[POC] Why you get a personal onboarding coach during the First 4 weeks

In our opinion, it is important that new team members experience a smooth onboarding. This challenges us every summer when we welcome around 100 interns. In order to "survive" that period we had to develop great organizational structures and practices to make it smooth for the new team members and for ourselves.

Let me point out a couple of important aspects of our mindset:

1. We are all looking forward to getting new team members on board. We know that we will learn from each other.

2. We carefully select our onboarding coaches. They are eager to coach new team members and they are well capable.

3. We are disciplined and we strive for perfection.

4. We are mindful and open-minded for improvements.

5. We are proactive. We’d rather shape the future than lament about the past.

Let me now expand a little on each of those aspects.

1. A positive mindset

We approach onboarding with a positive mindset. First, we are very selective during the application process. So we can be confident from the beginning that they will be great interns. Second, our coaches treat the new team members as high potentials.

Many people start their careers with us. We are the first impression that young people have of the world of work that will accompany them for many years. This first impression should remain motivating and positive in their memory.

1. Capable and eager coaches

Coaching new team members is the first step on our leadership ladder. Not everybody has a natural talent and not everybody actually wants to become a leader. Still for many people it’s desirable, or at least they want test the waters, to know what it feels like to lead other people. So we do the following: First, identify potential coaches. Second, test for their willingness and capability. Third, educate them on our approach to coaching. Fourth, collect and share feedback on how well they did.

1. Discipline and perfection

We know that a lot of people have to collaborate efficiently in order to onboard so many new team members. That’s only possible with high quality if everybody involved knows exactly what to do. Therefore we have defined a couple of roles (like Recruiter, Back Office, Office Admin, People Operations, Coach, etc.). We have collected tasks for each role and organized those tasks into task chains to ensure that everything is thought of.

1. Open for improvement

Whenever something goes slightly wrong we try to understand whether it was just bad luck or whether there’s more to it. We’ve consciously built the “four-eyes principle” into our task chains to make sure that crucial tasks get done properly and in time. We have also institutionalized surveys at some points (like when the application process is over, halftime through the onboarding and at the end of the onboarding) in order to collect feedback from all sides (candidate, new team member, coach). Together that’s a dense safety net so that not a lot can go wrong. And if there’s a hint for improvement, we take a deep dive.

1. Proactive

We communicate a lot upfront:
Coaches get in contact with new team members weeks before the first working day. We don’t just collect feedback from the new team members at the end of the onboarding phase but we invite them to a survey after two weeks already. Together that allows for new employees to prepare themselves early on.

Communication is the Key

Our approach also reduces the likelihood for disappointments.
We have learned hard: "Communication is the key."

To achieve that we need to teach new team members to ask questions otherwise they might struggle on their own for too long. So they also learn that they are meant to be proactive. However, some fall back to the more comfortable position.

That sounds like it's not rocket science. But on the other hand, it’s also more than common sense.

Our onboarding coaches spend a lot of time together with our new team members, expectedly 40 hours of pair working during the first 2 weeks. They sit next to each other and get to know each other well. The overall goal for the coach is “to manage the learning curve” of the new team member.

At the beginning, it’s important to provide small, achievable tasks and clear goals to the new team member with a lot of feedback – otherwise he/she might be overwhelmed and feel anxiety. Over time, the coach can assign larger and more difficult tasks to the new team member (to avoid boredom).

All in all, our onboarding approach works fine and we know for sure that we’ve set up all our internal processes for continued growth. There is always space for improvement but we can scale since we are used to excessive organizational growth during the summer.