It’s your first day at a new company and you’re ready to get cracking! After the company HR onboarding, you and your manager sit down for your first one on one.
”Where do I get started?”, you ask your manager with anticipation.
You hear a little slack ping as a link to a document appears in your DMs.
”This doc has all the info you need, work through it and ping me if you have any questions”, they say as they wave goodbye and sign off.
You open the link and in huge font you read the words “Onboarding Document”. Now at this point one of three things could happen. The document is relevant and well structured enough for you to clearly understand how to get everything setup. The document is missing information or has so much information that it’s hard to understand what to do next. The last option is that the doc is clear enough to get to the next step but then you stall as you hit an outdated step.
In my experience onboarding onto multiple teams/companies, I’ve seen the last two options much more then the first. And I while I’ll ping the manager for the first couple times I get stuck. If it keeps happening, I’ll spend more and more time trying to figure out what’s wrong. Increasing the time it takes to get productive as well as increasing my frustration.
I’m sure every team wants to have the most seamless onboarding experience. But of course, feature requests, incidents, OKRs, roadmaps, etc all get in the way. I’m here to say that onboarding should be included in this group of priorities.
We need to invest more time making onboarding amazing.
The effects of a structured, clear, up to date, onboarding document means every new hire can contribute to the team in a shorter amount of time. Directly impacting how fast you can ship out features or fix incidents. I know, there’s more to onboarding then a document. But focusing on making the onboarding document awesome will highlight the other pieces of onboarding that need to improve.
What goes into an Onboarding Document?
Here are my top things that I’ve gathered taking the best parts of all my onboarding experiences.
First and foremost, an onboarding document is a living, ever changing document. That means that the new hire and manager should adjust the document as things change. The manager should be checking things off as well as the new hire. The team should come together regularly to update the document as well. The best thing I’ve seen is an onboarding document where the entire team was working on it.
An Onboarding document should be filled with sensible defaults. These defaults should allow someone to focus on their current task - onboarding. And give them options to find extra information/context if they want to. It should also point to a buddy (someone that isn’t the manager). A buddy is someone you pair with a new hire, where part of the buddies time is spent helping the new hire onboard. They become the default person to ask questions to. And can also spend time pairing with them.
Some sort of structure around goals and timeline to onboarding. I like the 30-60-90 day milestones but use whatever you feel is right for your companies onboarding. Having structure is super important because at some point we want the new hire to finish onboarding. We want to have a checklist that they can definitively say that their done with onboarding after these items are checked off. Having the 30-60-90 day structure gives some flexibility in case items get pushed out from 60 days into 90 or if they’re not feeling comfortable yet and want to do a little more work before onboarding.
Onboarding Document Template
You can find the gist here for markdown. But feel free to copy from below. What is a buddy?
[Insert Team] Onboarding Document
Welcome message with what your team does and its responsibilities. Highlight their buddy and the expectations of the buddy: how many times will they pair, their 1-1 schedule. Useful resources: A short list of documents that they will often reference (2-3 links max)
30 Day Milestone (End date) Expectation around 30 days - eg. By the end of 30 days the expectation is that everything has been set up and you can contribute code without guidance.
Get Setup: [] Codebase setup
Documents to read: [] Context documentation [] (Optional) Design documentation
Check access to: [] Slack channels
60 Day Milestone (End date) Expectation around 60 days - e.g. By the end of 60 days
90 Day Milestone (End date) Officially finish onboarding. [] Complete 30 days [] Complete 60 days