So to start I just want to bring up an important thing that we all should should know and I don't think everyone knows.
A few years ago, well, 2010, so pre-pandemic, pre-remote work, some research - researchers found that it can take up to a minimum of three years to become fluent in a project.
And so that's a long time, but, like, the bigger problem is that the - on the turnover rate and employees switching companies has been about less than two years - most companies are below two years, between one and two, and again pre-pandemic pre this - great resignation period of time we are in.
And so this is a problem because that means people are moving around companies and having to learn new projects constantly and are never really onboarding fully or being up to speed.
So today I'm going to talk about remote onboarding of software developers.
I'm Paige and I want to define onboarding first.
So onboarding is the period of time when programmers become familiar with their new project, their source code, and their team that they're working with.
So I want to talk about a little bit of - about a story that happened to me during COVID and I think a lot of you can relate to this.
I've also onboarded at other companies - I've worked at many different companies and onboarded - but when COVID hit in March 2020 I was hired the November before to work at Microsoft as a visiting researcher.
So I was really excited, I was getting to move to seattle, like, from the east coast to the west coast and get to explore Seattle and work with awesome people.
So I'm, like, ready to start my job come May, so like very pumped, it's marked on my calendar but then COVID hit and so I found myself sitting at home onboarding from my couch.
At times I literally had a table for a desk, a flimsy table at that time and I had to work from home for the entire period of working there.
And so unlike my expectations from November to March I now was sitting at home onboarding.
And so it's important to note that job satisfaction is includes - equals productivity.
So if you're more satisfied with your job you're more productive.
And so onboarding remotely it's more difficult to become satisfied with their job because people are on different time zones, they're working with people they don't know.
And so when I went to Microsoft I decided that I would study the onboarding during the pandemic and how the developers onboarded remotely.
Well I also went through the onboarding process.
So it turns out there's no standard practice of onboarding remotely at Microsoft.
It's mainly, or it was mainly in person work, and so there was no standard remote onboarding practice.
And, like, different teams were doing different things, trying new things, etc.
And so I first identified some areas of need with onboarding.
I talked to HR,
I connected with employees,
I had a lot of different calls trying to figure out what everyone was doing with onboarding their teammates et cetera.
And I then developed a survey trying to study the remote onboarding experience of Microsoft software developers that onboarded between the beginning of the pandemic through July 2020, and asked a bunch of questions about the challenges and what teams are doing and interactions with the teams and connectedness - social connectedness.
I'm not going to go to - into detail on these because I want to talk about what we take away from this, this work, but we did send over a thousand emails out.
We had 267 responses collected and all of these were employees at Microsoft in North America just due to the different timelines of COVID happening and - all of the people who were surveyed were people who were onboarding from home and or had onboarded from home at the time.
But from all of this, there's some papers about it, but the most important thing really is just the simple rules for remote onboarding - and the rules for remote onboarding - remote onboarding are so important because you do want to have that job satisfaction early on so that the team member is productive, so they're not jumping ship to company to company, because we're seeing that every day.
My Twitter is full of people going back and forth to different companies right now, and so we have seven simple remote onboarding rules that we know empirically work, and so these are the seven.
I'm going to talk about them more in detail in a second but I do want to note that onboarding is the entire team's responsibility: it's not the manager's responsibility and it's definitely not the new hires responsibility, it's everyone's.
So these rules go for everyone on the team.
So what you should do, the first thing is, your camera should be on during all meetings: it should be the default culture.
Managers should encourage this by having their cameras on.
Of course there can be some rules, like, you know, if you're eating or something's going on you don't have to have it on, but having cameras on helps people match a face to a name to a person talking, and build social connectedness between team members.
Also you should promote proactive communication, and this comes from the manager but also from the entire team.
New hires can feel anxious when they start and they might not know the right way to communicate with the team and how they normally go about that, so promoting that is imperative early on.
And some of the other things you can do with that are schedule one-on-one meetings with all team members.
And this should be the manager scheduling the meetings with each teammate with the new hire, so everyone should have a one-on-one with the new hire, not just the manager, ideally in, like, the first week.
Additionally we found that a lot of people didn't understand where they fit in at the company, so explaining the organization chart is imperative so that someone knows who to go to - to ask different questions or get advice, or, you know, dig into some code with them.
So explaining that early on is very helpful.
Having an actual diagram to give them even better.
Another thing you should do on day one - day one - you should come in with an onboarding buddy for your new hire and a technical mentor - two different people.
The onboarding buddy should be from some other team maybe, not even in the same org, but in the company technical management - should be someone on their team.
And the difference is, the onboarding buddy helps them with, like, the general things like HR, meeting new people, networking, and the technical manager or mentor is someone who can actually go into the code with them and help them on their tasks and explain how their workflow works for that team etc.
Another thing is to assign multiple onboardings or be able to support multiple onboarding speeds.
So if you take someone from college who had just graduated versus someone who is leaving a big tech company to another one, they are going to need different speeds for onboarding, because someone could have been working in the company - in big tech and big companies for 20 years or more - they know a lot of the things that they already need to know and can easily pick up onboarding, versus a new graduate from a university with a bachelor's who has never worked in industry, they're going to need a little bit more help in onboarding.
And then finally a assigning a simple first task so that the new hire can quickly learn the workflow, can make a pull request very quickly and feel productive and also be able to sit into meetings with the team and understand what is going on, because they've already been in that code, their hands are dirty in the code, they, you know, hopefully have been able to complete this task in the first week or two.
So my question for you all is, do you have a checklist containing these rules?
Because I really hope you do, and if not I hope your recruiters are excellent because you're going to need them in the near future, and you'll be relying on them to help you recruit during this great resignation.
So I hope you have this checklist, and if you have any questions or want to chat more about onboarding or remote onboarding feel free to contact me at my email.
And this is just some of the work that's been published based on this - we have some work on remote onboarding and allyship and remote onboarding of new hires, it's all public, and I'd love to talk more about it.
Thank you very much.