How to onboard yourself into a new UX position
Three tips on how to prepare and manage expectations going through an onboarding process, from an employee’s point of view.
POV: You are walking up the steps of the building you will be working at, you are holding onto the strap of your bag that has your lunch, notebook, pen, keys and more empty space than a Miro board.
You’re early, too early. The office is quiet, but the air is thick. You meet another human, and they show you were to sit, they immediately ask you if you want to grab coffee. You hesitate…unsure if this is the correct thing to do but then remember you literally have no work, this is your first day. You have no laptop. You grab a coffee and the kind human who took you in, leads you back to your seat and gets back to their work.
Sip, sip…
You wait. Sipping anxiously and unintentionally making eye contact with everyone around.
Finally, your manager arrives, excitedly smiles, and comes over to greet you. Someone from IT support has just handed you a laptop. You log in and as you click on your first mail, more team members enter and others that you already made awkward eye contact with are introduced to you. Some mouth ‘hello’ while two others stand at your desk and ask you about yourself. Your manager is now shouting that he will be setting up some meeting invites for you to get to know the company and team procedures. PING, PING. You are getting emails from HR for the compliance exercises you need to do and an invite to a company policy introductory session. Your team members are still around, talking about projects you will be on and what you need to know. Your quiet atmosphere changed in a matter of minutes from not having work, you are now falling behind.
Every company has their own onboarding process, but the primary goal of onboarding a new employee is to start or continue the production of work.
Hence, you will be given the company policies, ways of working, resources, tools and brief introductions to members of your team. You will not be given this information in a phased approach, you will not be given a breakdown of everyone’s personalities, communication styles and expectations of you within the team. You also may be expected to start or continue a project that you don’t fully understand.
Being aware of a business’s expectation of an onboarding process allows you to create control in an environment that is not set up to help YOU get started.
Here are 3 tips to help you onboard YOURSELF
- Structure company and team resources from the get-go
- Get to know individual team members
3. Set expectations of your needs before you start on any work
1. Structure company and team resources from the get-go
Every company has their own resources that they need to share. When we say resources, we mean online repositories, employee dashboards, websites or documents that hold valuable information that you will need throughout your time working at this company. Often these resources are provided by different groups of people and at random points through your onboarding sessions (e.g., immediate team members, HR, managers).
In the design and research community, there are categories that are helpful to structure new resources into: Admin, Design resources, Research resources, Team resources and Project work. I suggest these 5 categories are immediately created as bookmark folders on your browser so when a resource is mentioned to you, you can bookmark it under a defined category and relook at it after the company onboarding process is complete.
In the tech design and research space, these are resources to look out for or ask for within each category:
Admin
- Company policies
- Where to log IT queries or equipment requests
- Time logging platform
- Company learning platforms
- Employee information portal/platform
- Where to book leave days
- Where to check your remuneration
Design resources
- Design processes
- Design system
- Component Library(s)
- Design files and passwords
Research resources
- Research processes
- Research tools
- Research templates
- Research repository
Team resources
- Jira boards
- Confluence boards
- Invision boards
- Team chat platforms (e.g., Slack, MS Teams)
- Groups within a chat platform
Project work
- Development environments and passwords
- Research resources related to the project
- Design resources related to the project
2. Get to know the team on an individual level
Getting to know a group of new people who already know each other can be quite intimidating. You can have more meaningful conversations by setting up 30 minute 1-to-1 meetings with each person on your team over your first week. These meetings can be run like research sessions, aiming to understand the role each person plays within the team beyond their titles as well as unpacking their expectations of your role.
Introduction and creating rapport:
Get to know the person by asking them about their role in producing work (Product owner, dev etc) as well as their role in the team (the one who everyone asks for help with support queries); What are their activities outside of work; What motivates them.
Take note of the pace in which they are speaking, the urgency or calmness in the tone of their voice. Team dynamics can always be spotted in the subtle hits made by an individual speaking about the team.
Previous way of working:
Try and understand the ways of working before you arrived.
How did the team communicate on ideas and share physical assets?
What or where in a process do they wish they were involved in?
If there was a previous person in your role, what did each individual like about the ways they worked or what would they change and how could it have improved from their point of view?
Specific questions to dive into: Are they involved in usability testing? what research studies have they been exposed to? what frustrates them about new designs?
Future way of working:
What expectations do they have of your role and where do those expectations come from?
Establish practices that could be put in place to manage those expectations. A great starting point for setting expectations is, How to set expectations for employees by Maggie Wooll.
3. Set expectations of your needs before you start on any work
Unfortunately, it has become very common for ‘small’ requests to come in when you are being onboarded like “Please can you change this button” or “The wording of this text needs to be changed to…” The problem with quickly doing these ‘small’ requests is we forget to stop and try to understand the context of the work and, we set the standard and pace of how fast we can produce work.
If there is a request for a change or an add on, it means that specific thing is having an impact somewhere and the business is conscious of it. Take your time even with what is called ‘the small changes’ because down the line when you understand the business better it will become a problem and then there will be no time to fix it.
When you are being onboarded, go through this list below before you take on any new work.
- Acknowledge you need company time to complete your admin tasks
- Go through past research studies that were conducted
- Understand the design system that is being used
- Complete a heuristic evaluation of the platform on the most up to date environments
- Complete a comparison of the currents designs to the built environment
- Understand what work is prioritised for the next two sprints
- Understand at what point you will be picking up these new tasks and make sure you understand the process of the job you are asked to do.
