15 Onboarding Strategies To Get Your New Tech Team Member Up And Running
It’s important to help new members of your business team adjust quickly and efficiently. This is especially true for tech teams. Because of the nature of the work, your goal should be to get these workers up and running as quickly as possible so they can start contributing right away.
To help you, we asked a panel of Forbes Technology Council members to share their strategies for supporting new tech team members. Here are their top-recommended methods and why they work so well.
1. Give Them A Small Independent Project
The best way we have seen to get a new team member up and running is to provide a small project an engineer can work on themselves that integrates with the rest of the code. This allows them to start creating code as well as understanding how systems work. Also, you need to make sure that the team is there to answer questions and do code review. – Eugene Malobrodsky, One Way Ventures
2. Have Them Shadow Different Departments
During our onboarding, we make sure that all new team members shadow different departments in our organization. By learning about what different teams do, new hires get a better understanding of the bigger picture of how their work impacts other teams. New hires often come away from cross-departmental shadowing with new ideas and feel a sense of ownership and engagement in the workplace. – Ryan Chan, UpKeep Maintenance Management
3. Invite Them To An Investor Meeting And Sales Call
I make a point of ensuring each dev joins at least one investor meeting and one sales call with me, the CEO or with one of the other founders. It’s surprising how much this gesture is appreciated by our technical staff. They feel included and enjoy receiving an opportunity to see the projects from the “business” perspective and to hear directly from the customers! – Rena Christina Tabata, ShareSmart (Think Tank Innovations Ltd.)
4. Help Them Understand Their Value To The Business
The key to onboarding new members of the team is to ensure they understand why they are doing what they are doing and how they impact the business. This means helping new members understand, beyond their own discipline, how their contributions add value to the business. Consequently, our strategy is to have new members engage in deeper discussions with other disciplines. – Abe Ankumah, Nyansa
5. Assign Them A Mentor
As part of our onboarding process, we pair every new employee with a staff member who has been a part of the company longer. This person mentors the new employee on what they need, how their laptop works, how their email is set up, where the restrooms are, where the coffee machine is, etc. We want them to feel welcome and the mentor is someone a newbie can go to for any question whatsoever. – Christopher Carter, Approyo
6. Encourage Questions
Before a new hire starts, the manager creates a 30-, 60- and 90-day plan to ensure the new person can get up to speed. We also host a monthly orientation to provide folks with the company history and values and how we work. We set up all of our new hires with a series of one-to-ones so that they can get to know the folks they will be working with, and we encourage questions and feedback. – Caroline Wong, Cobalt.io
7. Create A Helping Culture
Creating a company culture that supports helping each other and identifying ways of improving allows new people to rapidly learn from their mistakes. It also allows new personnel to have face time with different departments and different individuals as well as involvement in the processes and workflows of different co-workers. Culture is everything. It allows questions to lead directly to solutions. – Tom Roberto, Core Technology Solutions
8. Give Them A Good Knowledge Base System
With all the various systems and multiple document sources, it can take weeks or even months to onboard a new employee. We found that a good knowledge-management system can eliminate all of that. It slashes the onboarding time (and employee frustration) in half! When all the information is stored in one area, the material needed is now easy to find and always accurate. – Sagi Eliyahu, KMS Lighthouse
9. Pair Them Up With Other Team Members
We leverage pairing heavily for onboarding. For some tasks, the new hire will drive. For other tasks, they shadow. This provides guidance at a technical level and promotes subtler aspects of team-building, such as bonding with the team, learning conventions, and adopting and aligning on team culture and norms. These types of interactions are crucial in developing a high-performing team. – Andrew Waage, Retention Science
10. Offer Them Virtual Autonomy And Personal Connections
In the age of remote workers, we require our tech teams to have some type of face-to-face communication weekly. We require more days in the office for the first month. Additionally, we immerse our new tech members in intense training on what we do from an operations standpoint. Our new members thrive with a combination of virtual autonomy and personal connections in the team structure. – Tammy Cohen, InfoMart Inc.
11. Balance Learning With Doing
There’s plenty of information you can share with a new hire, and it can quickly become information overload. It’s important to balance learning with doing. For example, we help new software engineers to make a code change and push it live during their first week. The new hire gains confidence in their abilities and everything they’re learning starts to sink in. – Abishek Surana Rajendra, Course Hero
12. Have Them Jump Into The Deep End
A common practice is to train a new member and have them shadow someone, often testing them to validate they are up to speed. We have found it very effective to have the new employee jump into the deep end, doing the tasks themselves while being shadowed and advised. – Joe Cutroneo, DefendX Software
13. Include Them In Daily Standups
Standups aren’t just for software engineering teams! A daily 10-minute standup with your team allows a new team member to share what they’re doing and if they’ve hit any roadblocks. We can then work as a team to correct any missteps and share tips. – Sanjoy Malik, Urjanet
14. Build Cross-Functional, Collaborative Teams
I define my teams in a way that each person works on two or more projects and each team is cross-functional. This gives the overall team a web of more connections, preventing isolated pockets of knowledge and lost teammates. It also makes onboarding new people easier, because multiple people help them get up to speed faster. A few key people also act as cross-pollinators, which increases empowerment. – Eric Braun, South Shore Innovation
15. Make Onboarding A Process, Not A Single Event
In my experience, onboarding often consisted of a short meeting to run through the basics and then you were shown your desk. We’ve had success by making onboarding a process, not a single event. Meetings with our executives begin the week, followed by a meeting with their team. We maintain an onboarding handbook in Notion that they can access. At the end of the first week, we do another check-in. – Sean Herman, Kinzoo
