Onboarding Framework

An onboarding framework for inspiration when taking a new role, joining a new team or company.

Access

Sometimes you can be blocked by not having the access to the resource. It can be really frustrating due to such a trivial task. You and your onboarding buddy should follow very closely with IT or whoever is responsible for giving all the needed access.

  • Instant message: e.g. Slack, Team
  • Email
  • Document, e.g.
    • Google Drive
    • Confluence
  • Codebase
  • Project Management, e.g. Jira

Resources

Give a glance about what resources can be used later, you don't need to understand everything, but to know there's resources available when you go through certain stage of onboarding and reference them when needed.

  • Onboarding Plan
    • A first day checklist/bullet points
    • First week checklist
    • First month checklist
    • First three months checklist
  • Document
  • Workflow
  • Best practices
  • Tools
  • Active and future projects
  • Team structure

Build trust and relationship

  • Understand your role, responsibility and expectation from your manager
  • Understand relevant people’s role and scope
  • The relationship between each other, e.g. work dependencies
  • Schedule meetings
    • Get-to-know-you meeting, you can ask the list from your manager
    • Regular 1:1, e.g. with onboarding buddy or mentor and manager
    • Document the work you have done, even a simple bullet point list does the work.
      • It helps your onboarding buddy and manager to understand the progress and find missing part.
  • Be prepared for the meeting, e.g. with valid questions
    • Workflow
    • Best practices
    • Active and future projects
    • Current problems
  • Work on something, get things done, to earn trust and build relationships

Communication

Start receiving and gathering information.

  • Email: Be added email group
  • Slack: Join relevant Slack channel
  • Zoom/Team/Hangout: Ask and join necessary meetings

Make a plan

  • It’s always good to make your own plan based on the onboarding plan from the company.
    • Weekly and monthly plan.

Other tips

  • Understand the work and build trust first before proposing any new ideas or making big changes in general.
  • Avoid changing too much about the status quo of the current team.
  • Claim as many and various tasks as possible, get things done to earn trust as you can if you want to understand everything in the new environment.
    • You cannot earn trust and build relationships just by talking. It has to be built through projects and tasks.
  • Take the time to onboarding, don’t rush. Especially you should really understand the best practices and workflow, you might lose trust later if people find you are not following the onboarding plan or missing something.
  • Ask onboarding feedback regularly, e.g. weekly during 1:1, from the onboarding buddy, mentor or manager.
  • Ask questions.
    • It facilitates your onboarding process.
    • Show you want to learn from others, so other people are more likely to teach and help.
    • It’s one way to build relationships with others.
  • Be coachable and manageable.

Books

Blogs