Onboarding - We are doing it wrong.

Think back to the last time you joined a new organisation. What was your onboarding like? “Hi, here's your laptop. Here's where the toilets are. Here is the printer. Here is the cupboard with the pens. Here are a whole bunch of people whose names you won't remember for weeks. Here's a technical introduction to the work. Here are your logins to the tools you will need. Off you go.” There might be a welcome lunch to help you get to know the people you will be working with, or some sort of ritual embarrassment at the next all hands meeting so they can "get to know you" a bit better (what's one thing about you that no one knows...). There will probably be some mandatory, cover-our-legal-butts "training" in health and safety and various HR policies that will leave you feeling dumber than when you started.

I suspect most people around the world have similar onboarding experiences in just about every organisation. It's the way things are done. And it's wrong. Not so much for what it includes, but for what it leaves out. The traditional onboarding experience misses some crucial things that help new people get settled into a new role in a new organisation. While it might give you the basic mechanics of your job, it doesn't help you integrate into the new organisation. You are left to discover all the hidden little things all by yourself. The fact that we can't raise that topic in meetings because of last time. The fact that while the process says this, what we actually do is something else because of history. Or the fact that, given a choice between this and that, we always chose this because that's what is important to the organisation. In short, what traditional onboarding doesn't do is introduce you to the culture of the organisation you have just joined.

Onboarding shouldn't just be about the mechanics of your job. Job mechanics are easy to pick up. What's harder to pick up is all the context around the job mechanics. The team dynamics. The organisational culture. The stuff that, if you get it right it will help you do your job easily and, if you get it wrong, can see you unknowingly commit cultural faux pas that will see you relegated to outsider status and having a long road ahead of you to gain acceptance.

Onboarding should be focussed primarily on welcoming new people into the organisation and introducing them to the people they work with and the corporate culture they will be working in.

Let's start with the team. If we look at introducing people to corporate teams, it's pretty much - “Here is your desk, this is Joe. Off you go.” If you are lucky (and not in lockdown) you might get a welcome lunch (pay for your own of course) to get to know your new team members a bit better but after those basic intros it's down to work. If you look at the way good sports teams introduce new players it's very different. There are introductions and team building sessions and there is a lot, an awful lot, of intense training with the team so that everyone knows everyone's strengths and weaknesses. The standard plays are assessed and reworked to take advantage of any new strengths the newcomer brings. If the newcomer is lacking any specific skills, training plans are put in place to get them up to speed.

At work, although we work in teams, mostly we work as individuals. Not as a coordinated unit. How often do you see a team doing the equivalent of training together? Without that training, interactions take a long time to become smooth. The ball gets dropped a lot. The fact that the newcomer to the development team doesn't know they have to put the ticket number into the check-in comment to trigger the code review means that their work gets stuck and they need to go ask what has happened. Then that will get fixed but they don’t know the next little thing or the next. So their work will constantly get blocked and restarted. People will start to wonder why the new person isn't productive. In many teams it takes months to really get productive.

If, however, the whole team spent a morning together, doing the equivalent of training, all this would be sorted out in the first day. Running a code dojo (for development teams) or some sort of appropriate simulation for other teams, will help new people learn the way things are done and will allow the whole team to sharpen up the way they work together and maybe take advantage of any new strengths new people can bring.

The other really important thing that gets missed in a traditional onboarding is culture. Culture sets the context for our jobs. Why we do things the way we do them. The context around decisions - if faced with a decision between customer service and profit, some organisations will skew towards service, others towards profit. If you are new to an organisation, it is import that you know which way to go.

Organisations need to start properly introducing new people to the organisation's culture. Now that assumes that the organisation actually knows and understands its own culture. Which most organisations don't. There may be some aspirational culture type statements on posters on the wall, but there is often a big gap between the the aspiration and the actual culture. I have worked in many organisations where the official values were all about togetherness and working as one team but the actual culture was all about getting ahead by stabbing your peers in the back.

Culture is basically the values and goals of the organisation (the real ones, not the ones on the poster) and way we work together to achieve them. Without knowing the culture we will do the wrong things, make the wrong decisions, mess up relationships and generally screw things up.

If an organisation does understand its culture, it can start properly introducing it to new people. A lot of more enlightened organisations, where culture is something intentional rather than accidental, do this sort of cultural introduction to new people as part of, or as the whole of their onboarding.

In order to be really good at your job you need two things - competence and clarity. Competence we usually bring with us - we are hired for skills. But clarity comes from understanding the organisational context we operate in. Much of that comes down to team dynamics and organisational culture. Without an understanding of this we don't have the context we need to apply our competence effectively.