A recently-hired colleague at work shared an insight with me this week that hadn’t dawned on me before: onboarding is 80% self-directed learning and 20% tapping into tribal knowledge. Wouldn’t it be great if the tribal knowledge was documented, accessible, and structured?
So Slack provides history, depending on access, whereas new employees typically show up to an empty inbox. Some places seed the inbox with important messages, but these tend to be company-wide stuff, not the truly important issues (why was a decision made). The first 90 days are really about establishing context, normally of the personality variety. Onboarding wikis should accelerate the time-to-context. A person still needs to put the info in context for their role. Totally agree that everyone should be involved in writing, editing, and improving the stuff that matters to their roles. Also, as an aside, as a new employee it's important to understand why a certain path is being pursued and the reasons others weren't... this is where storytelling (which you've written about before) comes in. Keep it up!!!
So Slack provides history, depending on access, whereas new employees typically show up to an empty inbox. Some places seed the inbox with important messages, but these tend to be company-wide stuff, not the truly important issues (why was a decision made). The first 90 days are really about establishing context, normally of the personality variety. Onboarding wikis should accelerate the time-to-context. A person still needs to put the info in context for their role. Totally agree that everyone should be involved in writing, editing, and improving the stuff that matters to their roles. Also, as an aside, as a new employee it's important to understand why a certain path is being pursued and the reasons others weren't... this is where storytelling (which you've written about before) comes in. Keep it up!!!