Spin up new hires quickly in 9 steps
- Claire Baker
- Jun 20, 2023
- 12 min read
Updated: Jun 22, 2023
The first day is important to new hires…
… and it should be important to you too,
…if you care about retention.
The impressions that employees form in their first week lay the foundation for their long-term opinion of the company. A new hire’s anticipation builds between signing the offer and the first day of work as they prepare for a new phase in their lives. If your onboarding team doesn’t meet them with the same enthusiasm that it took to recruit and close them, the let-down can leave the new hire feeling spurned. Matching the new hire’s enthusiasm throughout the onboarding journey builds a foundation of respect and appreciation on which you can build a relationship of mutual success and growth.
If you don’t put thought into your onboarding process, then something else will make an impression on the people joining your team. Depending on your situation, apathy, overwhelm, or under-appreciation may shape someone’s lasting opinion of your culture.
💭 Imagine this:
It’s your wedding day. You’ve been burned by bad break-ups in the past, so you’re entering this relationship cautiously.
Your partner makes a good income, shares a lot of your interests, hangs out with people you like, and tells you that they love you. Your only doubt before you commit the best years of your life to this relationship is, Will it last?
It’s too late to worry about that now, with the paperwork already filed and your loved ones gathered to watch.
As the organ plays, you take the arm of your parental figure and walk down the aisle to find your partner standing at the altar…
… filing their nails.
… or frantic with anxiety.
… or holding an overflowing laundry basket with a sign that says, Just for you.
What do you think your first anniversary gift would be to each of the possible partners in this hypothetical nightmare?
Someone’s first day of work is a little like a wedding (without all the NSFW associations, don’t overthink it). Whether dating or interviewing, every company has flaws and every candidate has some career baggage. Perhaps they’ve provided references, which means that the most important champions and mentors in their careers are rooting for them. The candidate has considered many opportunities and carefully vetted their options, and they’ve decided to make a commitment to spend years of their life with you. Once the offer is signed (💍), the candidate spends weeks planning how their life will change. Even the most jaded professional comes to work expecting their quality of life to be better than before.
Meanwhile, at the company, the thrill of the signed offer has worn off, business carried on, and folks are eager to have another set of hands. These diverging priorities can come off to the new hire as apathetic, overwhelming, or like the company is not interested in the value they bring.
How much support and friendship will you expect at work if your coworkers’ reception makes you feel like a has-been by your first day?
Are you going to ask questions if your new team seems unprepared and your arrival and every request throws them into a frenzy of excuses and apology?
What if instead of training, you are assigned lowest-skill busywork and told to get to work?
Would you be fired up to give 110% to your new opportunity?
Companies who invest in building a strong onboarding program see a 200% return on their investment from greater team productivity and better retention.
To ensure onboarding success, your team needs to develop a welcoming environment and deliver a comprehensive orientation program that:
Covers all aspects of the job and company
Provides clear expectations and goals
Offers ongoing support and feedback.
What goes into creating a successful new hire onboarding program?
Here are 9 suggestions to get you started:
1. ☑️ Use a checklist to simplify and automate: Make a list of all the tasks you and your team need to do to onboard a new member, including equipment orders, communication, software account provisioning, paperwork, gifts, etc. Go through your list and check whether any of your people management tools have integrations to help automate the process. For example, Greenhouse offers a feature that automatically generates offer letters, and Gusto offers integrations with Slack, Zoom, and Asana. Set up these integrations so that you can prepare for a new employee in as few steps as possible. Once you have automated as much of the process as you can, create a checklist and sort each item into a separate section based on who is responsible for each step. For example, you may have separate sections for the People team, the hiring manager, and the spin-up buddy. Although many of your existing tools may have a checklist features, these can be a pain to update. I recommend that you start with a simple checklist using a collaborative document (e.g. Google Docs, Notion, Coda...) until you’ve run through the process a few times to be sure your list is relatively complete. A document is still my preferred place to keep my checklist, but do what works for you. As you run new hires through your checklist, add missed items to the list, store your emails as templates linked in the list, and don’t forget to add anything that comes up as a question or suggestion in the new team member’s first few weeks (see 9 below).
Summary:
Make an exhaustive task list.
Combine list items using integrations.
Create a checklist and divide tasks according to who is responsible.
Use the checklist and make improvements.
