Onboarding Employees & Expectations of New Managers
Managing people at 37signals should not take much of your time. We hire people who can operate as managers of one, so they should be free from your oversight most of the time.
When someone’s new, though, they require more touch as they get up to speed, and they deserve all the information you can give them about what it’s like to work here and how to succeed. Here’s a rundown of what’s expected when you onboard a new employee.
Before your new report starts, you’ll work with People Ops in the Welcome project. Here you’ll find all the onboarding tasks in the form of to-dos. You’ll also find a welcome letter from People Ops to the new hire, goals for the employee’s first week and 90 days, and a list of links & resources. Review the project carefully and make team- or you-specific adjustments as you please.
On day 1, schedule a welcome call with your new report. The purposes of the call are:
- Welcome and begin to get to know each other as colleagues.
- Review the days and weeks ahead and what they should expect from training.
- Recommend people to meet on/off their immediate team.
- Schedule recurring 1-1s — weekly to start, then on a schedule that works for both of you.
Over their first few weeks and cycle, make sure you’re discussing all the things that will help your new report succeed in their role at your weekly 1-1s, like:
- How we work. The tech and tooling used in your processes; the mechanisms you and your team use to give and receive feedback; and how your new report should identify roadblocks in their work & ask for help. Make sure to explain idiomatic concepts we know & love like scope hammering and judo.
- How we communicate. Working in the open; different communication mechanisms and how we use them (e.g. what’s in Basecamp vs. GitHub); how to effectively get feedback from senior teammates; and automatic check-in expectations and purpose (fostering engagement, radiating information).
- How you oversee and assess technical competency. Be transparent about the skills you’re expecting to see come through in their work right away, and then as they get acclimated over a few cycles. Developing and showcasing their core comp skills are the most important things to focus on during their first year, so give them the tools & information to do so.
- How we assess general competency. Refer back to your role’s progression framework throughout onboarding and at 3-, 6-, and 12-month review time, using specific examples taken from their cycle work to compare to the performance measures in the framework.
- Explain the performance categories using your own experience, especially the categories of mastery, judgment, and decision making. These are squishier concepts that we fully expect to see but can be confusing for newbies to visualize in action.
- Cover what’s written between the lines, like how to develop a reasonable sense of urgency, shipping early, and how you recommend they move work forward on their own.
- Define, too, how you evaluate and assess the core technical expectations of their job (e.g. coding, design). Describe what high quality work means to you — what are you looking to see?
- Broad strokes for their first year. Review Making A Career and Your First Year. Mention (multiple times) the 1-year hell yeah measure and how you take that temperature. If applicable, set the expectation that they level up to L2 in 2 years, and L3 in another two years. They can lean on the progression framework for all of this, as that’s what we use to assess trajectory.
- Give live feedback on their current work, and moreover give context and insight into your decision making process to back up your feedback.
- Have a dedicated small batch project kick-off and offer reasonable guidance and support throughout.
- Flag any role-specific documentation (e.g. Programmer’s Handbook, Ops Docs) and let them know what their responsibility is for maintaining documentation.
- Act as team and cultural ambassador; establish and maintain a relationship built on mutual trust and support.
Continually reinforce all of this information throughout your new hire’s first year. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s only fair to give them all the information they need to succeed. Oftentimes getting used to how we work is the biggest struggle for new hires, more so than the technical piece. So be direct, clear, and generous with your feedback in how well they’re adapting to not just the technical expectations, but all the rest.
You can also refer to the chapter in this playbook on 1:1s for more information on how to structure your recurring 1-1s throughout the first year.
If you ever sense lagging performance from a new hire in their first year, please escalate to People Ops as soon as you think there might be a problem. Better to sort it out early and work with you and your report to correct it before the 1-year mark decision point.