Handbook/Welcome letter

When you go to work, you get a handbook or a letter of greeting, and it’s a piece of artifact that contains all the information you need to know in the first few months of work and the instructions you need to do in the first few days.

It is probably pointless for companies with fewer than 30 people who are more visible and easier to answer questions in words (but that’s not accurate).

What problems Handbook solves

As with onboarding in general

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).

How to Start Developing and Implementing Handbooks

Classic examples of handbooks:

Valve New Employee Handbook One of the most famous examples.
GitLab HandbookAnd notice that GitLab is a distributed company, and they’re remote.
Tesla Anti-HandbookIt’s an atypical handbook. It describes all sorts of values and cultural things, like that each person has to discipline themselves, not do stupid things, take initiative, ask for feedback if you want feedback, warn about the absence, ask questions. In general, all this is common sense, but probably not obvious to everyone.
Facebook Little Red BookThe handbook describes the company’s goals and values and contains photos of its founding.

In the article How we implemented onboarding of new developers An example of handbook creation with a description of the necessary categories and questions is described.

Launch of the pilot project

The implementation of Handbook implies:

Writing of the document - most likely, you will need to find out details from representatives of different specializations (heads of production units, HR, marketing, accounting, company management).
Testing the document together with beginners In the simplest case, this can be done either by interviewing beginners and their leaders, and ideally, you can accompany newcomers daily to identify their difficulties.
Impact assessment Just like with other onboarding methods.
Ensuring updateability It requires all managers to be involved in the Handbook so that when critical business processes change, they can be reflected in the handbook, but at first, the update can be done through the knowledge manager initiative.

How do you provide a really useful handbook content and avoid the cargo cult and meaningless writing?

Scaling success

Scaling considerations

In the process of onboarding development, it can combine several approaches.

In the report Welcome to the board: Bringing new developers to the team (article) a comprehensive onboarding system is described, including: onboarding mentoring, office tour, automation and tracking of the onboarding process, rules for the preparation of Quick Start documents, practical tasks, testing of onboarders and ideas for design exercises.

It is also worth paying attention to the report of Alexander Afyonov "Turning Everyone Up: Onboarding New Employees"He has changed several leadership positions at Lamoda and has seen onboarding practices scale and change in the company, and he believes the framework has developed and is sharing it in the report.

Buddy is inside the team, who can be asked questions, meet regularly and share knowledge (this time is taken into account in sprint planning and encouraged at the performance review);
Immersion in the business of the company, in the tasks and problems that will have to be automated: induction lecture for several hours about the work of each department, about solving business problems, about successes and failures;
IT-onboarding: a story about development processes, infrastructure, who to go with, the history of technical solutions;
IT Gathering: Gathering IT once a quarter, where we go and where we come, what’s new, what’s up, and talking to newcomers as equals.
Excursion to the warehouse, a story about all production processes, where beginners see that they will automate (optionally: excursion to the photo studio, creating content for the site and the opportunity to be a courier-driver, deliver orders, wait for fitting, etc.);
Q&A every day, allotted time to ask questions, no substitute for 1-1 meetings.
Checklist: Everything a person needs to learn over a period of time, where to access and participate, such as what is shown on the board in Grafana.

Another report from Ruslan Ostropolsky from Sberzdravye about onboarding in a distributed team (dictionary and slides), he talks about three approaches to onboarding (teamlead lecture, mentoring and onboarding from the wiki system) and their pros/cons for different situations.

The speaker shared what is included in their onboarding "Quick Start":

Team culture and values, work approaches;
administrative and organizational matters;
tools and accesses;
Projects and teams who are responsible for what;
processes.

Interesting ideas:

Structure the beginner’s path in the form of a roadmap so that he sees the next steps and sequence of actions.
Use nested pages, cross-link between sections, for example, about development and testing, so different departments can support their pieces;
Use screenshots and videos;
Add contacts to help;
Assign each Definition of done item, which is the result of each step or how to verify its implementation.