Hello, Habr! My name is Sergey Leonidov, I am the CEO of the financial marketplace Sravn.ru. In this article, I will share my own experience and thoughts on adapting remote developers. I note that this is an extremely important process for both the company and the new employee. It is beneficial for the company that the developer joins the team and begins to effectively perform the assigned tasks. Employee - seeks to get along with colleagues and management, so that work in a new place becomes comfortable.
The process of employee adaptation, onboarding, takes a long time. It is not a day or two, perhaps weeks or months. Now the situation is further complicated by the fact that a large number of companies have switched to remote operation.
Adaptation speed of remote workers
On average, an employee takes about two months to adapt. This is true for both offline and online work. But adaptation in the office and at a remote location is, as they say, "two big differences."
Features of getting started in the office:
- Tour of the office and departments, general acquaintance with the company
- Meeting other employees, first impressions of the team
- Signing a paper contract
- Conversation with HR and, if necessary, with other employees in the kitchen
- Joint dinners, communication, office activities
Features of starting remote work:
- Getting to know Zoom. I personally hold a meeting, talk about the company, the principle of work, and also listen to the ideas of a new employee
- Welcome letter
- Signing a contract through a courier
- Receiving a laptop and necessary equipment from a courier
- Communication and all introduction to work online
As you can see, onboarding offers slightly fewer opportunities for remote employees, which often complicates the process of infusion into the corporate culture. The process can be accelerated by immediately involving a new developer on a joint project. The attitude of the team leader is also of great importance - he must pay a lot of attention to the new employee.
How to make the adaptation process effective?
As mentioned above, the leader should be primarily interested in this. Companies where adaptation is considered important use the following techniques and tools.
Adaptation Pack
This is a common tool and has been and is used by many companies, both in the office and distributed.
Ideally, such a package should be divided into time intervals and logical blogs (a beginner gaining access to company resources, familiarizing a developer with his responsibilities, studying corporate rules, etc.).
On the first day, you need to organize the following:
- Receiving a welcome letter, which tells about the company, links to all the necessary information
- Gaining access to the company's production infrastructure, including GitHub, Jira, Slack, etc.
- :
- — , , ,
- - — Buddy,
The adaptation package must include documents, manuals, handbooks and all resources in general. In the first week, when the new developer gets acquainted with the proposed information, it is worth taking feedback from him, to clarify if there are any questions.
Why is the adaptation package good? Thanks to him, the employee understands what needs to be done first, who can be contacted for obtaining equipment, access, signing documents, etc.
Isolating Personal Tools
A number of companies provide work equipment for their employees, whether they are working in or out of the office.
Receiving equipment with pre-installed corporate software can greatly facilitate the adaptation process for a new developer in a new team. The materials the new developer works with must be updated before being issued. The accesses and structure must be carefully checked.
Laptops, monitors, and other accessories are most often sent home by courier - this is safer in terms of the epidemiological situation, and resources are distributed more quickly.
A new employee who gets a job in an office in Sravn.ru receives the necessary equipment and also signs a paper contract.
As for the remote workers, the developers receive the equipment with a courier service. In addition, he receives a welcome letter, which contains links to all the resources necessary for work.
Programs and Services
This section provides work tools rather than specific onboarding services and applications:
- Slack - Corporate chat for employee communication
- Working mail
- Jira - Our task board
- Confluence - Our wikipedia and document filing tool
- Skype and Zoom - tools for creating conferences and calls
- Miro - Online board for visual discussion of material
- Figma and Zeplin - Tools for working on product design
- Power Bi - A tool that analysts use to show their data
- 1C Enterprise - Tool for our financial department, as well as the sales department
- Mango telephony - Tool for our CC
- Usedesk - A tool for processing requests and problems from users of our products
- Microsoft Azure –
- GitHub GitLab – ,
- PRTG Grafana –
- Hurma — , HR, , ( , , dayoff ..) .
Partner / Buddy
Despite the checklist, handbook and all other methods of getting to know a newcomer with a company, he will still have questions. It is very important that the developer has a person for the first week or month to whom he can turn to in any situation.
It is best to single out a team member who will help the newbie with all this. Buddy, as the "mentor" is most often called, must show and tell about all the features of working in the company and his team in particular. At the end of the first month, it is worth getting feedback on the adaptation process from the beginner himself.
An important point is that you should not overload a newbie with information, he may simply get confused and the adaptation process will drag on, and for a long time. After communicating with a partner, a newcomer should understand well why he came to the company, what goals he has and what they want from him.
In addition to Buddy, the team lead should also help the new developer. He should be interested in the life of an employee in order to understand what this person is - not only as a professional, but also as a person. Very often, adaptation is influenced by various life events. Being aware of these events and understanding their impact on a person is one of the responsibilities of a mentor.
Little by little, other colleagues will help, with whom the new developer will contact. As a result, the adaptation of a newbie is about 50% dependent on Buddy, 20-30% on the lead, the rest is on other colleagues.
In a company, a remote employee is often helped to join the Product Owner team. He introduces the newcomer to the team, the project that is currently being worked on, and the tasks. In addition, once every two weeks, company leaders give a presentation to newcomers, talking about the mission, values, teams and their tasks. This presentation is available to all employees.
Downtime
In the first few days, a new developer will be understanding the specifics of the work processes and organizational structure of the company in which he fell.
In addition, a beginner needs to study the technical documentation base of the company's project / projects, evaluate the code of his predecessor, and think over a plan for his own work. To process all the information received, it is worth providing “downtime” when the employee can calmly familiarize himself with new information for himself.
This is a good way to improve the quality of the adaptation process.
One of our new employees, who got a job at a remote job in the spring of 2020, shared her experience of adaptation in the company: “I came to the company in the midst of quarantine, the first month I did not see any of my colleagues. The only scary thing was that all communication took place remotely, provided that you still do not know anyone. I was worried that all communications would be in the mail. As soon as I was connected to a corporate messenger, all fears immediately passed. I think Slack is the best communication tool within a company. On the third day after employment, I had the feeling that I had been working in the company for at least a year. All issues were resolved immediately, I instantly received feedback from colleagues. If someone could not help me, they always told me who to turn to. And when it was necessary to immediately involve several people in the task,just create a group chat. My main advice is not to be a snob, to maintain normal human communication and a positive attitude, even when you are tackling serious problems. ”
results
You can understand whether a new developer has adapted by how efficiently they perform their tasks. If the onboarding process goes well, the developer starts to close the first tasks in the first days after starting a new job. He reaches an average efficiency in a month, and becomes a full member of a distributed team in 2-3 months.