> What are folks’ tips for making onboarding smoother?
The new employee's manager should expect to escort them continuously for the first week. Onboarding is, generally by design, a rare event and something will always go wrong. Quite often, managerial authority is required to cut through the logjams that appear.
Yes, there may be a stupid HR requirement--as a manager, let the new employee know that you understand this is stupid but that we just need to get it out of the way, anyhow. As an engineer in semiconductors, I have had to sit through the "Acids are bad, mmkay?" fab worker safety lectures more times than I can count even though I was not allowed to even get close to the production fab floor. That's just life due to lawyers.
>Onboarding is, generally by design, a rare event and something will always go wrong.
It is not (both). Hypergrowth startups and large companies onboard several dozens new people every month with limited HR, IT and management resources and usually do not have luxury to make a lot of things wrong in the process. Hence the need to optimize and build a standard operating procedure for it.
>The new employee's manager should expect to escort them continuously for the first week.
This task can be delegated to a „buddy“. It helps people to grow and spares some time for the manager (who still needs to plan some more time than usual for this new team member).
That seems to be a better solution. A new employee may hesitate to ask their manager questions that show they don't understand something. But they may feel less nervous about asking a co-worker. Also, a co-worker might have more relevant technical knowledge than a manager would.
The new employee's manager should expect to escort them continuously for the first week. Onboarding is, generally by design, a rare event and something will always go wrong. Quite often, managerial authority is required to cut through the logjams that appear.
Yes, there may be a stupid HR requirement--as a manager, let the new employee know that you understand this is stupid but that we just need to get it out of the way, anyhow. As an engineer in semiconductors, I have had to sit through the "Acids are bad, mmkay?" fab worker safety lectures more times than I can count even though I was not allowed to even get close to the production fab floor. That's just life due to lawyers.