Onboarding Principles

Part of The PIRATE Way — Stories about scaling up engineering teams.

Onboarding Principles

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Onboarding is integrating new employees into a company and its culture and acquainting them with the organization's policies, procedures, and roles. Effective onboarding is especially critical for a scale-up technology company, given the rapid pace of growth and the consequent urgency for new hires to contribute effectively as soon as possible.

To meet this need, a thorough onboarding process often includes the following key components:

• Cultural Integration: One of the initial steps in the onboarding process involves helping new hires understand and assimilate into the company culture. This might include sharing the company’s mission, values, and goals through interactive sessions or storytelling. It also involves illustrating how their role contributes to these larger objectives.
• Operational Orientation involves familiarizing new hires with the tools, technologies, and systems the company uses regularly. This could include training on software platforms, internal communication tools, and any proprietary technology the company has developed.
• Role-Specific Training: This provides new hires with in-depth training for their specific role, enabling them to understand their responsibilities, the tasks they’ll be performing daily, and how their work contributes to the overall goals of the team and the company.
• Building Connections: This crucial part of onboarding helps new hires forge connections with their colleagues. This could involve mentorship programs, team-building activities, and fostering an environment that encourages open dialogue and collaboration.
• Continuous Feedback and Evaluation: This process ensures new hires receive regular feedback on their performance. In return, they should have opportunities to provide feedback on the onboarding process, enabling continuous improvement.

In a scale-up environment, the onboarding process must be efficient and effective, accelerating new hires’ journey to becoming fully contributing company members. Simultaneously, the approach should be comprehensive and thoughtful, immediately ensuring new employees feel welcomed, supported, and valued.

I like to visualize the onboarding process as layers of an onion. The layers symbolize the progressive uncovering of more profound and specific aspects of the company as the new hire assimilates into their role.

• The outermost layer is the company onboarding, where you should receive a 360-degree overview of all the different functions, their missions, and how they work together towards the shared goal.
• That layer reveals the department onboarding, which covers who we are, our operational principles, organizational structure, system overview, delivery process, etc.
• Deeper in is the discipline onboarding, outlining the tools and ways of working that will differ for a backend engineer, mobile developer, frontend developer, product designer, or product manager, etc.
• At the core is the team onboarding, acquainting you with the specifics of your team, their specific Agile adoption and collaboration agreements, and the problem domains the team owns.

This article will focus primarily on the last three layers, delving into the more specific aspects of onboarding within a scale-up tech company.

Department Onboarding

Upon joining the department, each newcomer should understand how we work, our mission, and our challenges. To achieve this, I make it a point to personally engage with every new member, discussing the following key topics:

• Understanding Our Mission: Explain the specific problem we’re addressing and how our solutions are designed to tackle it. This discussion includes an overview of our architecture and infrastructure, ensuring new members can visualize how our systems interlock to solve the problem.
• How We Work: A critical component of the onboarding process involves familiarizing new hires with our operations. This encompasses an overview of our delivery flow, the organizational design, including the different teams and the challenges they’re currently handling, and introductions to the members of each team.
• Department Principles and Values: New hires must fully grasp our department’s ethos. This means understanding our core principles and values guiding our daily work and long-term strategies. We also discuss our department’s rituals, such as All-Hands meetings, Post-Mortems, and Guilds.
• Critical Frameworks: A thorough understanding of our Incident Management Framework and Voice of Customer Framework is necessary. These structures are fundamental in our day-to-day operations and decision-making process.
• What to Expect: The final part of the onboarding process details what the new hires should expect next. This includes insights into their next days or weeks at work, introductions to their manager and team, and the allocation of a ‘Buddy’ — a go-to person who can help them navigate the early days of their new role.
• Final Notes: I like to conclude with a call to action. The onboarding process is a living, evolving entity and we all contribute to its refinement. I encourage new hires to approach it with a ‘scout mindset’ — aiming to leave the process better than they found it. By welcoming feedback and ideas, we ensure the continual improvement of our onboarding process.

Each of these stages is carefully designed to ensure new members feel welcomed, informed, and prepared to embark on their journey within the department.

Discipline Onboarding

The discipline onboarding process is designed to be self-directed, enabling new team members to take control of their learning journey. However, this process is well-supported and documented to ensure everyone has the necessary resources to succeed.

• Getting Started: A comprehensive guide should be provided to help new hires set up their equipment and local environment according to the requirements of their specific discipline. This guide also leads them through making their first contribution to the team’s work.
• Best Practices and Standards: It’s essential for newcomers to understand their discipline's standards and best practices within our organization. This includes accessing relevant repositories, using specific tools, and understanding licensing agreements when necessary. All this information should be readily available in written documentation or on an accessible board with tickets.
• Discipline Governance Framework: I also believe explaining how the discipline operates as a unit is essential. This framework might include the frequency of discipline-specific meetings (e.g., Guilds), how often retrospectives are conducted at the discipline level, how regularly we conduct surveys to identify discipline bottlenecks, and where the discipline roadmap can be found.
• Training: Depending on our hiring approach, the discipline onboarding process may require training. If we’re hiring experts in a specific discipline, this might involve introducing them to our particular way of doing things. If we bring on more generalist professionals, the onboarding process might need to include more in-depth training on the specifics of the discipline. This can be managed using internal material and training or e-learning. In the past, I’ve successfully implemented this with Udemy for Business due to the quality, breadth, and up-to-date content available across a range of technologies.

By blending self-directed learning with structured guidance, we aim to empower new hires, helping them become effective and confident contributors to their discipline.

Team Onboarding

The final part of the onboarding process is tailored to the specific team the new hire will be joining. This process aims to provide detailed information about the team’s responsibilities and workings, fostering a sense of belonging and understanding right from the start.

