What are the best ways and tools to onboarding for the developers? How do you make them feel welcome and part of the team? And how do you connect with them when working remotely?
To answer these questions, we invited Gabriel Paunescu, CEO at Naologic, and Vindya Dassanayake, Software Development Team Lead at UCL, to join us for a virtual roundtable discussion on the best practices for successfully onboard your remote developers.
In case you missed it, don’t worry! Here are the main takeaways from our last UTOPIC0DE Tech Talk: Best onboarding practices for your tech team.
1. The do’s and don’ts of onboarding
A successful onboarding process will make sure your new developers are more engaged, motivated, and productive from day one. Here are some helpful do’s and don’ts from our experts to make your remote onboarding process as efficient and welcoming as possible.
DO provide a personalized onboarding experience
Onboarding can vary depending on the type of developer or team of developers you’re trying to recruit. For example, someone who has been programming for ten years will probably have fewer questions than a junior developer. Each team member is different, so make sure you understand their role and what they need.
Here are some insights from Gabriel:
- If you’re hiring an engineer manager, focus more on team dynamics, budget planning, hours, and burn down charts.
- If you’re hiring a front-end developer, don’t walk through the entire architecture, but only through the front-end architecture and what they need to do.
- If you’re hiring a junior developer, just try to make the best experience possible. Junior developers are less experienced, so walk them through the architecture, get them to ask questions, have them meet the team and, finally, assign them sub-tasks that are part of larger tasks to execute.
DON’T overwhelm new hires
Prioritize the training and only show new hires the things that are essential for them to be able to do their job. Overwhelming new employees with too much information at once can lead to confusion, stress, and frustration.
Send all the documents with basic information about the new job, the company, and the onboarding process before your new hire starts. As Vindya explains, developers are usually motivated and excited about their new job and don’t want to spend the first day of work filling in forms and reading documents. So, if you wish to create an engaging onboarding experience from day one, it’s so much better to focus on how to integrate new hires into your team.
DO assign a buddy to each new hire
New hires will feel more comfortable if you have a designated employee or “buddy” for them on their first day. This will help them get to know about team dynamics and culture and allow them to feel welcome and motivated.
“The important thing is to never leave someone on their own,” Vindya explains. “There should always be a mentor who sends new hires the necessary documentation, tells them what to do, and checks-in with them at the end of the day.”
Mentors are usually team leaders or senior, experienced people. However, as Gabriel points out, everybody should be a mentor. Everyone is encouraged to say hi to the new team members, have quick meetings, and get to know them.
DO build team dynamics
In the first week, it is important to help new hires feel welcome and part of the team despite not being in the office. Set up virtual meetings to introduce the new employee to their new coworkers and allow them to ask questions.
“At Naologic, when new members enter the team, we give them access to a very complex part of the code,” Gabriel says. “We assign new devs difficult tasks because we want them to explore, get stuck, and ask questions to their colleagues until they get it right. This will make them more comfortable when asking questions at work.”
DON’T forget to ask for feedback
Ask employees what they thought of the onboarding process and whether they have recommendations for improvement, not only immediately after the onboarding but also once they’ve been on the job. In the case of negative comments, accept criticism, and see it positively: it’s an opportunity to change and do better. In the end, as Vindya highlights, your onboarding process will definitely mature as your organization grows.
2. Tips for better communication with remote teams
Remote teams face unique communication challenges, such as coordinating across time zones, difficulties with technologies, and lack of face-to-face interaction. Discover how to manage and overcome these challenges with the following tips from Vindya and Gabriel.
How to transmit culture from day one
New hires should learn the inner workings of both the company and their team as early as possible.
According to Vindya, hiring managers, team leaders, and senior employees should have frequent check-ins with new team members. In this way, they can monitor their work and see how things are going, setting the right culture from the beginning.
Also, everything should be as collaborative as possible. As Gabriel explains, if there is an open collaboration from day one, you can train skills pretty fast and fix any other problem.
