Onboarding: The Good, The Bad, The Awkward

Steve, why is, um, why is it important to do a good job onboarding, uh, somebody?

Well, I think it, at least for me, I wanna feel as productive as possible right away, and poor onboarding is a barrier to that.

And, and, and it could manifest itself in many ways.

You talked about the parking lot.

I've been at my, I've been at my client for three weeks, and I don't know if I'm exactly parking in the right spot or not.

[laughs]

And, and it's not, like, a big deal.

It's not like I'm in the wrong spot, but they, like, have a parking ramp and then a lot.

I don't know if I'm allowed to park in the ramp when there's inclement weather or not.

I have no idea.

So I'm just parking in the lot, and I got rained on a couple of days, but, uh, it is what it is.

Um, but I would say over the course of my career, and I'll just make this statement, to varying degrees, organizations do a good or bad job of certain types of onboarding.

Yeah.

That's what I've found.

Um, some of them do a really good job, like I got my laptop and equipment, technical equipment right away.

I got an intro to it.

Great.

Other organizations, sometimes it's days or a week before all of that is set up and ready for me.

And I'll just turn it over to, to you to on, on, a- anyone else about that particular thing.

Just that first getting connected, getting to the building, getting connected.

I wanna throw a caveat out there that we don't always work with the people that do the onboarding for the company.

Sometimes we're working for somebody in a department, it might be IT, it might be wherever, that needs work done.

And so we're being onboarded by somebody that's maybe never done onboarding, and so they're just winging it.

So this is not a slam really.

It's just kind of, you know, talking about our experiences.