3 Ways to Accelerate Your Onboarding
Starting a new job or moving within your current company into a new area is difficult. You are drowning in new information, meeting new colleagues, and having 1000 questions about what is going on. All that at once can be overwhelming and we can feel like we are not making any progress.
Over the years I’ve found three ways that helped me organize the chaos and speed up my onboarding experience.
1. Keep and prioritize a list of questions
Start this list of questions on your first day. Write down every question that comes to your mind, even if it seems easy or dumb. Remember what they used to say at school? There are no dumb questions.
As your list starts to grow and you begin to understand a bit more of what is going on, prioritize which questions are the most important for you to answer now. You may want to start with broad/general questions to get a big picture and then zoom in later on specific details.
Get these answers by having conversations with your colleagues or by reading past documentation. Make sure to write down the answers so that you can refer to them and so that you can one day make onboarding easier for the next new person.
Template for the questions spreadsheet
2. Understand who you need to build relationships with
Ask your new boss within your first week who it is important for you to connect with. As you onboard, you will need to form new relationships and establish trust with your colleagues to collaborate effectively.
Keep track of stakeholders and collaborators that you would like to set up introductions with. Be prepared for each introduction by understanding why you’d like to speak with them and what you want to learn from them.
After your conversation, write down your key takeaways, personal things you’ve learned about them, and words of advice and wisdom so that you can reference them at a later date.
Template for keeping track of relationships.
3. Keep a master knowledge document
While you are getting up to speed on a topic, keep track of what you do every day. Your colleagues will send you millions of links to strategy decks, research documents, wiki pages, Jira tickets, and video recordings to watch.
Add each link that you find or are sent to the rolling document and take notes on what is important and what are your main takeaways. This document will become your master file with all your knowledge on that topic. It will also help you onboard someone else onto the topic in the future.
If you are learning about many topics at once, create an individual rolling document for each one.
Make the role easier to onboard into than you found it. You won’t be the last person to onboard into the role, team, or company. With your process, how can you improve it for the next person?
