Building CAUSL - Episode 7: Onboarding at Lightspeed
Compressing 3 - 6 months of ordinary onboarding time at a new company into just a couple of weeks.
New Employee Onboarding
One of the hardest things about joining a company as a new employee is getting up to speed with everything. Navigating the choppy waters of uncharted territories requires resilience, time and a damn good compass. It’s not easy. The reason it’s not easy is because onboarding is not just about understanding how the business works, although that in itself is a mammoth task and one that very few people undertake. You also need to identify your stakeholders, build relationships, learn the processes, get access to systems and in the case of analysts, learn how data is collected and stored. Then there is the actual work. What are the goals? What are the priorities? What resources are available? What do the outcomes look like? Nope, joining a new company is not an easy task at all, in fact, joining a new company can be a gut-wrenching experience.
Historically, as a manager, I would give new members of my team a three month run way to build up the institutional knowledge needed to do their job and a further few months to do their job well. Eventually they all enter calm waters and are able to freely and safely navigate themselves. Naturally, some people get there sooner than others, but eventually everyone gets there. Based on my past experience, it could take someone new anywhere up to six months to really feel settled. I personally would allow myself up to 3 months to feel like I had control of my ship. Over time, I learned to get there faster by taking the optimal routes.
Thought Exercise
At this point I want to conduct a short thought exercise. With all of the above fresh in your mind, I want you to cast your mind back to the last time you were a new joiner. Try to remember what it felt like to have so much uncertainty around you. Recall the overwhelming nature of the situation and the gut-wrenching feeling of being lost. Are you there?
Now take all of that and cram it into a two week discovery process and you’ll have some idea of what the last few weeks have been like for Nico and I. Got it? Now times it by two clients and you'll REALLY KNOW what the last few weeks have been like. (This doesn't include work outside of clients - pitching to potential clients, doing lead generation, writing content, speaking at an event etc...)
Don’t get me wrong, neither of us had any delusions of getting a 3-6 month runway to build the institutional knowledge needed to do our job, especially considering our projects with both clients are approximately 2-3 months in length. But we also hadn’t grasped the intensity of pace we would need to work at to get up to speed. There comes a point for every new starter where the uncertainty and overwhelmingness has vanished and you find yourself sailing in calm open waters. Most of the times that point comes and goes without you even realising. That point for us has to be pre-determined before we even begin.
Onboarding At Light Speed
It sounds gut-wrenching to me even now as I find myself on the other side of a very intensive two/three week discovery sprint but thankfully Nico and I have been able to compress nearly two decades of onboarding experience into a system that gets us there in weeks instead of months. We really have found a solution to onboard at light speed.
I'm trying to keep these newsletters short so drop me a note in the comments section if you want me to share more about our system and if there’s enough interest, I'll write about it over the coming weeks.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know what you think.
Bhav
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