Online onboarding — how to do it without losing the sparkle?
The current situation forced all companies to move from their offices to houses and start working fully remotely in just a few days. While this change wasn’t very difficult, especially for our Tech part, there were still a lot of concerns. One of them was how to conduct the onboarding of the newcomers, and share with them our culture, atmosphere, and this little spark that makes working in Docplanner so special?
We believe that proper onboarding is crucial to help people adapt and feel comfortable since changing a job can be a quite stressful experience. For me, as a person who does a lot of onboardings, the most important thing was to preserve the newcomers’ feeling that they are taken care of, and also share with them our culture and our amazing atmosphere. How did we manage to do it?
Always be there for them. Even before their first day
Constant email contact and efficient reply to messages is a clue. Besides sending generic information about the first day’s schedule, it’s good to simply ask “what’s up” and how they feel in this specific situation. It helps to build the relationship in the process and affects a greater sense of ease after joining the company.
Try to make the first day as normal as it can be
Usually, we start our onboarding with a meeting with a People Experience team representative, and it is, of course, still doable. Talking about our mission, values and sharing helpful knowledge as well as fun facts from the company’s life is always a nice start.
Then tour around the office, which may seem silly, because not many people will remember names and faces of more than 100 people, but this simple moment is also very significant. So many people saying “Hi” and “good luck” with huge smiles on their faces can really cheer up. To feel a substitute for it we still can do a tour but… via Discord — the application which enables an easy way to communicate over voice, video, and text to stay close with your teammates. In our space, you’ll find a kitchen, conference rooms, and places for specific teams.
You can still hear “good luck” and use this place to be with people during a coffee break or lunch. Now we can feel even more like in our office using virtual backgrounds on video calls with photos from it :)
Devote time and share the passion
More frequent one to ones with Team Leader and with a friendly face from the People Experience Team is also our new improvement to be sure that a new team member feels comfortable in this situation. Besides meetings with the Team, for newcomers, there is always a list of people they should meet as part of further onboarding. There are people from different teams and even countries. These meetings are aimed at getting to know the company from a different perspective, understanding business and our goals. It’s also a time when a new person has a chance to see our values and passion not only through the presentations and guides but mostly through our people. It can be really motivating and inspiring.
It is essential to provide the new person with tools and useful knowledge. During onboarding, we use Trello Boards where newcomers can find all information and guides that will help them adapt. We also use Tettra as a knowledge base, but most of all, we encourage people to ask questions as we believe that it’s the most effective way to learn and meet new people.
Last but not least — have fun together!
What would you say about lunch via Zoom or other communicators? It can be a nice variety during the first days, not only for a new person but for the whole team. Keeping the routine of a typical day is very important for being productive, especially during remote work, when the borders can blur. And there is no better way to get to know each other than spending time together, also after work, e.g. using popular gaming websites like kurnik.pl in Poland. One of our teams has already had the opportunity to test a new colleague in a game of puns :)
To stay in touch while we are apart, we created a new channel on slack — home office photo story, where we can share how our home offices look like or what we do in our free time. It turns out that it’s also a great place to feel our atmosphere and get to know each other a little bit better. In our case, most of the photos include food. Maybe that’s why more culinary channels like #znanypiekarz appeared at this time :)
We are still learning how to adjust to this new situation and hoping that it will end soon so that we could meet in our real kitchen or common space — not the virtual one. But even if it’s getting harder or we feel overwhelmed by the current state, that kind of messages causes big smiles on our faces and motivate us to continue working with even more energy:
