Onboarding — 5 things that are waiting to welcome you

Sixtine Caspar-Fille-Lambie
WeMaintain
Published in
5 min readMar 26, 2020

A new start in any company is like entering into a little world.

Each company has its own unique rituals and norms which all newcomers get to learn about and become a part of, and WeMaintain is no exception. To give you an insight into what all new people joining WeMaintain can expect, here is a list of 5 things which will welcome you when you arrive at WeMaintain.

Your buddy

During your first day, the first person that you will meet is your buddy.

Your buddy won’t be in your team — this way you can get to know more people quickly. Their role is to welcome you, give you a tour around our offices, show you our online tools and explain some of our company wide practices at WeMaintain. You will eat lunch together on your first day and then they will continue to check-up on you during your first few weeks to make sure that everything is going well.

Your Buddy will have prepared your Welcome Bag, which contains everything you need to get started, as well as some useful WeMaintain goodies.

The book

In your Welcome Bag you will receive a book.

There are not a lot of strict rules at WeMaintain, but reading this book is one of them and everybody working at WeMaintain has to read it. Then, during your first few months, you will take part in 3 onboarding sessions during which you will exchange with the founders and other newcomers about this book.

Only after these three sessions, will you really be able to understand WeMaintain culture. Of course, no spoiler on the title of the book in this article (we left if out of the above photo for a reason ;)), but everyone having this book in common is something that a lot of us appreciate.

The weekly

If you arrive on a Monday, your first meeting at WeMaintain will probably take place at 12pm. It will be The Weekly! The clue is in the name. It is a short weekly meeting which takes place every Monday at midday (French time) and for which everybody is present (either in person in our offices, or at distance via Google Hangouts Meet). During the next 30 minutes, one person from each department presents their news from the previous week, and the new people that have arrived have the chance to introduce themselves.

No telephones, no computers and no risk that it runs over (in any case, with WeMaintain’s meeting rules that never happens) because the time master makes sure that it rests short and sweet.

The team events

With the “Welcome Drinks”, the “Monthly Founders”, the “Random Lunches” and the “One-on-Ones”, you will quickly have the chance to get to know (as well as eat and drink with ;)) everyone.

  • The “Welcome Drinks”

Once a month, to celebrate that our team is growing (it really is the case every month), we organise some small welcome drinks in our offices. It’s nothing very big, just a nice moment shared amongst colleagues around a few drinks and some nibbles.

  • The Monthly Founder

The last friday of every month, we all get together in our amphithéâtre for a ‘goûter’ (seasonal cakes, crepes… every month, it’s different) and for a one hour session of Ask Me Anything with our three founders. At WeMaintain, we aim to be a transparent company, and this is the chance for everyone to ask any questions they might have concerning the strategy, organisation, finances… everything!

  • The Random Lunches

Every 2 weeks, groups of 3 people, chosen at random via our friendly Donut in Slack, lunch together outside of the offices. Whatever your role at WeMaintain, you will naturally work more with certain persons than others. The Random Lunches allow people who might not get to see each other very often to touch base again.

Operations, data, devs, founder, when the random lunches gets bigger :)
Operations, data, devs, founder, when the random lunches gets bigger :)
  • A special mention for our One-on-One Lunches.

For us, this is a good example of how a growing startup has to change. Until we were about 30 people, every new person had a One-on-One Lunch with everybody else. At 10 people it was easy to organise, at 20 it was a little bit more difficult, and at 30 it became almost impossible (or at least it would take several months…). So we have recently taken the decision to adapt this rituel. From now on, during their first month, all newcomers will have 5 lunches with at least 3 different people who are all from different teams. The aim is to try and maintain our ‘get to know each other’ culture at WeMaintain, especially as we continue to grow. Once your first month is over, obviously you can continue One-on-One Lunches as you wish. We are currently still in the process of testing this new format so it’s a watch this space moment.

The onboarding meetings

At the beginning, WeMaintain was a few developers, two salespeople, and a couple of people in the operations team. As we have grown, different teams have been created. Today they include marketing, finance, commercial sector sales, residential sales, design, product, data… It’s a lot of different jobs.

Once a month, all the latest arrivals spend one hour with each team’s lead to learn about who is in that team, what is its history and what are its role and strategic objectives as part of WeMaintain today. Of course, as a newcomer, this is the perfect opportunity to ask all the questions you want to understand how the different teams interact at WeMaintain.

So there you have an insight into what you can expect when you join WeMaintain. For us, the onboarding of everybody is really important. As we grow quickly, it is a team effort which is evolving all the time. After six weeks spent at WeMaintain, you will have an Astonishment report to fill in so you can tell us how we can improve for the next person’s arrival. Today, we are in the process of creating our playbook which we will use in our international expansion, and onboarding is an important part of this. Wherever you will be based, we want to make sure we give you the same (and the best ;)) welcome.

👉 If you would like to join the WeMaintain adventure, don’t hesitate to contact us for more information or to look at our latest offers here !

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