The Pain of Integration or How to Treat a New Joiner
With every newcomer, we hear the phrase “Please give him/her a warm welcome.” So what is that “warm welcome” that every new joiner needs?
In most companies, the HR department takes care of the smooth onboarding of every newcomer. But for full involvement in the project team, the team coach comes to rescue.
Having been a Coach in various teams, I have often found this “welcome period” pretty challenging. When a new team member joins the team, you feel responsible for making their integration period as painless as possible. There is a big number of lessons I have learned with every new team member, so let me share some of those lessons with you and also give some tips for easier handling:
1. Identify the personality of your new teammate
When you have a new member in your team, it is very important to understand the key elements of his/her character to be able to treat him/her right. Try to identify whether you deal with an introvert or extrovert.
You don’t want to kill someone with your attention or leave one die without being noticed.
Before passing to work, take time and have a cup of coffee, learn a bit about the new joiner’s background, hobbies, and interests. This will, later on, help you better create bonds. If you learn that someone likes football, let’s say, you can use it in your examples later on and thus create a more comfortable atmosphere for the new joiner.
The things that work for one person can fail to work with another, so first get to know the person and then elaborate your “integration path.”
2. Give them some ground to lean on
We all have been a new joiner sometime. What is the most awkward thing we all experience during the first days? Mostly, it is a lack of information. I mean lack of information on anything: the project we are going to work on, our new colleagues, company culture and what is worse, the company jokes :)
Try to arm the newcomer with information that you think will be useful for their integration. Give them some documents about the project, tell them a bit about their current colleagues, about their specialties and hobbies, about the level of their professionalism. Share some nice teambuilding photos and videos as well as funny stories that have happened in the workspace. Stuff like this help people to feel more connected.
3. Never overcare. Respect their personal space
We all like being independent, so please give the newcomer air to breathe.
Try to organize the introduction sessions in a way that the person also has time by himself. You can have one one2one session and after ask him to read something by himself and come up with questions. The important thing is to show him that you are always reachable and available for help, but he is the one to turn to you for support. Of course, a lot depends on someone’s level of experience.
The amount of your involvement may differ a lot based on whether you are working with a junior specialist or an experienced professional.
4. Ask questions and learn new things
Well, we all like to be important, right? We just get wings and feel super powerful when we are told about our importance.
Telling people that they are important is a really good way of motivating them and making them more eager to do their best (well, it works for me, at least :D).
When you introduce a project, a process, or a simple workflow to someone, never just “introduce.” Ask him what he likes in the way you work, what he dislikes, what he thinks can be done in a more efficient way. Ask him to bring examples from his own experience. Show him that you are open and ready to always improve the ways of working. If he feels that he was able to give valuable advice, you will have twice a motivated employee in your team.
5. Start from scratch every time with equal or more excitement
Yes, integrating a newcomer to the team can be a tiring process for the coach. The motivation of your new team member is of utmost importance for the future success of your team. You do your best to convince them they have joined a great company, a professional team, and are going to work on an awesome project. And you do all this with every new team member with equal excitement. When the team gets bigger, you not only focus on the behavior of the new joiner but also on the rest of the team. You want to show a good example and you want the integration period to pass as smooth as possible for everyone. For this, you need to be ready to start from scratch every single time.
This process is similar to the case when a baby is being born in a family. From one hand, you show everything that he is going to deal with by living in that family, and from the other hand, you help others to get used to the baby, support him and help to grow, tolerate the discomfort that the baby can cause and always show a good example and show how lucky he is to be born in that very family.
p.s. Yes, the maternity leave with a second child does affect the examples one brings in the articles. As a PM, I enjoy analyzing various family scenarios and drawing parallels between the ones I face in the teams.