How to effectively communicate expectations and goals to your dev team
Ensuring that your team members know what’s expected of them is key in being able to lead an efficient, successful dev team. While large companies usually have a designated project manager who sets tasks and deadlines and communicates how things should be done, startups make team members feel comfortable asking questions and checking in with colleagues.
“At UCL, we clearly define expectations, goals, and criteria. We have detailed user stories, so developers know what to do and when,” Vindya says.
Here are some extra tips from Gabriel:
- Hold regular meetings
- Give constant feedback
- Explain the business process behind a product and why things have to be done in a certain way
- Show developers how to test their work
How to overcome communication challenges
Different time zones, connectivity issues, and mic problems can make communication difficult. To solve these problems, Gabriel recommends using asynchronous communication tools:
“At Naologic, things have got a lot better since we use Loom. Before, if we wanted to show the bug to a colleague and ask for help on how to solve it, we had to get on a video call. Now, we can just film the screen, explain what we want to do, and send the video. Team members can answer later without interrupting other tasks.”
3. Building social connections in a remote team
Building strong connections is a key part of building a strong onboarding experience, but how can you help your team feel more connected and motivated? Vindya and Gabriel share with us what they do to bring their remote team together.
- Have live meetings. If you’re writing emails or messages, you can’t see other people’s faces or read their body language. Video conferencing allows team members to show their emotions and feel connected, avoiding misunderstandings.
- Organize team-building activities. Many simple but fun activities can help your team get to know each other. Need an idea? 💡 Ask each team member to take a picture of his or her desk. Make sure they leave their working space as it is because this gives a true representation of them. Then, get everyone else to try and guess who’s desk is who’s.
- Have one-on-one meetings with your employees. Use this time to talk about personal life, hobbies, jokes — anything but work!
- Keep your team in the loop. Tell your employees things that go beyond their role and daily tasks and keep them updated on everything that’s going on in the company.
How to make your new employees feel welcome and valued
People want to feel appreciated for what they do, especially by their managers. For this reason, Gabriel organizes one-on-one meetings with his employees to let them know what they did well and thank them for their efforts and contributions.
In some cases, as Vindya suggests, it’s also important to praise employees in team meetings — they will get extra motivated, especially if they are junior developers!
Try to give feedback as frequently as possible. Acknowledge the positive aspects of each employee’s performance, but don’t avoid negative feedback. As Vindya points out, when you see something that’s not going well, you should give feedback quite quickly to correct the course.
Ways to get team members to know each other
- Pick a name out of a hat. Randomly choose two or three people so they can meet.
- Competitive hackathons. In these events, developers, especially new graduates, can collaborate on software projects and use their knowledge and creative skills for ideating and problem-solving.
- Proof of concept. If you’re looking at new technologies that you might add to your tech stack, dedicate an entire day, possibly a Friday, to building something that has nothing to do with what you’re doing at work. This experiment will definitively connect your team members.
4. The best onboarding tools
And last but not least, here’s a list of some of the best onboarding tools and collaboration tools for remote teams:
Zoom: a cloud-based video conferencing service that you can use for virtually meeting with others.
Jira: software for bug tracking and agile project management.
Clubhouse: project management software for software development teams.
Trello: visual collaboration tool that enables teams to organize and prioritize projects.
GetGuru: knowledge management solution that works with different apps, Gmail, Slack. It’s a great tool for documenting internal processes so that everyone knows how they need to do things.
Github: development platform for host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 50 million developers.
Loom: video recording tool that helps you get your message across through instantly shareable videos.
Ghost: a free and open-source blogging platform. You can use Ghost to create private documents and blogs.
Cloudflare: cloud-based network security platform for web application security and performance.
Companies across the world are adapting to the new normal and are now onboarding new talent remotely. With this article, UTOPIC0DE aims to empower hiring managers, team leaders, CTOs, and founders to onboard remote developers with confidence and ease. We believe that these main takeaways from our roundtable discussion with Gabriel Paunescu, CEO at Naologic, and Vindya Dassanayake, Software Development Team Lead at UCL, will help you create the perfect onboarding experience for your new dev team.
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