You are an Engineer possibly a senior/lead role in a company and you have been there for some time. HR department usually plans something for newcomers as an onboarding process but after they join and pass those, they have to understand the code and everything. Do you have a plan in your company for them?

In this article, I am going to a checklist of items that you as a Senior/Lead Level must provide, find or write and keep up to date.

What is an onboarding process and why is it important?

Employees are the heart of the business and every manager knows that the company stands on its people. So when a person joins your company you should give them a brief introduction to each department of your company, giving them instructions on who to go to for different questions, that helps them to

• Increase productivity: the more they know, the better connection they can have to understand what they are doing and even improves their relationship with other employees.
• Definition of their role: if you give them clear instruction, they know what is the actual expectation of them and potentially helps them to achieve all of their goals at least in the first six months.
• Less stress: As a stranger to a new company, you have so many questions, and so many strangers surrounding you to ask questions, the more you know, the less stress you have and that ends up with better job satisfaction.
• Less employee turnover: if you give them a clear perspective of their job, they will have more excitement to fill the missing piece of the puzzle, and achieving results, is also keeps them in the company.

How to create an onboarding process?

You need a plan, clear plan for the onboarding process that everyone understands and participates in. By everyone, I mean the head of each department.

1. Planning session:

you need to organize a meeting with a nominated person from each department, you will have general knowledge and specific department knowledge. Like a new person in IT needs to know who his CEO is at the same time, it’s a good practice to know someone from Marketing. sometimes you are working on a feature and if you know Marketing’s perspective, it will help you to develop a better result to the point that they want.

You need to transfer general knowledge to everyone joining the company, a bit of Support System, Marketing, Digital and every other department you might have within your company.

2. Organize their equipment/desk and any related tools:

Then you need to give them what they want to work with. it’s important to keep them ready, that helps them have a better experience and possibly less stress about what they need to do. Nothing is worse than sitting and watching people for the first day!

3. Introduce them to the team:

you need to introduce them to the team publicly, over zoom or an in-person meeting, that breaks the ice, and ask everyone to introduce themselves in a sentence, this little introduction helps a lot for a team to accept the new person and also helps the culture of teamwork to grow in your team.

4. Introduce them to their direct manager to report to and a colleague in their team to ask questions:

they need to know who their direct manager is, who to report to, if they are taking a sick leave and whatever, they also need to know who to ask technical questions, keep them separate, some questions need to be answered by someone else. For a person joining a company who wants to impress his/her manager, they don’t want to ask lots of questions from them.

5. Hand them documentation:

The next thing you need to do is to give them something to read, documentation with steps of what they need to do. Give them a day, let them settle, they have lots set up to do and they need time to process. Keep the documentation up to date. This needs to have:

• What codebase or software they are working with?
• How to install their software if they need to?
• What links they need to have? like where to submit sick/annual leaves?
• What was their team name? who is their team (they need to remember their colleague’s name and use it as a reference)
• Where is the Jira/Trello or their tasks? what tools managers are using to manage their time?

6. Ask them what they might need?

ask them to write down their questions, that helps them to read through and find answers first and then write their questions down then organize another meeting and let them talk, ask and answer their questions, do it with few people, and if they got all of their questions to go to next step

7. Pair them up with someone for the first task:

They are for sure confused, do not assign them a ticket, assign someone else a ticket and ask them to do it. They should do lots of talking, start the process and finally do the task. Having the task assigned to someone else forces them to finish it together. That also dedicate some time to work together.

It’s a bad experience having a task and asks your colleagues and they don’t have time to help you!

8. Assign them a dedicated task, a general one:

Now they can make a task done, but they need to know how they must report to managers, assign them a less technical task to do, give them time to understand how to report, and make a task done and if they finished the task, make sure you tell to the whole team and they have done their tasks and let everyone in the team know and thank them. That helps them to understand you will reward them and recognize their work.

9. Ask them to update onboarding documents:

This is the best time to update the onboarding process, assign them a task and give them an opportunity to add/edit those documents, this is the best way to keep them up to date.

Is having a buddy from another team helps?

I know most of the companies do that, I have had a few of those, the fact is that it doesn’t. it’s a never happening conversation or if it happens they have nothing to talk about.

In conclusion:

This comes from my experience, I’d be happy to hear your ideas if you have any. The faster they understand, the more connection they make in their first few months, the better they bring results and that’s what you are after. These simple processes are usually left off because the company doesn’t prioritize them, But the first impression of a company will help to have a better culture and better results at the end of the day.

Hope you enjoy this article.

Gazar