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Introduction to onboarding practices

Onboarding (also used term) employee adaptation) is the process of familiarizing a new employee with the company, its accepted features, processes, business specifics, standards, etc. It is believed that at some point a person goes to "full capacity", and at this point we believe that his onboarding is completed.

Onboarding can include several components:

onboarding It is an immersion in projects, technologies and specific agreements that are accepted in the team: how to write code, why PostgreSQL is used instead of MySQL, what services are used in the project and how they are related, and so on.
boarding Getting to know people, understanding who is responsible for what and who to approach on what issues; understanding the actions that a person should do in the first days / weeks / months of work; understanding what internal web services exist and how to work with them.
business-offering (immersion in a business domain) – familiarity with the specifics of the industry / business / product, terminology and business context of tasks.
cultural Immersion in the mission of the company, product, accepted engineering culture, possibly bordering on psychotherapy.

Onboarding is not a probationary period, it can be longer or shorter than this period.

What problems do onboarding solve?

Unit managers:
- New employees are long coming to the “production capacity”
- Onboarding new employees takes a lot of energy
- Separation of units
The knowledge manager:
- We need to develop a culture of knowledge sharing.
- We need to correct errors in the knowledge base.

Onboarding tools and examples of their implementation:

Report by Alexander Afenov Theory and practice of knowledge sharing in Lamoda Experience with using different tools knowledge management Improve the quality of adaptation of new employees.
Report by Gleb Deikalo Welcome aboard: Bringing new developers into the team, with a clear description of an onboarding checklist and an example document.

An important criterion for the success of onboarding is *full-time*Depending on your business, you can be normal for both onboarding in six months and onboarding for two days: for more complex, research and under-studied professions and positions, it will be longer, for linear low-skilled ones - it should be much smaller.

To determine the "full power" can, as a rule, the head empirically, and he can formulate formal criteria (for example: the employee independently solves a class of problems, or some frequent task begins to take less than N time, or some formal indicator reaches a certain value).