Welcome to the team: how to make newbie feel and work well without meeting face to face

So this happened.

For the last five years, I have been leading a team which is dispersed among three different countries, and, since the pandemic, every member of the team can work from home as needed.

We have our annual Big Live Gathering, but beyond that we work from Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius, and from Tartu, Valmiera, Pärnu and Klaipėda. Sometimes we work from one of the offices, sometimes we work from home.

Our team closely collaborates with colleagues from marketing, products, sales channels, IT and legal teams. We use emails and MS Teams to communicate with them, and quite often these are people neither of us have ever met face-to-face.

It all somehow works, and people see many benefits in the structure. The boss has no ability to micromanage, everyone gets significant freedom (along with significant responsibility), and country borders are no longer an obstacle for collaborating with interesting people from interesting backgrounds. Many choose to work in our team precisely for these reasons.

But for new members, entering such a team can be a frightening task. Starting a new job can already be full of anxiety, uncertainty, and information overload. It’s like the first day of school, but with more at stake. Cross-country teams encourage tribalism among nationals. Working from home might turn that into an isolating and distressing experience. But not necessarily! 

To help the new members, we have devised a process, “the Academy”, which is a life saver and we would not be able to successfully expand our team without it. It has been continuously improved over the previous three years, and we are quite proud of the result.

So let me share why it the 7 main cornerstones of our ‘Academy’: onboarding checklist and involved team, mentoring, solid wiki in place, structure for virtual networking, clear KPIs and regular improvement. 

#1. Make a (very) detail onboarding checklist 

Currently, our team plan for a new project manager consists of 44 steps, divided into 6 main sections.

It starts from the obvious, such as signing all the right documents with HR, getting access to internal systems and tutoring what each right of access is meant for; and continues to information security, data processing, GDPR and much more.

On the first day, we discuss the onboarding plan with the new hire. I believe that having a clear plan reduces stress and anxiety, as the person knows what to expect and has control over the personal learning path.

If you don’t have an onboarding checklist in your team, I definitely recommend crafting it. Start from asking your team to list what a new colleague would need to learn. You might be surprised - the list might end up being much longer than you think. 

When you learn the full list of what needs to be covered with a new colleague, you could prioritize and structure the learning process more efficiently, and avoid leaving gaps in knowledge which could lead to painful incidents down the road.

It massively improves onboarding process experience for the newcomer.

Last but not least - it provides you understanding of onboarding cost for your team and helps managing mutual expectations. 

#2. Distribute responsibility across the team

In our team, onboarding of a new colleague is a joint goal and a joint effort. We have appointed subject matter experts - team members who are responsible for explaining specific topics from the checklist. This is a very nice way to get to know everyone in the team, even if they are in different cities across Baltic countries.

The first weeks after joining our team, a new hire has the schedule pre-booked with meetings with other team members - getting to know specific topics, then shadowing, doing a task together, etc. Before such meetings, a newcomer is expected to read about the topics in our wiki.

I encourage the new colleagues to schedule follow-up meetings with the appointed team members in a week or two, as by that time in-depth questions would come up. These meetings are booked by the newcomers, so they can adjust it to their style of learning and combine them with what is coming up in their work schedule.

#3.  Assigning a mentor 

In our team, we see mentoring as the key to successful onboarding. 

A mentor is responsible for general new team member orientation (culture, people, values, how we do things here) and also keeps a sharp eye on the overall onboarding process, making sure that it goes well. 

Typically, new automated marketing project managers in our team are mentored by one of the area managers - Daira Rozentāle , Dominykas Preibys , Liisi Sestverk , Pille-Riin . 

Our mentors take this role very seriously and with a big dedication. Area managers actually measure their personal success by the success of our team members. Being the champion of organization, the mentor is able to share the sense of purpose and excitement of doing our job (it’s contagious!). 

I believe that mentoring is very immensely rewarding for both mentor and mentee. It allows you to learn together, gain new insights and practice leadership skills.

#4. Document EVERYTHING 

A well-maintained wiki this is the ultimate pre-condition for any distributed/hybrid team to function well. It enables us to have standardized processes and to avoid misunderstanding across team members.

And a detailed and well organized wiki is an amazingly good tool for onboarding newcomers. 

But how to start a wiki, if you don’t have one? Your experienced team members most likely will not willing to contribute to wiki. Why should they - they already know it all? 

I received this advice from our IT colleagues: newcomers are your golden opportunity to start creating team wiki, if you don’t have one. In our team, we started our team wiki together with Olga Rimoviča , and within a year it was developed to a very solid source. 

Why writing things down on paper (wiki) matters, particularly in hybrid teams?

• Writing all meeting minutes, plans, agreements down is the only way to keep everyone included -  whether the person is working from home, office, Riga, Tartu or Klaipeda. 
• If it’s not written, it’s much more difficult to explain it to a new colleague. “Unwritten wisdom”, that is being transferred via emails or mouth to mouth leads to miscommunication and incidents.
• Writing things down services for logic validations purposes -  ideas, pitches, processes might sound good when talking, but on paper you start seeing logic gaps.
• One shouldn't trust human memory - it only takes one perfect Carribean vacation to forget not only your laptop password, but also a good part of the unwritten internal rules and procedures.

