Learning by doing: My first years as a manager in a tech start-up — Part II: Onboarding
By: Sophia Höfling
Tags: Onboarding, Startup Lessons, Startup, Management, Leadership

“While organizations recognize the importance of onboarding, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are getting it right.” (Human Resource Executive)

Following my article on recruiting, with this article, I aim to convince start-up managers to devote sufficient time to designing and executing onboarding procedures. I will share my failures, learnings, and successes in the art of cultivating new team members. The insights I share are a reflection on my first 3 years in a management role at the high-tech start-up NavVis. In the highly dynamic environment of a fast-growing B2B start-up, I built and led a Customer Experience Team of up to 28 people. I hope my insights may help other team leader newbies to circumvent some rocks on the bumpy road of growing and leading a team.

Photo by Etienne Boulanger on Unsplash

If recruiting is the bread, onboarding is the butter to successfully build a team. It is a well-spent investment in the future of a functional team. It ensures that a new team member can work independently and productively early on. Nevertheless, the time to set up and execute a successful onboarding procedure is often underestimated by rookie managers. As a newbie, you often spend way more time on getting a new person in (setting up a job ad, reading resumes, interviewing, etc.) than bringing the new hire up to speed. As a result, onboarding procedures turn out to be uncoordinated and not fully thought-through. I recommend rethinking this time distribution. As a manager, you should aim for spending at least as much time on onboarding as on recruiting, both from a strategic as well as from an operational perspective.

As a manager, you should aim for spending at least as much time on onboarding as on recruiting, both from a strategic as well as from an operational perspective.

This advice comes from someone who had profoundly underestimated the effort of onboarding. With my very first hire, I didn’t even think about onboarding until two days before he started. This first onboarding experience was probably as unsatisfying for me as it was for him. What are the objectives for the first weeks? How often do we get together 1:1 to align? Where to find an overview of the running projects? I didn’t have the answers to these questions. I was greatly overwhelmed and at the same time disappointed. We had hired someone to take some workload from me. Instead, these first weeks simply felt like double the work. This experience taught me two important lessons :

1 — Don’t expect from any new joiner — no matter how experienced — to be fully productive in their first weeks. Those first weeks are there to learn and get fully immersed in their new role and environment. As a result, your team’s workload will first increase before it will be reduced. This approach will pay off in the long run. The more thoroughly your new hires understand your business the more likely it is that they will surprise you with own ideas that drive your company success.

2 — How quickly your workload will decrease strongly depends on how effective your onboarding procedures are. From my experience, the most effective onboarding takes place when:

the new hire feels warmly welcomed a clear learning path is laid out for the newbie expectations are explicitly expressed by both sides

Based on these lessons my team and I iteratively built and improved our onboarding procedures over the following three years. It was complex but worthwhile. When I quit my job, my successor told us that he had never been onboarded in such a structured and welcoming manner. It seemed that we had done something right.

Our measures and recommendations on effective onboarding can be summarized as follows: