Anything we may say about how to integrate new people virtually leads straight to a solution that’s suboptimal to what happens in person. That’s a reality that every boss must recognise. Even in global teams, the experience is absolutely consistent: if you want to integrate a team, you have to buy some plane tickets.
So, before I talk about online onboarding, I must first state that when we are able to meet safely again, we must get back to bringing new joiners into the office as soon as we can.
In the meantime, while we’re in the suboptimal world, we must understand a very important point: new joiners are the weak underbelly of working from home. In teams, working from home works when you have established relationships and established trust. A new joiner has neither of those things. So, let’s see how we can overcome that.
The first phase of online onboarding must consist of a mixture of tacit and explicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge is the easy bit – it’s the staff manual and anything else on paper that sets out how the business works. It’s the “know what” stuff, which is pretty simple.
The stuff that really matters is the tacit knowledge: “How do I actually get things done around here? What are the major no-nos? How much risk should I take? What are the real Death Star projects that lurk around the organisation, and how do I avoid them? And who are the Death Star managers?”
As a new joiner, you can’t just ask your boss those questions, because it’s awkward. And you can’t try and whisper them to your colleagues in Zoom team calls, because everyone else can hear you. So, the best thing that an employer can do is fix you up with a buddy. There are three key rules of engagement:
1. Every conversation between the new joiner and the buddy is 100% confidential. And I mean 100%. Because the new joiner needs to know that there’s a safe space in which to ask unsafe questions – and potentially, to do some unsafe things.
2. The buddy must know that their success in that capacity, in terms of how they have assisted the new joiner’s integration, will be assessed at year end. That enforces the idea that it isn’t a nice-to-have arrangement – it’s a must-have. Take it seriously.
3. As such, appointing a member of staff to be a new joiner’s buddy shouldn’t be an addition to someone’s already overloaded priority list. There must be a level of: “OK, let’s see how this fits in with all your other tasks.” And then perhaps some of those existing priorities get de-prioritised.
This isn’t about having one, big conversation. It’s a constant dialogue through lots of short conversations, so the new joiner can sense check anything they’re not clear about.
Set the new joiner up with a series of one-on-one Zoom chats with their new teammates and any other important people in the business they’ll need to liaise with. This will enable the recruit to find out what those people do and what they’re like, which is really important.
Then, for the team as a whole, organise some social events that are both entertaining and non-threatening. These can be based around classic icebreakers, such as: what was the first bit of music anyone ever bought for you? And then people bring their selections along, tell the story behind them and play them to the group.
People are bound to come up with all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff and tell some amusing tales, and the whole thing is completely pressure-free.
What you’re trying to do in these social events is encourage everyone to know each other as people – something that happens quite naturally in the office all the time, but absolutely does not happen online if everyone is task focused all the time.
The reality is that any team only succeeds if everyone on the team trusts each other. And you can’t trust each other unless you have those bonds of common values and experiences. So, while they are ostensibly humorous and light, these social events have a serious business purpose, which is to build that trust.
Again, though, recognise that this is suboptimal. Do it because you have to do it – but as soon as you can safely get everyone back in the office, switch to in-person icebreakers. Because that’s when the magic starts.
This is all about workload and performance management. And here’s where we get into what I call the Paranoia Zone. When you’re working in the office, everyone can see that you’re working. So, as a manager, you know who’s overloaded, you know who’s coasting and it’s relatively easy to manage performance in real time – because you can see it.
But when you’re working from home, no one knows whether you’re working or walking the dog. And the curse of professionals is that they always want to do a good job, and most of them want to overachieve. So, they’re not walking the dog – they’re working all hours, to prove they really are working. The first problem is demonstrating that.
The second is that you have much greater ambiguity around what you’re really meant to achieve. All professional work is ambiguous. For example, if I ask you to write a report, it could be one page or 100 pages. But there’s always one more fact you could gather or opinion you could canvas.
In the office, you resolve that ambiguity through constant, in-person dialogue in the vein of: “Is this what you really want? I could do this, or I could do that – what would work best for you?” And it gets resolved in real time, reducing the ambiguity.
At home, you don’t have that constant dialogue. So, typically, the way you resolve ambiguity is to cover all the bases, just in case. Which, of course, is a recipe for massive anxiety, overwork and stress.
As the boss of a new joiner, then, you have to be ever more purposeful and deliberate in everything you do. Be crystal clear about goals and expectations. All good journalists – even rookie journalists – examine the Who, What, Where and When in the first paragraph. But by far the most interesting question is Why.
A boss must do exactly the same. As much as they should be clear about the Who, What, Where and When, they must also set out the broader context of the Why. And the joiner must be clear about that as well: “OK, you want me to do this marketing analysis – fine. Who’s it for? Why do they want it? When do they want it? Why do they want it by then? How are they going to use it? What is the problem they’re trying to solve?”
Until it’s 100% clear.
It’s a really good discipline. It’s a painful discipline – but it’s much better to have that difficult conversation at the beginning about what’s actually expected than an impossible conversation at the end about why something wasn’t achieved.
And if you’re really focused about that as a boss, you’ll automatically know whether or not people are performing.
Further information
Read Part 1 of our guide to online onboarding, featuring specialist treasury recruiter Helen Jones, here.
Jo Owen is an award-winning author and keynote speaker specialising in leadership and the development of global teams. He was interviewed for this piece by freelance business, finance and leadership journalist Matt Packer