The situation
The team is working well and doing great stuff, but business is growing and there is more work than they can achieve. You are prioritising the items with the highest value. The team is working hard and smart. You want to do more, so you are recruiting, which is causing a few challenges:
- Bringing new people to a team disrupts the rhythm and effectiveness of that team.
- People coming in have assumptions about how things work based on their previous experience.
- New starters are keen to contribute and get frustrated when they can’t make progress. They worry about passing their probation.
Approaches for successful onboarding
Bringing in new people is a change to the team and its dynamics. Like all changes, it is about adapting to the change. Here are some approaches to minimise disruption and fast-track the benefits:
- Most organisations have mandatory training on things like GDPR, health and safety, and information security. Give your new starter time to complete their mandatory training upfront, so they are not trying to fit it into gaps in their work schedule. That way, when the training is complete, they can focus on their work and apply what they have learned, without the context switching between working and training.
- Have an onboarding process which is documented and repeatable. Reflect on the process regularly and make improvements based on feedback from the new starters. Remember to remove items with low value as well as adding in new ideas
- When new members join a team, existing team members should talk them through the Team Charter. Whilst in the mid to long-term, bringing in a diversity of thinking is beneficial, in the short term, there may be misunderstandings. Get the new team member involved in creating or updating the charter.
- Have regular catch-up training sessions for new starters so they benefit from training received from the rest of the team. Some organisations will regularly run introduction-level courses such as Introduction to Agile. This re-baselines people’s understanding of the common agile processes and can prevent antipatterns from previous companies from being introduced with new starters.
- Train new starters on the processes developed for the organisation, such as quarterly planning, dependency management or how highly configurable systems, a system such as Jira, have been set up for use in that organisation. It needs to tie in with the day-to-day experience of the team and not be a theoretical ideal, bearing little resemblance to reality.
- As the teams grow, it becomes harder to collaborate once a team gets to around 10 people, it is likely to become less effective. Splitting the team into smaller, more focused teams often results in an increased throughput compared to a single, larger team.
- Bring in team players; people who are willing to occasionally work outside their specialism (sometimes called ‘Generalised Specialists’ or ‘T-shaped’ people) so the most valuable work can be progressed rather than pulling in the work to fit the people. This allows the team to focus on common goals rather than individual tasks.
Summary
- Bringing new people in will always cause some disruption, look to minimise disruption by having an onboarding process which allows teams to become more effective, and more quickly.
- The onboarding process, like any process, can be improved. Review the process regularly, and add, remove or update elements as required.
- Having team charters is a great way for new starters to understand the team’s working practices.
Additional Reading
