On a new team member’s first day, the worst move that you could make would be to gesture broadly over your office floor plan and say,
Welcome to the team! Now go, and…be valuable to the company.
I don’t think that anyone would ever do that. At least, I hope not, because you’d be shooting everyone (you, your new hire, the receiving team, and/or your whole company) in the foot and setting up your hiring investment to fail. Gladly, almost no companies actually do that.
Instead, we have this wonderful thing called “onboarding” — teaching an incoming team member everything they need to know and giving them all the tools they need to be successful. It could be called “orientation” or something else entirely, but the idea is the same and it’s super duper important.
But onboarding is a whole lot easier said than done. Every company has their own way to onboard and while there are hundreds of books and blog posts on the subject, there’s no one size fits all. In fact, there’s rarely a “one size fits a few dozen”. I’ve worked at places that had highly formalized onboarding led by a complex HR department and I’ve managed teams where I’d more-often-than-not have to block out an entire week to do nothing but onboard one new person. [Read more…] about Jumpstart Sessions: How We Onboard at UpBuild
