RDEL #4: What’s harder about remotely onboarding engineers?
A majority of companies now onboard engineers remotely. What factors are more challenging when it comes to new engineer productivity?
Welcome back to RDEL! Each Monday, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.
For our fourth edition, we’ll look at a very consequential process that impacts all engineering teams - onboarding new engineers. Specifically, what’s changed about the process now that it’s mostly a remote process?
The context:
Onboarding refers to the first few weeks of ramp-up for new engineers. New engineers are building context on the codebase, tools, people, and processes to become a contributing member of the team. The onboarding process has an outsized impact on the productivity of both the new engineer and their overall team.
It’s also one of the most antiquated processes, often relying on a single or series of checklists to manage a workflow that can take three to nine months. In person, this process is often supplemented with pair programming or informal sessions with a teammate (known as a “buddy”). Remotely, those processes are harder to reproduce, leaving new engineers to fill in the gaps on their own.
So what’s harder about onboarding engineers remotely? And where can managers make small improvements with a big impact on new engineer productivity?
The research:
Paige Rodeghero, Thomas Zimmerman, and other researchers at Microsoft looked at the impact of onboarding new engineers in a remote setting using an organizational study of 267 new engineers at Microsoft. This survey was conducted in the summer of 2020, when virtually all US companies were remote. They posed a series of four research questions that dug into each new engineer’s process, interactions, social connection, and challenges as they ramp up to their new teams.
The key takeaways of the study were:
The six most common responses to “what challenges have you faced while onboarding to your team?” were communication and collaboration, asking for help, building team connections, finding documentation, technical questions, and hardware or permissions.
When asked what teammates have done to make new hires feel more connected, the most common responses were
Frequent 1:1s with the manager
Remote meetings to introduce teammates
Non-manager teammates checking in and offering support
Recurring “bonding” events
A distinct onboarding buddy
When asked how long remote communication sessions with teammates last, 72.9% said less than 30 minutes, and 43.4% said less than 15 minutes.
The researchers also summarized their observations and created a list of top recommendations for remote onboarding (thanks, team!). The results are below.
The application:
This paper’s findings and recommendations make it clear that in a remote setting, more attention needs to be placed on the onboarding process to unblock engineers, build connective tissue, and increase new hire velocity. The authors make a few succinct, actionable recommendations - like assigning an onboarding buddy - that organizations can easily implement to improve onboarding outcomes (some more recommendations are available here).
Broadly, as the onboarding process becomes more complex to account for the remote experience, the system to run it needs to be able to handle that complexity. Consider your existing onboarding structure - can you break the work into more digestible chunks? Or introduce tools to organize and manage the process effectively?
Onboarding is aptly referred to in this paper as a “necessary evil”, but there are many ways (as mentioned above) to improve the process to make those first few weeks successful for both new engineers and their team. Doing so also improves the entire team’s productivity 🎉
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Thanks for reading, and happy Research Monday!
Lizzie
From the Quotient team