Onboarding made easy (through writing)

The value of writing is huge. I often write about the benefits related to decision making, and I'm a little shocked to realise that I haven't written about the benefits relating to onboarding (especially when this has formed a big part of my professional career!)

So this blog is going to be about just that - writing for onboarding and the amazing benefits that can be unlocked.

I was listening to an episode Melissa Perri's Product Thinking podcast recently, and this very topic came up. The guest, Anthony Maggio from Airtable was talking about how they are making onboarding work in their fully remote company. At the heart of this was understanding what made onboarding harder in remote environments - essentially not being able to look over to a fellow colleague and all the questions that pop into your head. Their solution? To write it all down, alongside super quick daily touch-points akin to stand-ups with team members. Genius.

I've joined both fully remote teams and in-office teams, and I can honestly say I think companies cling to a false belief that onboarding when in an office environment is better and more positive. Don’t get me wrong it can be, but a good onboarding experience doesn't just happen because you are sat next to someone. It requires a lot of thought and preparation that largely stems from documentation, clear processes, a good launch plan and access to the right people.

What I see from remote-first companies is that they know this and so document everything and keep it in a place where others can find it. Amazon has a single wiki platform where everything is stored and searchable. Pages are open to all access (with edit access to everyone in most cases too). Gitlab even evangelise about the amount of pages they have in their documentation (interestingly it would take around 50 hours of continuous reading to cover the whole handbook).

 Anyway I digress.

Why does this focus on documentation work for onboarding?

Because you are applying rigour and capturing everything, storing it in places that are easy to find, and removing the human-factor. Think about the last time you joined a new company or team. You were probably raring to go, ready to hit the ground running. The last thing you wanted to do was ask "stupid" questions to the person helping you onboard.

Now think about how you'd feel if you had stuff to read, watch, listen to that got you started. You could start to pull together questions to probe deeper or find out how things relate to the work you are involved in. Now instead of asking where customer reports are stored you can ask questions relating to the latest report (which you've read) and the experiments which are being run off the back of the findings. These things make a difference when you are new, and the time saving benefits are huge.

As the newbie, you ramp up quicker, your confidence grows and you gain a sense of how the company is set up to help you succeed. You fell less of a burden on your colleagues and your colleagues are less impacted by your arrival too. 

This is really important. At Amazon we used to run an annual tech survey and every year we would ask software developers how much of their time was spent onboarding new folks to their teams. On average they spent 15% of their time onboarding. Across a company with tens of thousands of software developers, that is a lot of time spent onboarding. My job was to reduce this time so that ultimately developers could be productive.

I did this by documenting key steps in deploying software at Amazon through a mix of comprehensive documentation and step by step video tutorials. In the first 3 months these videos were watched 16,000 times.

I've worked in some big companies and what I encounter is knowledge chaos. Documentation is stored in many places with little to no thought about the person who needs to get up to speed quickly - whether that be someone new to a company or joining a new team or project.

Writing can really help.

But who has time to write stuff down?

If you think writing stuff down is time consuming, think about the time and money wasted by not properly documenting stuff.

The company I am at now is heavily reliant on presentation decks. I was sent a rather impressive looking deck created about 12 months ago, which was the results of a user research study into a product. The deck was beautiful. Very arty, think grey-tones, big words…and impossible to decipher. No notes, bold statements but lacking in detail. I asked the team about it, and they couldn't really remember the details. The study had cost around £25k. A massive chunk of money, now wasted.

What I really needed was the report that would have sat along side it. But that didn't exist.

I am often challenged on the time it takes to properly document. I'm used to this. My response is always that yes, documenting does take time, but it is time spent once. The document can be shared often, comments added, meetings can be avoided or consolidated.

Why not bring this idea up in your next team meeting. Agree on where you are going to store your team documents and notes and hold each other accountable. Talk to the most recent people to join the team and ask how you can improve the onboarding experience. You can also encourage new folks to document their findings as a way to make it easier for the next person. These things can evolve over time, but you have to start today.

Go forth and write more!

If you have enjoyed reading this, why not donate $5 to Doc Bar Raiser to fuel future articles or suggest topics you'd like us to cover next. Email me at charlotte@docbarraiser.com