Importance of onboarding

Most companies have implemented (or still need to) some programs for onboarding. In this article, I will describe the importance of onboarding.

Target of onboarding

The target of onboarding is the successful reach of newcomers to establish comfort conditions. At the moment of the 2020 year, onboarding of remote workers was a new challenge for companies and their human resource departments.

Most of one-third of companies suffer from poorly implemented onboarding programs. The average duration of the onboarding program is 90 days. Still, according to Gallup’s “Creating and Exception Onboarding Journey for New Employees,” the appropriate duration is 90 days to reach maximum potential performance.

The employees who proceed with a good onboarding program feel better, confident, and ready for challenges.

The authors of “Open Source Software Onboarding as University Course: An Experience Report” highlight the following problem:

“Even with guidelines, it is still hard for newcomers to locate suitable development tasks independently.”

It means that more than guidelines are needed.

Even experienced employees require some onboarding procedures. The onboarding manager can shorten the onboarding program if the employee has a similar experience.

How I would solve this problem

First, I would assign a mentor or buddy for new employees, who will answer questions and help them through their onboarding journey. Support at the start of a new job is essential since you need to learn about many things.

Second, the company should utilize software already used to teach new employees. The Atlassian Confluence can help companies build a miniature course where new employees can obtain additional information about technologies, organizational structure, and other helpful information.

Third, the company should provide guidelines for employees. The guidelines should contain precise instructions on what you must do to achieve something. The guidelines should be flexible.

Fourth, I often am in a situation when the team lead is unavailable due to many meetings and, therefore, cannot reply to what I should do after I finish the task. To keep development velocity high, the good idea is to mark an easy task that can help new employees get more knowledge with the label good-first-task. This practice is standard practice in open-source software projects. In my honest opinion, a task deserves this label if it is:

• Well structured
• Has clear instructions
• It is an understandable and reachable definition of ready is present
• The task takes from 2 to 4 hours
• This task description provided contacts who can help if you struggle with a solution additional to a reporter

Fifth, one of the essential things in all processes in any company is feedback since new employees can look at many things from different angles and propose many helpful and valuable changes.

Remember that a happy employee is productive, and a productive employee boosts business.

Bootstrapping the onboarding process is a time-consuming operation in a short time, but it pays you later. The good-built onboarding process also positively impacts talent retention.

References

1. “Onboarding Can Make or Break a New Hire’s Experience”, Sinazo Siblis, Gys Kappers, 2022
2. “Open Source Software Onboarding as University Course: An Experience Report”, IEEE Computer Society, 2023