areas. 🚦
The key difference in an onboarding retrospective is that we only people who have been involved in the process to join this retro. In our case this included:
- The employee or employees, if you have onboarded a few in your area
- The team lead or in our case the Tech Lead of the new joiner’s team
- The hiring manager
- A facilitator
What’s the role of a facilitator?
Their primary role is to run the session by:
- Making sure it’s a safe environment where people are able to share ideas and speak freely 🎤
- Tracking time and making sure all important* topics can be covered during the session ⏰
- Making sure actions are captured and assigning a person to be responsible for that action 📔
- Sharing actions at the end of the session ▶️
*If you vote on topics, make sure the most voted for topics are covered off as those will drive the biggest changes. Don’t feel like you need to cover everything in this session.
Some insight into the topics that got raised in our first onboarding retro
- Company introduction sessions were great for context 👀
- The team have been really helpful and supportive 👪
- Being left alone to solve our technical test during the interview process felt strange and meant they had no-one to ask questions of ❓
- The Introduction to Elm coding workshop was great 💻
- Quite a lot to take in regarding external tooling/services/external content providers 📚
- Would have been good to have a “buddy”, someone to pair up with for the first week to understand what a normal day looks like 👭
I personally found these sessions super helpful and insightful, and learned which areas of the process people really enjoyed and found useful, how easily they felt settled into the team, and how positive they felt about our company culture. Given that everyone is remote right now, this is a fantastic achievement in my opinion.
I also got insights into areas I wasn’t expecting to. For example, seeing our recruitment process experience from their perspective, what they liked and more importantly didn’t like about it, and feedback on how we could improve that.
How often should we do this?
It depends on how often you are hiring and how many people you seem to be onboarding. We are currently looking to build a couple of new teams of 10–15 engineers, therefore we will continue to run these sessions every month or two when we have a few new joiners.
I hope you enjoyed this read and found it useful. If so please like and share! If you like the sound of carwow then take a look at the careers page, or if you have any questions, reach out to me.
