Employee Onboarding: How to Get it Right, From Someone Who’s Just Been Through It
It’s been exactly 4 weeks since my first day at Blue Array and I was recently asked for feedback on the onboarding process…
I didn’t expect the process of employee onboarding to affect me emotionally — as it did — not just happiness at how positive my personal experience was in spite of a challenging backdrop of remote working and Covid restrictions, but feelings of sadness at how I may have short-changed my own team members in the past.
This post seeks to share my personal experience of the process at Blue Array, and extract the lessons learned from the past month in order that it might help others to onboard new employees as positively as I have experienced, and more!
Keep the first week well structured
Are you in the habit of leaving HR to do the orienteering and onboarding, whilst you, the taskmaster, remain responsible for introducing your new employee to ‘the work’? This used to be me, often with very little oversight into how the HR pieces needed to be sequenced or the time needed to complete them as processes evolved and new ones were introduced. My Blue Array experience gave me a good shake and taught me that this is, at best, an inefficient way to onboard and at worst, darn lazy.
I think I must have exposed my own past deficiencies, when I nearly fell over at first sight of the schedule that had been prepared for me. My manager, Jordan, had clearly put a lot of time into preparing my first week alongside HR and, whilst not sequenced to the nth degree (which is no bad thing!), provided a structure that ensured I could have introductions to people, processes and the work over the course of the week, without cognitive overload. Breathing space was purposefully built into the schedule to give me the room to centre myself and go at my own pace, as was 1 on 1 time with my manager every single day.
Lesson learned: Your hire’s first week is the most important one, and will inform a lasting impression of the business and its culture. Make it just as important to you too and prepare for it. Stay connected to your HR or People Team throughout the process.
Anticipate where your new recruit may need a little extra support
On my first day I was paired with a ‘buddy’ outside of my immediate team, who would be there to check in on me and help troubleshoot any questions or concerns I had. The buddy assigned to me, Charlie, was easy to get along with and empathetic, and he was only a few weeks ahead of me in terms of joining Blue Array himself. Charlie’s ‘newness’ made him hyper-aware of where I may need a little extra support; he’s been able to almost predict what I might need help with and provide an answer before I had even posed the question.
Lesson learned: Be cognisant of the little things that can impede the confidence of a new member of staff. Think back to your own first days at the company, however long ago or recently that may have been and try to remember where the stumbling blocks were, for example making sense of internal acronyms and abbreviations, and use those experiences to increase your empathy.
Remember it may be your new hire’s first time using a Mac or PC, or new piece of software and they may need some tech support; it may be their first time working at home and they need support to get their home office set up. Ask those probing questions in order that you can be there to offer support in anticipation of what your new person may struggle with and be first to reach out if you can, to avoid them struggling in silence.
Learn Names and Pronouns
As part of my onboarding my personal pronouns were logged and integrated into my email signature, and further resources provided to heighten my understanding on the importance of learning others’ pronouns and stating my own, as part of my online induction material.
Whilst there has been more increased awareness around personal pronouns in the past few years, this is the first business I have been a part of that makes pronouns a living, breathing part of inductions, awareness training and internal and client communications.
As a cis-gender person with an easy name to pronounce, my gender identity and my pronouns, that are placed on me by others without prompting — she/her — are not something that have given me much concern during my life, and I realise that that is a privileged position from which to write about it. But in recent times I have educated myself more about the issue of assuming people’s pronouns and the distress that it can cause, and am making a concerted effort to be more obvious about my own pronouns, and I am really pleased to see that Blue Array are on that same journey.
Lesson learned: Promote inclusivity by stating your pronouns along with your name and build heightened awareness of pronoun use and gender identity in the workplace. When interviewing candidates, always introduce yourself with your name and pronouns. If you’re unsure on how to pronounce somebody’s name, ask! And keep practising until you say it right.
Put Period Health on The Agenda
This part of my induction blew my mind — a talk from Chloe Smith and Steph Whatley about menstrual health. Every person, irrespective of gender or experience of menstruation, has to watch the educational session as part of the Blue Array onboarding process.
The video had a particular significance for me because, well, I’ll tell you the story of my first day…
I live around 90 minutes away from Blue Array’s offices in Reading and decided that, rather than risk delayed trains and general first-day flapping, I would stay in Reading the night before. That way, I could take my time getting ready, have a good breakfast, settle my nerves and float into the office all timely and effortlessly.
All was going smoothly, but just as I was getting ready to leave I suddenly felt ‘that feeling’. I went to the bathroom, and lo and behold, had just come on my period unannounced and woefully unprepared. And of course I’d chosen cream trousers that day. I sought the help of the lovely staff at The Roseate Hotel, and they provided me with the pads I needed, but had to then rush to get to the office and was all flustered; neither timely nor effortless.
So, later that week, to be part of this induction was incredible. “On your period, and need a break? Just say it how it is, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” and words to that effect. I love now knowing that I could have just said to my team, “I’ll be late, I’ve started my period” and they wouldn’t have batted an eyelid because they have all been educated on menstrual health.
Lesson learned: This talk took a sledgehammer to those notions of needing to be secretive or ashamed about menstruation and whilst years of conditioning cannot be absolved in an hour, I cannot tell you how comforting it is to know that I don’t need to embarrassed in my place of work.
To hear the sentence, “Not every woman menstruates, and not every person who menstruates is a woman” during my induction training had me leaping from my chair shouting, “Yes, yes, YES!” I have been telling everybody who listens about the significance of this part of my onboarding process, and will take it with me wherever my career takes me.
Commit Your New Hire, as a Person
At Blue Array, Monday team meetings wrap with a talk about a historical event or person of interest, with each person taking it in turns to showcase something that interests them every week, and so this is how I learned about The Battle of Ramree Island and my new teammate’s passion for crocodiles on my first day. I loved this for a couple of reasons: first, I loved the integration of sharing something personal and non-work related into the team meeting, with the permission — and encouragement — to be unashamedly quirky, and secondly, I loved that it was the personal sharing that wrapped the meeting rather than kicked it off. I’m very used to casual talk and ice-breakers at the beginning of a meeting, but ending a meeting with anything other than business was completely new to me and purposefully framed where ‘people’ sit within the team’s hierarchy, in relation to ‘profit’. We open — and close! — meetings, committing to each other as human beings.
At Blue Array the company values are, ‘Focused, Collaborative, Supportive, Confident and Honest’. And they’re easy to remember because my experience during this first month is that their people talk about their values, and hold themselves accountable to upholding them, every single day.
Throughout my onboarding I have been reminded through actions — from the sharing of resources from team members outside of my direct team to help me elevate my knowledge in SEO, P&L accounts, and music to enhance my Spotify playlists, to time carved out for me for mentoring and career planning — that I matter, that I hold value, that they are committed to me as a person, beyond any value I offer the company as an SEO.
