Recently I've realized the importance of Team Onboarding.
During my career, I've experienced various approaches to the process from just a brief intro to a week-long sequence of meetings and 1:1s.
Currently being a Team Lead I believe it is crucial to have a formalized and a well-thought Onboarding process. Successful Onboarding sets the new Team member to the success and greatly reduces time to first meaningful contributions.
The field is still new for me but I've tried to put together some notes that might be useful.
Goals
- A feeling of belonging (to the team, the organization)
- A sense of accomplishment
Important things
- Provide formalized Values and processes
- Develop a good sense of the business / projects in the new hire
- Wisely choose the first project, it should not rely on internal knowledge
- Provide a good source of knowledge (documentation)
Suggestions
- Onboarding starts within the hiring process
- Assign a Buddy (inside the Team) and a Mentor (outside of the Team)
- Introduce collaborative practices (pair programming)
- Introduce brown bag sessions / lightning talks
Links