The Onboardee’s Checklist

ou’re starting a new job and you know nothing. It is a new company, with their own internal processes and culture. Plus your role may be different, from what you were doing before.

You have the information you obtained in the interview, however the realities of a position do not often match the theory of a job description. Even if the interviewer filled your role in the past, the day to day activities tend to be glossed over in favour of less frequent but more memorable events.

Your own checklist

So the first thing you need is a plan. But how do you make a plan when you know nothing, every company is different. While that is true, it is not the whole truth. You have previous experience that can be used here. You would have noticed reoccurring patterns, especially if this is not your first job. 

If you lack knowledge the first step is identifying the needed knowledge and the initial steps in obtaining it. Remember you do not need to know everything all at once, you just need to know the next step.

Take your previous experiences as a new hire or learning a new activity or joining a new organisation and distill the commonalities down to a checklist. It is better to create your own, but on the off chance that it has something of value I will share my own.

My checklist

The following may seem obvious, but listing it out can help calm yourself and give you confidence. You have a way forward.

Remember your weakness is that you know nothing and your strength is that you know nothing. You can look at things with a fresh perspective.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If you have problems framing a question, note down an area where you are uncertain and after they have finished their explanation, ask for elaboration.

First steps

List the answers and / or the first steps in obtaining the answers to the below questions somewhere prominent.

• What do you need to know?
• Who can you go to for help?
• What are the resources you can call on?
• What can go wrong? What are the triggers for escalation and what are the first steps in response.
• What are the preferred communication channels?
• Is there any awkwardness or pain points in the processes? The existing team may be so used to working around problems that they put off changing the existing process.
• Is there a missing skill or responsibility that is not being covered by the existing team? Teams have a tendency to avoid essential tasks if there is a skills gap or a responsibility gap.

Onboarding and Tutorials

Document your onboarding experience, especially missing or incorrect information. Your successors will thank you.

• Evaluate step by step tutorials. Most people hate creating tutorials and are not trained in writing them so unless there is a dedicated team of technical writers they are often bad or completely missing. Even when a company employs technical writers, those writers need to communicate and coordinate with the relevant subject matter experts and this can be a failure point.
• There is almost always too many steps in these tutorials. This can be fixed by streamlining processes and creating defaults for the most common use cases. This is usually easy if your new role owns the process, a little harder but doable if no one owns it and if someone else owns it then some lobbying may be needed.
• A common failing in these tutorials is due to the curse of knowledge. Many tutorials explain from the point of view of the creator, emphasising implementation details and listing every possible function of the system. 
• It is better to explain things from the users point of view, emphasising the intent of the system and breaking things down by common use cases rather than by internal structure.

Communication 

• Create filters for your email that sort email into folders. In some companies, you will have 10s or 100s of emails a day, many of them automated notifications. It is easy to lose the signal for the noise.
• Don’t blindly accept meeting invitations. Know why you are in the meeting. Meetings are necessary for coordination, but they are costly. The more people in the meeting and the longer they run the more expensive they are.
• Frequent retrospectives are key to continuous improvement and the most important product of retros are the action items. Track the action items.
• Communicate using the teams preferred method.

First suggestions

You probably won’t volunteer suggestions until you have a feel for the lay of the land. However don’t wait too long as you can lose momentum.

Are their any gaps or pain points?

• Gaps
• Some of my greatest career successes have been from tackling problems that the other team members were avoiding, despite the fact that I had no previous experience with those problems. If the existing solution is either missing or extremely bad, then it matters less that you know nothing, the bar is low and it is amazing how far you can go with a little persistence, a fresh outlook and a willingness to learn. It is also easier to make changes if it is no ones responsibility as you are not stepping on anyones toes.
• Pain points
• If the existing process is painful then you will face less resistance to change and more impact on efficiency and effectiveness if you manage to streamline it.