Post-onboarding
Part Four — What happens after you’ve hired and onboarded
The final part of this series looks at what to do once you’ve found, hired and onboarded your new remote web developer.
Mostly, it’s about having a mentor who can evaluate and offer feedback. Ideally, a dev will outgrow their mentor in time. In the early days, it’s best to supervise work to guarantee technical quality and rapid-reaction to any mistakes. This will benefit both the new dev and the company.
Providing feedback regularly will highlight any unforeseen problems at a team or project level as well as an individual. This ensures no unexpected nasty surprises in the long run.
When the evaluation rolls around, the dev should be prepared for a fairly scrutinous look over their code as well as their finished tasks. Tasks versus time spent should be analysed with consideration to the complexity of the task and number being handled at once.
An employer shouldn’t expect a quick multi-tasker from the get-go. The reality is that bugs take time to fix and builds take a while to code.
By agreeing on an acceptable long-term strategy that balances the employers’ expectation with the capabilities of the individual. As mentioned in previous blogs, it’s really important to learn what the dev is passionate about and fold this into their work. Motivation will result in improvement. This also requires a level of mutual trust, that the employee will develop and that the employer will do what it can to facilitate this.
For example, at Code Enigma, we’re given an annual budget that can be spent on personal training. This could be anything from a new language to certification in our given areas of expertise. We improve our skills and in return, we advance in our roles.
How to increase efficiency
Where possible, it’s advised to automate processes. This means tasks are never forgotten, consistent, streamline workloads and are easily audited so the evaluation process is easy and transparent.
Remember the onboarding document mentioned previously? It could be useful to automate the tasks so nothing is forgotten. It’s worth checking with your HR representative what systems they could use to facilitate recruitment, onboarding and performance analysis.
Post-onboarding checklist for success
- Put a formal probation review meeting in the diary
- Not only this but schedule ongoing progress meetings
- Weekly feedback sessions
- Suggest meeting up in person, whenever possible
- Make sure your team are vocal and you hear from them daily
- Ensure your dev knows the business objectives
- Set them achievable and realistic goals (we like SMART goals here at Code Enigma)
- Make sure these goals feed into the business objectives
We hope you’ve picked up some useful information on how to find, hire and retain anyone on a remote team, not just a developer. Our director, Greg, would be more than happy to discuss how you can make your company more remote.
