Summary

If a new hire can join your team and start contributing asynchronously in a short time, it shows that you’re running a tight ship. This article, a repost from reworked.co, shares three patterns for effective onboarding to distributed teams.

For many,the concept of “asynchronous work” won’t be new. Async-first collaboration is straightforward. I like to break it down as a combination of three principles:

1. Meetings are the last resort, not the first option.

2. Writing is the primary means of communicating in a distributed team.

3. Everyone on the team is comfortable with “reasonable lag” in communication.

Each of those three principles is hard-edged for a reason. Asynchronous collaboration is not the end-all. It’s a means to an end. You get six benefits from async-first that are invaluable for high-performing teams: work-life balance, diversity and inclusion, deep work, improved knowledge sharing, scalable communication and a bias for action.

Teams that value these benefits follow the three principles I outlined at the start almost religiously. Hence the hard edge.

That said, not everyone who joins your team will be comfortable working asynchronously from day one. It’s not sufficient to say, “Don’t set up meetings, write a lot and make peace with lag.” Being new to a team is an anxious time for most people. Dealing with that anxiety through the deafening silence of remote work is disconcerting. Without the right onboarding mechanics in place, even experienced asynchronous collaborators may struggle to work in certain teams. So in this article, I want to tell you about three mechanics that I employ when I onboard people to teams I lead.

First, start with a checklist

At its core, onboarding is a series of steps a new hire must follow before they can contribute to your team. I suggest building a precise checklist that takes away guesswork from the onboarding process. Here’s what makes an onboarding checklist effective.

• Bare minimum only: It’s already overwhelming to be in an unfamiliar team. It’s even scarier for some people to onboard themselves remotely. Don’t throw the kitchen sink at your new hires. Ask yourself about the shortest path to productivity. What’s the least the new hire must do, to make their first, however small, contribution to the team?

• Action-oriented: Each checklist item should be about doing something. Start each item on the list with a verb - “read,” “complete,” “fill out,” “get access” and so on. When you phrase checklist items this way, the new hire knows exactly what they must do.

• Say “by when”: Everything doesn’t have to happen on the same day. Provide a due date for each item, so the new hire can not just keep themselves accountable, but also pace themselves. To make the checklist easy to maintain, you can even state broad time scales, instead of specific dates — e.g. what to do in the first week versus what to finish in the first month.

• Single source of onboarding truth: The checklist should be the only document a new hire needs to guide themselves through the onboarding process. Of course, it can hyperlink to other content, but as the onboarding designer you must think of the checklist as a hub that leads to many other spokes.

• Thin spokes of content: Speaking of spokes, it is critical to design your onboarding content so it's lightweight. Resist the lazy temptation to reuse existing decks and documents. Instead, walk a mile in a new hire’s shoes and create bespoke content for onboarding use cases. If a piece of information is not essential to a new hire’s first contribution, be ruthless and eliminate it.

Remember, design is not about adding everything that’s potentially useful to an outcome. It’s more about cutting things out until you have nothing left but the essential product. Think about your onboarding checklist this way, and your new colleagues will thank you for it. 

Second, give them a shot at an open goal

Onboarding checklists set people up with the knowledge and access they need to make their first contribution. But they won’t be enough. The standard pattern of asynchronous work is to look at the team’s board of work (on Jira, Asana, Trello, etc.) and pick up the next, highest-priority task. When someone joins a new team, this can be a daunting endeavour! 

This is where you, as a manager, must set them up to succeed. For every new hire that joins your team, shape up an initial mini-project that they can execute by themselves. Provide all the context they’ll need in writing and any steps you think they might need to follow to complete the project. Maintain a balance between guiding and prescribing. Leave some room for them to experiment and implement the task creatively while providing guardrails, so they don’t thrash around and frustrate themselves. 

This first project can set your new teammate up with a shot at an open goal. Success is addictive, and when new hires can experience success early on, they gain the motivation to do even better the next time around.

One word of caution: Be sure that this mini-project you set up is real, even challenging work, not a throwaway toy. People should be able to see the value that a new hire has delivered. It doesn’t just establish them as contributing team members, but it also gives them the confidence that they can make an impact.

Third, wear your coaching hat

Regardless of how much experience a new hire comes with, they don’t quite know about your ways of working or your standards until they dive into the deep end. It can frustrate new hires to get stuck in infinite review loops, where they complete work and someone says they didn’t do it right. It only takes a few such instances before they doubt their ability or their choice to work in your team. Thankfully, such an outcome is easy to avoid.

If your team works async-first, I assume it frees up a lot of your time as well. You must reinvest some of this time into meaningful synchrony. You’re a manager and a leader for a reason — you know your people’s jobs well. So pair with your new colleague to guide them through their first task from the project you created for them. Let them drive, while you navigate. Paired work like this is an effective way to show recruits how you organize your team’s artifacts and the standards you follow. It’s also a great way for you to learn about their problem-solving approach and the skills they bring to your team. Win, win, I’d say! 

This short stint of paired work sets up your relationship with your new teammate as well. They’ll know that they can count on you for help when they need it. Moreover, they’ll experience everything they may have read about your ways of working, in the flow of a real-world task. 

Sometimes managers may not be the best person to pair with their team members. For example, an engineering manager isn’t the best candidate to team up with a new designer. In such cases, find the next best option — maybe it’s the design lead or the product manager. The key here is to find an able navigator!

Wrapping up

Onboarding efficiency is a proxy measure to know how effectively you’re managing your remote team. If a new hire can join your team and start contributing asynchronously in a short time, it shows that you’re running a tight ship. But more importantly, an efficient onboarding approach helps your new colleagues experience all the ingredients of a high-performing team:

• The onboarding checklist provides them with the structure and clarity to guide their first few days on the team.

• The mini-project adds to it while giving them the psychological safety to experiment and use their unique problem-solving skills. It also helps them connect to the team’s purpose by making a tangible impact.

• And finally, pairing with your new hires shows them they have dependable colleagues who care about their success. It also helps them experience the team’s ways of working without the fear of failure. 

So the next time you know of a new person joining your async squad, plan and implement these three techniques. Seek that new joiner’s feedback on this fresh approach and see if it helps them integrate effectively into your team. Whatever the result, I’m sure you’ll be richer for the experience!