Onboard Like Your Whole Team Depends On It (Because They Do)

Stephanie Hippo

22 Feb 2024 — 8 min read

Without onboarding docs, you might be leaving a new teammate to feel like this.

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If your team doesn’t have a single point of entry for an onboarding process, it’s time to start one. HR should handle the basics: get their benefits set up, go over company policies, get your desk or laptop set up, etc. From there, it’s a group effort to welcome new team members and set them up for success. So whether you’re the new teammate ramping up or the tenured team member who is looking forward to having some more hands to pitch in, you’ll want to make sure it’s easy to find the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How of your new role. Read on to find out what separates a good onboarding from a poor one.

Who

First 90 Days

90 Days is a typical minimum ramp-up period for a new role. If you aren’t offered a list of People To Meet In The First 90 Days, ask for one when you join. You shouldn’t need to meet with all of these folks regularly, but these are the people you should meet with at least once to understand their role and how it relates to your role. This should be something a manager can whip up fairly quickly; it doesn’t need to be long. Normally 5 names for junior roles is sufficient to start. For more senior team members, it’s reasonable to expect they’ll need to build a broader context and therefore a larger network for the role. Here’s a rough example of what I like to give people:

Name	Role	Relationship	Talk To Them About	Notes
James	UX Designer	Team Partner	Design system for the upcoming feature launch	You both have a golden retriever. They are the most tenured member on our partner team.
August	Principal Engineer	August’s team is a customer of our service.	Testing strategies and release engineering	August roots for the local professional soccer team.
Taylor	Director	Taylor’s organization is our top customer.	Communicating with senior leadership	Come prepared. She’ll end the meeting early if you’re not. She’s our biggest ally in leadership.
Betty	Staff Engineer	Former Team Lead	Design decisions, technical trade-offs, and history of the team.	Betty moved to a new role internally last year but she architected the original system and still visits the team.

I normally give some starter topics. It can be really nerve wracking for some folks to do a cold outreach in a new environment, and so in most cases I’ll also let people know when I’ve added their name to this list and that a new hire might be reaching out soon so they know to be extra friendly and welcoming. I recommend keeping a general list of people for the team, and then as you onboard new team members, add names in order to customize it for their specific role.

Buddy Up

Make sure everyone gets an off-team mentor for a few reasons. It should be the manager’s responsibility to help you find one after getting to know you a bit. Some companies have good systems set up for mentor matching, but if yours doesn’t, ask for help getting matched with someone. In my experience, an ideal mentor is in a similar job function, but reports to a different manager, and ideally has some common goals or experiences. This is an important network to build. If you ever need to vent about your manager (yes, there are times you might need to complain about me) or your team in order to process or work out how to respond to something difficult, I want you to have someone who can offer you an outsider perspective, give you space, and prepare you to jump back into the conversation with me with a focused goal.

Where do people hang out? Connecting to your peers as people helps teams norm faster. Your onboarding should provide a list of ways people can get connected to others in the company both inside and outside of their immediate team. If your team doesn’t already do something as a group, consider starting something. Maybe it’s a regular virtual tea time, a jigsaw puzzle in the team area, an async game in a team chat, or a book club.

Employee Resource Groups are a common way to get people started with building connections. Don’t make assumptions on which ERGs may be of interest to a certain individual. Simply advertise the most active ones or maybe link out to ERGs that current team members are already active with. Past teams have made an effort to let each other know if they’re hosting an event or participating in an activity that others are invited to, too. It sets the tone that it’s time worth prioritizing.

Social chats and groups are great, too. At past jobs I’ve connected with folks outside of my immediate team over dogs, soccer, or baking. It was as simple as asking around on which groups got together and sharing a bit of myself. Internal company social media- mailing lists, Slack, or group chats- can be a powerful tool to get started. Just share a bit about yourself and see what’s out there. Sometimes folks laugh when I tell them one of the most powerful networking tools I had at Google was their internal version of Google+, but honestly and truly I got to connect with engineers I’d never have the chance to meet otherwise and I learned so much from them.

Why: What do we do around here anyway?

What does your team do? What are the broader goals? Make sure your new team members have somewhere to read your team’s mission, vision, and roadmap. These should be up-to-date and regularly revisited. Building this understanding helps folks contribute more meaningful ideas over time. They should understand how the business makes money and how your team’s role contributes to that process.

For their day-to-day work, it’s most important that they understand what only your team can do and why. What makes your team different from other similar teams in your areas? Why does their work matter? If your team has a charter, this is the perfect place to include it.

