Onboarding: a journey built by our team
How I was set up for success, and how I’m now doing it for others!
Having only been through onboarding once (this is my first job!), I was unaware of how different onboarding could be across companies, until my uni friends shared some of their experiences. Luckily, our onboarding usually gets great feedback, from both new juniors and seniors. But why?
I wanted to answer this question, so I documented the process through my own experience. Here is how we set up our team for success with a safe, efficient, and fun onboarding journey!
Someone to lean on
“…When you need a hand
We all need somebody to lean on”— Bill Withers, Lean on Me.
When someone joins our team, they are given a “buddy”. Buddies are volunteers from the team (not a manager) who are your work companions for the first few months. As your daily point of contact, they are there to answer the 100s of questions, but also work with and help you on projects. This is in addition to the team and line manager.
My buddy booked in daily calls (which gradually turned weekly) where we’d talk about workload, projects, questions I had, and also just about life — like what we were cooking for dinner (an important topic in our team)!
Looking back, it was important that I had this safety net of having someone to reach out to for the pettiest questions — like how to recall an email I forgot to put an attachment to or where to find templates for the usability testing questions. Without this system, I would have felt lost and perhaps more nervous than confident during my traineeship. Grazie Davide!
In short, a buddy system provides a human-support-line for the new joiner — their own 999 at work!
A New Joiner Kit
Is anything more frustrating than searching for (literally) anything? Luckily, and thankfully, our team had gathered all resources into a “New Joiner Kit”:
- The folder contains literally everything — from fonts to install and program guides to training and overall valuable resources.
- The presentation is a step-by-step guide (52 slides!), which includes links to our design resources, such as our design methodology and documentation to security rules and office etiquette. Even a to-do list to guide the new joiner on the first hectic weeks.
This New Joiner Kit did not happen overnight, but over several years, with continuous inputs from almost everyone on the team. It was built by the team, for the team.
It’s now a ritual for new joiners to add to the kit, making sure it’s up-to-date. I added my part about being careful of phishing messages and data leak risks. Others added a checkbox and star system:
The New Joiner Kit is not set-in-stone, but always evolving — it gets the team and the new joiners to collectively improve the onboarding process. It’s a valuable thing to do as a team, and which also remains forever!
Projects with gradual difficulty
Our structure allows new joiners to experience varying levels of projects. Our main onboarding goal is to get people leading projects as soon as they’re ready…-ish! So how is it done?
At the start of my traineeship, I was paired with a fellow designer to work on a new feature on an ongoing product. I had imagined a “replicate this design in XD”, but I was presented with the problem, user needs, and realistic data, and given the opportunity to perform research and iterations independently and present back to the team. I was pitching my designs in the first month of joining!
I continued to work on several projects with different requests — each new project was more complex than the previous one, with some surprises here and there (projects are usually more complex than initially scoped). Our diverse range of advanced users, which you can read about in Morgane’s article “How to design for advanced users”, meant opportunities to work across a huge variety of financial projects, ranging from trading tools to client onboarding services.
And so… I was given two lead projects — halfway through my traineeship! Leading meant organising meetings, pitching ideas, and guiding developers to bring my designs to production. It gave me the perfect amount of pressure and challenge — to get to where I am now.
In conclusion
Two years later, I have now volunteered as a buddy for a new joiner (hi Honor!). I wanted to reflect back on my onboarding as I first-hand experienced how important onboardings are. In the beginning, I may have felt like I was thrown into the deep end, but I later realised it was with confidence.
To sum up, here are the points we do to prepare a successful onboarding:
- 🤝 A friendly buddy who they can ALWAYS talk to
- 🧰 A “New joiner kit” to be their BIBLE
- 🛠️ Get them to improve the onboarding — built by people, for people
- 💻 Give projects at different levels to challenge gradually
- ⏰ And… remember it takes time and effort!
Lastly, I want to emphasise that this onboarding process was not created overnight, but through several years of commitment and desire to give back to the team!
For more career stories in our team read about how Onsi, a Product Owner turned Designer, managed his transition from Product Owner to Designer, and about how Davide’s experience at Bootcamp went!
