Do you track onboarding progress?
Working at a software consultancy means that I might have to switch clients and projects often. This sets me up for being part of onboarding processes frequently — which in many cases can be very unstructured and ad-hoc.
I don’t like that. We wanted to do things a bit different in my last project.
Our approach
Every newcomer to the project gets their individual onboarding board that might look like this
This board was created through a GitHub Project Board. If you use other tools like GitLab, they may have some similar feature. Or you might even have Trello at your organization.
The cards
- are ordered
- should include catch-up tasks in-between to ensure to get feedback
- can contain additional information. For instance, links to existing documentation.
We wrote a simple python script to copy over a template project board for every new employee on the project.
Purpose
Track onboarding progress per team member
Most of these tools provide a way to visualize progress.
This allows the person being on-boarded with where they are on their onboarding journey.
For managers and existing team-members, this could serve as a visual cue to indicate whether existing team-members need to intervene and unblock their new colleagues.
Iterative Improvement
Post the onboarding process, people will come across problems that make them go “This is something I should have known during my onboarding”
If you have a structured template for onboarding tasks, then it can be updated with these new-found topics.
“It takes a village…”
Conducting onboarding sessions is usually a tech-lead or engineering lead responsibility in many teams.
But we need to involve the rest of the team. Having an onboarding board will make it easier for other team-members to visualize what new-comers to their project are going to have to know.
Other team-members can then sign up for some of these onboarding tasks. Not only does this avoid knowledge silos but it also reduces the workload for the tech-lead or engineering lead.
Also, this is a very functional way for the new-comer to meet different people of the team, and build working relationships.
Never throw a set of documentation and manuals to someone on the onboarding journey. Instead, always supplement documentation and manuals with 1:1 interactions.
Offboarding
Tasks that involve providing access to systems must be reversed when the employee leaves the team.
Having these kind of tasks tracked will make it easier to collate off-boarding actions (or they could be tasks on a separate offboarding board). This avoids the possibility of missing out revoking accesses for an particular system, which can be a security nightmare.
Conclusion
A Gallup study of US based workplaces in 2019 stated that only 12% of employees felt that their organization did a good job at onboarding. Not all teams do onboarding well.
One way to improve onboarding do this is to have structure in place that enables collection of feedback and iterate for a better solution with every new employee. The technique of tracking using cards is just one approach.
Arguably, we could also get similar results with recording tasks in a Google Document instead of a full fledged card-wall. That however, will depend on your project.
On a personal note, however, nothing beats the satisfaction of moving a card from the “In Progress” column to the “Done” column. What do you think?
