There is no single format that ensures a good onboarding of a new team-mate. No one size fit all. But there is an ethic that can work for all. At least that’s what I believe.

It was the first week for our new designer at my work. We’d found them, or should I say, found each other, after a good deal of effort over more than 5 months. And since our team is small and we had a new person joining our team after almost 2 years, the opportunity was special.

There are more articles, guides and handbooks out there on onboarding than what a single person can absorb/remember. Most of them with very good advice, rightfully encouraging you to pick and choose what works for you.

Those points and processes are good, but only as long as most of them concern HR and regulatory processes. In my experience, what differentiates a formulaic onboarding from a good one, is the human context.

An onboarding that is curated around the individual that is being welcomed. And it is every bit worth it to customise it for both short and long term team happiness. Three things are quite important to get this right,

1. An onboarding buddy is indispensable. Not just any onboarding buddy, but someone who is patient, knows what they are doing, and whom you see the new team-member working with closely for a long time. Think the first few mates you met at university.

2. A first day that doesn’t suck. Meaning they don’t get stuck, but also that they don’t feel unseen/invisible. Have people over in office and a lunch break that is not rushed. Have conversations that are not on in-topics, or exclusionary. Let them participate.

3. A first week that is neither boring, nor overwhelming. That means planning enough pockets of self-exploration and readings to get them curious and absorbing information at their pace. But also carefully planned, human-driven dissemination of knowledge. To give them a chance to bring questions, or ask immediate ones, make suggestions, feel involved.

There are more, but all of them, including the three above, focus on the person joining. Hopefully you already have a clear understanding of where do you see the person going, what are your expectations from the role and maybe you even know a little about the person joining to then be able to create a customised onboarding plan.

Yes, it may be that all these thing may apply to anybody joining with only a very slight variation based on the actual person/role. But that slight variation/customisation may be what makes it memorable for them in the end.

Interesting reads

1. Combat LLM spam by building a web of trust
   Tangled, the git hosting site, has a ‘hot take’ on managing trust in the age of LLM slop submissions to OSS.

2. Little magazines are back
   Just something I liked

3. Github is sinking
   Maybe it can still be saved???

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitoshi_Imamura
   Not a result of my usual wikipedia rabbit-holes, but still, a good find

A project I discovered am working on

Keep your audience and own every byte of your podcast data

I have been working on this project for some time now, I just launched a waiting list for it, hence featuring it here. You can expect to hear more about the project in the coming weeks

A photo I took

Thanks for reading. See you next week!