2. 🧑🏫 Create a comprehensive orientation program that covers all aspects of the company: Your company culture is a conglomeration of tribal knowledge, written policy and unwritten operational habits, org structure, and miscellaneous other docs and resources. You also invest in benefits and perks that employees can’t take advantage of if they don’t understand them or know that they exist. How do you upload all that knowledge into the new hire’s mind so that they have what they need to orient themselves? Some companies take the “deep end” approach, throwing new hires into work right away, assuming that they will learn on the job. This approach is bad. It’s overwhelming to the new person, has a prohibitive learning curve, extends the time before the employee is fully functional, and practically guarantees knowledge gaps. Other companies take the hands-on approach with an ad hoc curriculum of live sessions. This approach is inconsistent, expensive and inefficient for small teams, and its results aren’t much better than the “deep end” approach. Instead, gather the minimum information that a new hire needs to get started into a single resource. The idea isn’t to create an exhaustive resource, but to give them an overview of the information that they need to get through their first week. Each section should be no longer than a few sentences, and link out to a primary resource where they can find out more if needed. The most important thing is that the resource is searchable, concise, and limited to only the essentials for get started. This resource doesn’t replace face-to-face learning, instead it provides all of the prerequisites for deep learning. Your new team mates will absorb and retain more information during live training sessions when they have a basic overview to contextualize it. Learning will also be “stickier” when folks can find answers themselves with the help of a searchable resource.
Summary:
Gather the minimum information needed to navigate the first week.
Present each topic in a couple of sentences, and provide links to where they can find out more.
3.👨🏾🔬 Create a comprehensive orientation program that covers all aspects of the job: Once you have gathered the information and resources new hires need for any position in the company, start aggregating job-specific knowledge for various departments and positions. E.g. The information that a security engineer needs to spin up is very different from what a recruiter needs. As more new team members spin up, use their questions and suggestions (see 9) to improve the resource. Encourage new hires to share any resources they created for themselves during their spin-up to improve the experience of future colleagues. Summary:
Tap your team to aggregate job-specific knowledge for various departments and positions.
4. 💪 Make it self-service: There’s a lot of set-up to be done when you start a new job. Disorganized teams often wait for a need to arise, figuring that the new hire will ask for access if they missed anything. This “fetch” approach means that some of your team members may not be aware of the tools they should use or the conventions for using it, and guarantees that the account setup will take them out of a productive workflow. Some companies take the opposite approach, using up hours of the spin-up buddy or hiring manager’s time to oversee the process and share tribal knowledge when it comes up. This ad hoc approach leads to an inconsistent and uncontrollable experience. A better approach would be to develop a document that is part checklist and part guide for navigating your company’s processes and culture. Begin with your internal hiring checklist from Step 1 (including the accounts you automated), and pull out all the items that require some kind of setup by the new employee. Look for software accounts, payroll paperwork, benefits enrollment, harassment training, etc. Once you have a list of the basic steps needed to set up their workspace, separate them into categories and add some information (from 2 and 3) about your company’s approach or conventions in that area. For example, a section about Communication may include a checklist of accounts to set up including email, Slack, Zoom, and voicemail, as well as tips about what communication method your team uses in various situations. This ensures that each person receives the same information, and that their accounts are set up, contextualized, and ready when your new team members need them. Summary:
Make a list of accounts to set up and paperwork to fill out.
Add relevant cultural information within the same document.
Organize job-specific information the same way.
Give each person time to review the document, fill out paperwork, and set up accounts before in-depth training.
5. 🥳 Create a welcoming environment: Now that preparation is drama-free for the onboarding team and the new hire has self-directed busywork to keep them occupied, your team can focus their attention on creating a welcoming environment. No matter how your team welcomes new people, create processes to make the experience consistent and add todo items to your checklist (1). Here are some suggestions to create a welcoming environment:
Welcome gift such as a swag box or gift basket. You can have this delivered before their first day to drum up excitement, or have it waiting at their workstation when they arrive.
A large group meeting or casual gathering to give new team mates an opportunity to introduce themselves and watch their coworkers interact in a low-pressure situation. Let the new hire see their new colleagues’ faces light up when they introduce themselves, but don’t make them the center of attention. Avoid anything that puts too much attention on the new hire like a party with no working agenda, or the dreaded All-Hands “tell us about yourself” hazing. 😰 Instead, you may want to introduce them at the beginning of a team standup or sprint planning meeting, and then give them an opportunity to sit back and observe the team discussing current projects. If you have an office culture, a team lunch on their first day is also a good “coming out” event.
Create a little fanfare. It doesn’t take a grand gesture to make a new team member feel appreciated. While the red carpet may not be necessary, a few balloons at their desk, a card signed by the whole team, and even an announcement on your #general Slack channel with a few extra party parrot emojis will get the job done.
Mark the team calendar with the new team member’s first day (and work-aversaries) to indicate that both milestones are worthy of celebration.
Summary:
Create a strategy for welcoming new people.
Add action items to your preparation checklist.
Create a low-pressure opportunity for new hires to introduce themselves, then observe their coworkers interacting.
“New hires who went through a structured onboarding program were 69% more likely to remain at the company for up to three years.”
