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So to start I just want to bring up an important thing that we all should

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should know and I don't think everyone knows.
A few years ago, well, 2010, so pre-pandemic,

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pre-remote work, some research - researchers found that it can take up to a minimum of three

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years to become fluent in a project.
And so that's a long time, but, like,

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the bigger problem is that the - on the turnover rate and employees switching companies has been

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about less than two years - most companies are below two years, between one and two,

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and again pre-pandemic pre this - great resignation period of time we are in.

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And so this is a problem because that means people are moving around companies and having

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to learn new projects constantly and are never really onboarding fully or being up to speed.

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So today I'm going to talk about remote onboarding of software developers.

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I'm Paige and I want to define onboarding first.
So onboarding is the period of time when

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programmers become familiar with their new project, their source code,

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and their team that they're working with.
So I want to talk about a little bit of - about

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a story that happened to me during COVID and I think a lot of you can relate to this.

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I've also onboarded at other companies - I've worked at many different companies

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and onboarded - but when COVID hit in March 2020 I was hired the November before to work at Microsoft

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as a visiting researcher.
So I was really excited,

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I was getting to move to seattle, like, from the east coast to the west coast and get to

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explore Seattle and work with awesome people.
So I'm, like, ready to start my job come May,

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so like very pumped, it's marked on my calendar but then COVID hit and so I found

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myself sitting at home onboarding from my couch.
At times I literally had a table for a desk, a

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flimsy table at that time and I had to work from home for the entire period of working there.

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And so unlike my expectations from November to March I now was sitting at home onboarding.

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And so it's important to note that job satisfaction is includes - equals productivity.

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So if you're more satisfied with your job you're more productive.

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And so onboarding remotely it's more difficult to become satisfied with their job because people

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are on different time zones, they're working with people they don't know.

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And so when I went to Microsoft I decided that I would study the onboarding during the pandemic

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and how the developers onboarded remotely.
Well I also went through the onboarding process.

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So it turns out there's no standard practice of onboarding remotely at Microsoft.

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It's mainly, or it was mainly in person work, and so there was no

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standard remote onboarding practice.
And, like, different teams were doing

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different things, trying new things, etc.
And so I first identified some areas of

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need with onboarding.
I talked to HR,

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I connected with employees,
I had a lot of different

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calls trying to figure out what everyone was doing with onboarding their teammates et cetera.

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And I then developed a survey trying to study the remote onboarding experience of Microsoft

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software developers that onboarded between the beginning of the pandemic through July 2020,

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and asked a bunch of questions about the challenges and what teams are doing

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and interactions with the teams and connectedness - social connectedness.

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I'm not going to go to - into detail on these because I want to talk about what

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we take away from this, this work, but we did send over a thousand emails out.

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We had 267 responses collected and all of these were employees at Microsoft in

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North America just due to the different timelines of COVID happening and - all of the people who

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were surveyed were people who were onboarding from home and or had onboarded from home at the time.

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But from all of this, there's some papers about it, but the most important thing really is just

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the simple rules for remote onboarding - and the rules for remote onboarding - remote

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onboarding are so important because you do want to have that job satisfaction early on

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so that the team member is productive, so they're not jumping ship to company to company,

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because we're seeing that every day.
My Twitter is full of people going back and

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forth to different companies right now, and so we have seven simple remote onboarding rules that we

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know empirically work, and so these are the seven.
I'm going to talk about them more in detail in a

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second but I do want to note that onboarding is the entire team's responsibility: it's not the

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manager's responsibility and it's definitely not the new hires responsibility, it's everyone's.

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So these rules go for everyone on the team.
So what you should do, the first thing is,

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your camera should be on during all meetings: it should be the default culture.

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Managers should encourage this by having their cameras on.

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Of course there can be some rules, like, you know, if you're eating or something's going

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on you don't have to have it on, but having cameras on helps people match a face to a name

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to a person talking, and build social connectedness between team members.

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Also you should promote proactive communication, and this comes from

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the manager but also from the entire team.
New hires can feel anxious when they start and

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they might not know the right way to communicate with the team and how they normally go about that,

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so promoting that is imperative early on.
And some of the other things you can do

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with that are schedule one-on-one meetings with all team members.

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And this should be the manager scheduling the meetings with each teammate with the new hire,

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so everyone should have a one-on-one with the new hire, not just the manager,

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ideally in, like, the first week.
Additionally we found that a lot

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of people didn't understand where they fit in at the company, so explaining the organization chart

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is imperative so that someone knows who to go to - to ask different questions or get advice,

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or, you know, dig into some code with them.

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So explaining that early on is very helpful.
Having an actual diagram to give them even better.

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Another thing you should do on day one - day one - you should

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come in with an onboarding buddy for your new hire and a technical mentor - two different people.

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The onboarding buddy should be from some other team maybe, not even in the same org,

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but in the company technical management - should be someone on their team.

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And the difference is, the onboarding buddy helps them with, like, the general things like HR,

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meeting new people, networking, and the technical manager or mentor is

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someone who can actually go into the code with them and help them

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on their tasks and explain how their workflow works for that team etc.

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Another thing is to assign multiple onboardings or be able to support multiple onboarding speeds.

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So if you take someone from college who had just graduated versus someone who is leaving a big tech

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company to another one, they are going to need different speeds for onboarding, because someone

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could have been working in the company - in big tech and big companies for 20 years or more - they

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know a lot of the things that they already need to know and can easily pick up onboarding, versus a

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new graduate from a university with a bachelor's who has never worked in industry, they're going

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to need a little bit more help in onboarding.
And then finally a assigning a simple first

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task so that the new hire can quickly learn the workflow, can make a pull request very quickly

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and feel productive and also be able to sit into meetings with the team and understand what is

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going on, because they've already been in that code, their hands are dirty in the code, they,

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you know, hopefully have been able to complete this task in the first week or two.

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So my question for you all is, do you have a checklist containing these rules?

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Because I really hope you do, and if not I hope your recruiters are excellent because

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you're going to need them in the near future, and you'll be relying on them to help you recruit

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during this great resignation.
So I hope you have this checklist,

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and if you have any questions or want to chat more

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about onboarding or remote onboarding feel free to contact me at my email.

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And this is just some of the work that's been published based on this - we have some work on

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remote onboarding and allyship and remote onboarding of new hires, it's all public,

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and I'd love to talk more about it.
Thank you very much.