Company-wide onboarding isn't good enough — new hires need intros to their specific teams, too
Remember the questions that would race through your head on your first day of school: What would the classes be like, and how hard would the workload be? What kind of first impression would you make? And sometimes most crucially — who would you sit with in the cafeteria?
It may seem as though we left these anxieties behind in our school days, but those feelings can easily reemerge when we start our first day at a new company. Earlier this year, our Talent team wrote a blog post about what they’ve done to revamp our company-wide onboarding to make sure new hires feel supported in their first few months. And while that type of general aid is crucial, I’ve been working on a project the last few months to add an extra step to that guidance: Coming up with an entire onboarding process for one specific team.
After joining Insider as its first Video Training Coordinator fellow back in the spring, one of my first tasks was to audit the editorial department’s onboarding process (this is the company’s biggest department). I was then asked to help build a team-specific workflow for the video side of the Insider newsroom, which is also part of editorial. Reviewing what we already had allowed me to consider what was missing on the individual level. I also realized during this process that the transformation of a new employee into a fully integrated, confident team member is essential to the effectiveness of a good onboarding program, which is why I made this central to my process.
Catherine Cain, Video Training Coordinator
The best team-specific onboardings prioritize introductions to the employee's new coworkers. It also makes very clear what an employee’s responsibilities will look like, and who they will feel comfortable working with. Teams that know how to work together are essential, especially on the newsroom's video side. For example, every series produced by our video staffers has its own team, so knowing the expectations of everyone in the small group and understanding how they all collaborate is crucial to delivering high-quality work.
At Insider, every team uses different organizational tools, systems, and procedures. These are the most important things to learn to do your job effectively.
As I began creating the onboarding curriculum for the video team, I made a checklist that helped me identify what a new hire on the video team would need to help get to know coworkers, understand their workflow, and deliver their assignments smoothly. That checklist included items like:
Talking to managers about the needs of their new hires
Identifying what team-specific resources the new hires would need, and how they’d used them (for example, project-management software like Asana)
Welcoming them to the team with introductory emails
Scheduling virtual coffee chats with all the members of their team
Creating an orientation video to introduce new hire to the video team and their goals
Scheduling check-in sessions with their specific manager as they onboard for any team-specific questions that may arise
Team-specific onboarding is just as important as company-wide onboarding because it provides a new employee with all the essential information they need to understand what will be required of them in their new role. Creating a more fine-tuned onboarding system for the video side of Insider has been valuable because it will allow new employees to be successfully integrated into the team without major trial and error.
And to help me with this process, I’ve created recorded workshops with team-specific information that will be placed and tracked on the video newsroom’s Google calendar. This gives us the flexibility to move any training around in the day, be considerate of different time zones, and allow new hires space to meet frequently in their first weeks with their manager and colleagues.
Now that virtual onboarding is commonplace, onboarding and training have become even easier to do. But just because onboarding is now often virtual, it doesn't mean that it should be any less personalized for each employee and team. A truly successful onboarding maintains genuine human interaction and makes sure it can meet each person's unique needs.