SHRM
6. 👯♂️ Assign a buddy (and littermates): Assigning a spin-up buddy creates an immediate sense of connection and provides an approachable “safe space” for dumb questions. Once the New Hire label wears off and the team member is operating independently, the onboarding buddy relationship can turn into one of mentorship. As your team grows and you onboard more frequently, make a deliberate effort to group new hires into cohorts, or “litters” as I like to call them. Onboarding cohorts create a sense of connection right away by giving members a “starter friend.” These bonds are extra strong when new hires are in similar roles or departments, but even pairing individuals who won’t work together frequently has its benefits including reach within the organization as it grows and becomes more siloed, and a sense of connection that builds into loyalty over time.
Summary:
Assign a spin-up buddy to each new hire.
Hire in cohorts, when you can.
7. 🏆 Provide clear expectations and goals: Starting a new job is a vulnerable time. As new hires onboard, learn, take on more responsibility, and make their first mistakes, it’s easy to doubt whether you’re providing enough value or spending time on the right things. Your handbook, internal documentation, and the resource developed in 2, 3, and 4 provide generic expectations, but providing each new hire with a unique map of their personal spin-up journey based on their role and the current roadmap sets performance expectations and mitigates overwhelm. Work with the hiring manager and onboarding buddy to create an outline that maps each individual’s journey in their first year, and include it in their onboarding packet. I suggest breaking it into the following sections, including several attainable goals and at least one “stretch” goal:
Week 1: Work with the onboarding buddy to create one easy win (e.g. fixing a simple bug) and one progress or “stretch” goal (e.g. complete their first expense report and submit for approval). Select goals that are attainable, and where failure is inconsequential in case overachievers are distracted by higher-priority tasks.
Month 1: Work with the person’s supervisor to create an easy win and a stretch goal. The work involved should be a core component of their job, but accessible for anyone who meets the role’s qualifications. The stretch goal should be something where the challenge comes from the amount of work required or complexity of the task, not prior knowledge.
3 Months: After 3 months, the employee should be fully operational in their position. Work with the employee’s supervisor to determine what tasks signal that a team member is meeting expectations for their role and include them here. For a stretch goal, define what would exceed expectations for someone in that role with this person’s experience. Frame excellence with specific, measurable criteria.
6 Months: This is the point when the employee has started to “find their place” in the organization and take on more complex work. Work with the supervisor and hiring manager to define what tasks on the roadmap this person could be responsible for, and express a successful outcome for each in one sentence. For example, an account manager’s expectations might include “manage $5M in active accounts” or “successfully implement Widget™️ feature at 2 client locations.” For a stretch goal, use what you know about the individual’s career goals, or have their manager define what indicates that someone is a candidate for promotion or investment in further development.
12 Months: This section is too remote to be accurate, so instead use it as an opportunity to get the new hire excited by spelling out the growth paths (both on the management and IC track) available in their role. Make it clear that these are possibilities, not expectations.
Summary:
Work with supervisors and team leads to create incremental goals for the first year. Goals should be specific to each individual worker.
Include one stretch goal in each section.
Add this list to the onboarding packet the employee receives on their first day.
8. 🙅🏽♂️ Remove barriers to reaching out: Don’t leave it up to the new person to schedule time to meet their coworkers 1:1. Whether they’re distracted by other priorities or just shy, most people won’t do it. The longer a candidate goes without building relationships with team members that they don’t interact with every day, the less connected they will feel to the company. Before a new hire starts, make sure there is 1:1 time already on their calendar with each key member of their team. Include their supervisor or manager, skip-level manager, everyone they will work closely with (including those in adjacent departments), and their HR representative.
Summary:
Schedule 1:1 sessions with colleagues before the first day.
Include scheduling as a task in your prep checklist.
“36% of respondents said they had left a job within the first six months due to poor onboarding experiences.”
9. 🪜 Offer ongoing support & feedback: Finally, create a system for collecting and implementing suggestions. Use surveys to collect feedback from both the candidate and spin-up buddy after the first week, and from the candidate after the first month. Also, create a point of contact or forum for miscellaneous feedback and suggestions. Whether you collect feedback in a shared inbox, Slack channel, or a suggestion box in the break room, make sure to tell new hires how to submit feedback in a prominent place in your onboarding materials. Set a regular cadence for reviewing feedback, iterating on processes, and updating resources. More heads are better than one, so consider creating a committee with representatives from HR, recruiting, leadership, management, and individual contributors. Then, set a quarterly or bi-quarterly cadence for review. Don’t forget to designate a DRI, so that someone is accountable for making sure that the review happens and changes are implemented.
Summary:
Create feedback surveys for new hires to fill out after their first week and month.
Create a feedback survey for spin-up buddies.
Create a “suggestion box” (digital or physical).
Set a regular cadence for reviewing and incorporating feedback.
Assign the responsibility for reviewing and acting on feedback to a specific person.
If any of these strategies worked for you, I’d love to hear about it. Let me know how the tips here improved your onboarding experience for new hires and the onboarding team that welcomes them.
Want to read more about how to improve your onboarding workflows and experience? Check out these related articles:
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