What should they know and by When:

What should your new teammate know how to do and roughly by when? A good onboarding guide might look like this format:

At the end of your first week:

Set up your laptop and get access to all of your tools.
Be able to submit a small change to the team’s code base.
Complete anything HR asks you to do.

At the end of your first month:

Completed this list of technical trainings that are relevant to your role. (Ideally these are in rough dependency order for a newcomer.)
Have completed a small starter project.
Present to the team on something you’ve learned.
Read the team’s roadmap and understand it well enough to ask questions.

At the end of your first quarter:

Join a larger project and make direct contributions to the team.
Be able to describe your team’s partners and how their goals work together.
Understand your job role and expectations.
Have a career conversation with your manager.
Provide feedback on your onboarding experience and your observations from the first 3 months.

Where: Meetings.

Where does the team get together and how does someone new know if they’re added to all of the right meetings? Make sure your onboarding docs include the meetings that everyone should be invited to, their purpose, and whether or not they’re optional. Forcing yourself to enumerate all of your team’s meetings is also a good way to keep an eye on your meeting load and if it’s appropriate. Your new team member should be able to ensure they’re on all of those meetings. I find that if this doesn’t happen, your newcomers get added to meetings only when they no-show and someone notices they’re missing. That’s not a very welcoming message to send to someone new. If you’re not sure where to start, go through the last 4 weeks of your calendar to catch meetings that might happen less frequently and start creating your catalog.

Consider managing meetings by email groups. When someone new joins a team, they’re added to an email group for the team, and that group is automatically added to all team events. This way you just update the group rather than having to go add them to each individual calendar event, which can be error prone and lend itself to accidentally excluding folks. Ensuring everyone is invited to the right conversations can be an important inclusive practice that enables team members to be part of important conversations, notes, or documents.

If you are the person being onboarded and there isn’t a list, ask if your company has a way to share and view calendars (most do these days). Diff your calendar with some of your teammates and your manager to see if there’s something you should be added to. It can also be a great way to be aware of meetings that happen even if you don’t need to be there yet, like partner sync meetings, leadership discussions, or roadmap reviews.

How: The Tools for the Job.

In order to do the key parts of the role, what tools does someone need? What access? If they find that they’re missing something, how do they get that resolved? Wherever possible you want to give people the tools to solve their own problems while also making it a safe place to ask questions and connect with their new peers.

Onboarding Buddy

Everyone gets an onboarding buddy. On my teams, your onboarding buddy is someone on your immediate team who is there to make sure you can get set up with all of the tools that you need to do your job and walk you through how to use them. This might include making sure you have the passwords you need, the permissions for certain software, and the ability to debug any problems getting all of the pieces working together. You should be able to ask them anything and everything to get your tools of the trade, whatever they may be. They can be really useful if there are some assumptions in your onboarding docs, too. Maybe you don’t know a particular acronym or the guide assumes you already completed a step that you haven’t gotten to yet. That’s where a human with expert knowledge of the team’s existing systems can make a huge improvement to your onboarding experience.

Communication Guide

How does this team work together? What team processes do they use? Don’t assume that your new teammate will know or don't assume that it's like your previous role! There really isn’t a single standard way to do anything from company to company, and getting your team to articulate how they prefer to work together is a great way to see if it’s the same as you understand it.

If you haven’t had a communication guide on a team before, pick the top three things your team needs to get done every week. Ask each person to write down how that gets done, and then compare notes and talk about where people might be surprised or disagree. Come to an agreement on what you want the process to be and write it down so a new team member can easily learn.

This isn’t just about formal processes, though they’re important. Communication guides can also be for things like “this is how we resolve conflict,” “this is how we apologize,” and “this is how we give feedback.” This is where regularly updating your team’s communication guide can be a good team building tool, and it can be a great way to address any awkward lingering situations in the group that folks otherwise might not talk about until a problem repeats itself.

As an example, I love to include a prescriptive hard rule on when newcomers should be asking questions. Within your first 90 days, ask a question if you’re stuck for more than 15 minutes without forward movement. Maybe you find new documentation or get a new error message to investigate. In that case, carry on, but otherwise, don’t just keep spinning your wheels. Everyone is here to help you be successful, and the faster you’re up to the speed, the sooner you’re useful to everyone else, too. It’s in everyone’s best interest to invest this time in a newcomer upfront.

Use these sections above to get started. It doesn’t have to be perfect right out of the gate; in fact, these work best when it’s a shared team responsibility to keep it updated. Set your teammates up for success by ensuring they have everything they need so they can focus on learning all of the new information that comes with a new job.