• Problem Domains: A comprehensive overview should be given about the problem domains for which the team is responsible. This ensures that new team members understand the scope and significance of the work from the start.
• Metrics and Dashboards: New team members must know about the vital business and engineering metrics that the team monitors. Showing new hires the dashboards where these metrics are tracked will help them understand the team’s performance objectives and how their contributions will make a difference.
• Team Members: A formal introduction to the team will help new hires understand their colleagues’ roles and how they can collaborate effectively. This promotes a sense of community and supports efficient teamwork.
• Ongoing Initiatives: Information about ongoing initiatives, adapted to the team’s particular framework (e.g., OKRs), can help new hires understand the team’s current priorities and where their efforts will be directed in the immediate future.
• Agile Practices: The specific agile practices a team uses can depend on various factors, including the problem they’re solving, the team’s maturity, and the duration they’ve been working together. It’s important to inform new hires about these practices (such as Scrum/Kanban, sprint size, daily stand-ups, refinement sessions, demos, retrospectives, etc.), so they understand the team’s workflows and can contribute effectively.
• Available Documentation: New team members should be introduced to the team’s internal documentation or wiki. This is a valuable resource for detailed, team-specific information and can aid in further understanding and integration into the team.
• Next Steps: Specific tasks the newbie will face first, in some cases can be bug fixing, fire-fighting, pair-programming, or a set of discovery tasks already pre-selected by the technical lead or newbie’s manager.

This final stage of the onboarding process ensures that new hires are well-prepared to start working effectively in their team, feel supported, and understand their role within the larger context of the team’s and the company’s goals.

Additional Documentation: A Staggered Approach

While abundant relevant documentation could be shared with new hires, it’s essential to be mindful of the potentially overwhelming nature of the onboarding process. Thus, not all information must be provided during the initial days or weeks.

Below is a list of additional documentation and resources that, although not immediately necessary, can be beneficial for new hires to explore after they have settled into their roles:

• Post-Mortems: Historical documentation of significant incidents or challenges and how they were resolved. This can provide context about past decisions and current practices.
• All-Hands Presentations: Copies or recordings of previous company-wide meetings can help new hires understand the bigger picture, ongoing initiatives, and company culture.
• Learning & Development Program Details: Information about available training programs, workshops, and learning resources can help employees plan their professional development.
• Interacting with Colleagues: Guidelines for interacting with colleagues in specific roles (e.g., other frontend engineers), including relevant Slack channels or other communication platforms.
• Competency Framework: The organization’s structure and hierarchy, detailing roles and responsibilities.
• Performance Review Cycle: Understanding the performance review process and expectations can help new hires prepare for these assessments.
• Issue and Idea Reporting: Information on how to raise a bug or propose a new idea will familiarize new hires with the company’s workflows.
• Tool Adoption Discussion Process: If an employee wants to suggest a new tool for adoption, they need to know the appropriate process to follow.
• And many others

I recommend structuring this content into an easily digestible format. For instance, you could use a ticketing system like Trello or Notion to create a personalized board for each new hire. These boards can be divided into 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day segments, providing new hires with a phased approach to consuming this additional documentation. This way, new employees can gradually familiarize themselves with all the essential aspects of their roles and the company over a reasonable time frame.

Buddy Program: Your Onboarding Companion

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash

Implementing a buddy program is a vital component of an effective onboarding process, especially in scale-up technology companies. This involves pairing new hires with a more seasoned member of their team or department. The ‘buddy’ is typically not a person’s direct manager but a peer who can provide informal guidance and support.

The buddy program has several benefits:

• Navigational Support: A buddy can guide the new hire through the complexities of their new role, the team’s dynamics, and the organization’s structure. They can provide explanations, answer questions, and assist in overcoming initial challenges.
• Social Integration: A buddy can help new hires feel welcome and connected. They can introduce the new hire to other team members, involve them in social activities, and assist them in understanding the company culture.
• Encourages Knowledge Transfer: A buddy can help new hires understand the practicalities of their role faster by sharing their experiences, best practices, and tips.

The buddy should be a volunteer who is knowledgeable, patient, good at communication, and willing to help. They should be adequately trained for their role as a buddy, and the expectations from them should be communicated.

Remember, the goal of a buddy program is not just to ease the transition for the new hire but also to foster a supportive and inclusive company culture. Building solid relationships from the start can create a collaborative and productive work environment where everyone feels valued and engaged.

Final Notes

Onboarding is a process directly influenced by your hiring and delivery methods. Your approach might vary depending on whether you’re bringing on seasoned professionals or entry-level individuals, experts in your stack, or those new to it.

The ultimate goal of onboarding is to mold successful team members who can meet or exceed expectations in their upcoming performance reviews. However, it’s important to remember that the process is not static but should evolve as your team and business do.

In an ideal situation, an onboarding process should align with a well-defined competency framework. But, often, you may find yourself onboarding new hires before such a framework is in place. When time permits, consider building a competency framework and revisiting your onboarding process to ensure alignment.

Just as you identify skills, competencies, and behaviors that you’d like to see in a candidate during the hiring process, do the same for the onboarding process. Consider what you would like the new team member to achieve after 1, 2, 3, and 6 months (often coinciding with the end of the probation period).

Establish outcomes as intermediate checkpoints based on these competencies to ensure the new team member is heading in the right direction.

One method to measure the effectiveness of your onboarding process is to conduct a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. This tool can provide valuable feedback on the new hire’s experience, which we will explore further in our next post on onboarding metrics.

In conclusion, effective onboarding is a journey. The best onboarding experiences are well thought out, detailed, and executed with empathy and understanding. Remember, the onboarding process should constantly be evolving. Be a scout and leave the onboarding process better than you found it.

Remember: This is a blog post from the series “The PIRATE Way”.