#5. Encourage networking

 Feelings of belonging, trust and respect can’t be generated from a checklist. They require conversations and connection with team members, managers and overall organization.

I always strongly advise some office presence, as it helps bonding & establishing you in a new role. Spend a day or two per week on site, talk to people in the kitchen, and make plans for lunch. Use the ability to connect live with people, who are accessible geographically. 

The Magic Trick is to show your new colleague how to network virtually and develop connection (fast!) with people across borders. 

• Formal regular meetings with the team, major counterparties and major stakeholders. 
• Create and maintain informal social structures, eg Teams chats, where you can connect, joke and ask for help or advice when needed. 
• Introduce to significant people over “Teams coffee beak”. Arrange job shadowing - a video call with a shared screen can work wonders and be just as effective as in-person. 
• When it feels natural, consider using social media to connect on a personal level with your teammates - from instagram stories and BeReal, following on Spotify or Duolingo, connecting on Walker tracker.
• If you onboard more than one person at a time - it’s bingo! They can create informal self-support network and this might become a massive booster for the process. 

The big question: do one actually need to be in the office during onboarding? I have seen people who could probably onboard themselves virtually from Timbuktu, not even coming to the office event once. Others need more human contact, encouragement on site.  It’s difficult to say in advance who will be a good remote learner, if the person had no such experience before. 

The good thing, that in hybrid environment at Swedbank we are able to offer a little bit of both, based on individual needs and person learning style.

#6. Set onboarding KPIs 

The average onboarding program lasts 90 days, but according to Gallup’s report “Creating an Exceptional Onboarding Journey for New Employees”, it typically takes new employees 12 months to reach their full performance potential.

In my practice, many people become quite anxious by not nailing it within the first few weeks or months. Setting KPIs provides more certainty and control and gives direction. 

What exactly do you expect a new team member doing in 2 weeks? 1 month? 3 months, 6 months? When should they start leading my projects independently? How long will the mentor support  and supervise projects of newcomer?

Typically, I would expect a new colleague in 6 months to have enough functional expertise to do the job independently, understand how we create value and do business here, have an interpersonal support network and find himself the position: what are the parts of job I love? What are my unique strengths in the team? What will be my long term plan?

Critically important to encourage your new colleague to ask feedback for other team members on “the spot” - after a kick-off meeting you led, on business requirements document you provided. 

Real-time” feedback from the team is valuable  source of growth and helps people most. In Swedbank, we have very healthy feedback culture, but still one need to ask for it proactively.

#7. Your onboarding plan will never be complete

In our team,  we used to have a ‘newcomer book’ -  a solid folder with main things to know, all the formal procedures, guidelines, user manuals & contacts in one place. Eventually it evolved to  PPT& XLS, then migrated to wik. We added links, presentations, tutorials, some videos and since then improved massively (process nether stops!)

Use all opportunities to review & improve:

• Ask for feedback right after formal onboarding ends (in our case, we have two milestones - after 3 & 6 months) both from the newcomer & the mentor.
• Check it after a year - because then, an already experienced person will be able to assess better.
• Use incidents as and opportunity to improve your onboarding plan - maybe, we missed something in the initial training stage to prevent it?
• With each new feature, tool or process intro to the existing team, think - how to incorporate it to your onboarding plan? Add info to wiki. Make video recording. Update your onboarding checklist.

How this happened

For the first year, we did not have any formal process for onboarding. Partly because I assumed that a newly hired smart person would quickly learn ropes from other smart persons, and partly because this is the corporate culture in our countries - I was certainly never offered an “onboarding” while switching jobs before.

But that did not work as well as we expected. The new hires had gaps remaining in their knowledge - partly because our documentation, while reasonably thorough, was not thorough enough.

There were differences between approaches of offices in each country - so a new hire would learn the “Latvian way” of doing things in Latvia, and an “Estonian way” in Estonia. Which would lead to the new hires feeling insecure, fearing there are nuances they have not been told about.

A lot of our know-how, it appeared, relied not on documentation but on email chains, “common law” and just “knowledge” - as we might have agreed on the way of doing things at, for instance, a meeting some time ago, which the new hire would not know about.

I was struggling. I saw people are not feeling right, but had no experience in crafting onboarding processes. I talked to other teams within our bank on their onboarding experiences, but many had none, and some had processes which did not fit us. The best tips came from IT, in fact, our current “Academy” is in large part an amalgamation of the best examples of various IT departments, adapted to our business processes.

Daira Rozentāle really started our process by crafting the initial checklist for new hires, which was the germ that bear “the Academy” in its current form. The standardization of teaching new hires between different countries was key for us for finding and fixing discrepancies in how we work in different locations, and for understanding gaps in our documentation.

And then there was the COVID lockdown. And by having worked to create “the Academy”, we found we are lockdown-proof. A nice bonus.

To sum up. Hybrid teamwork requires some changes in ways of working, including integrating new team members. But it’s absolutely possible and manageable with a proper onboarding