Jason Fried's Blog, page 10
August 22, 2019
How I Wrote Shape Up
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes look at the development of our newest book, Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.
In August 2018, Jason Fried (Basecamp’s founder and CEO) asked me to write a book about how we work. “Sure thing!” I said — having no clue how to go about it or what it would entail.
I didn’t know how to write a book. But I did know how to give a workshop. So I put a call out on Twitter.
⭐️ Announcement: Join me for a one day workshop in Chicago, Dec 20th. "Shape and Ship 1.0" is a workshop on Basecamp's product management techniques. Learn how we design, develop and deliver new products and features. Apply by Dec 3. https://t.co/NAUxNiuVoG
— Ryan Singer (@rjs) November 28, 2018
The workshop was a prototyping device. It was going to do three things:
Force me to come up with a full day’s worth of content that could eventually become a book.Get instant feedback from an audience to learn what’s interesting, what resonates and what doesn’t.Put something out into the world that people could buy, so I could interview them afterward using the jobs-to-be-done approach.
I priced the workshop at $1,000 a seat and made people fill out a lengthy application before letting them buy a ticket. The application asked them to tell stories about problems they experienced with product development. Using their answers, I could screen out anyone who was merely curious or a fan but wasn’t really struggling. This created the best possible audience for getting feedback: hungry and motivated with skin in the game.
After the workshop, I emailed every attendee and asked if I could interview them by phone. The interview wasn’t about the workshop—it was about what was going on in their company when they decided to apply. I had a lot to say about product development, but I didn’t know which specific things actually mattered to people. I didn’t know what they were struggling with. The interviews gave me a way to learn what was going wrong in their teams, how they made the decision to attend the workshop, and what they hoped to get out of it.
I did a quick jobs-to-be-done analysis on the interviews and pulled out four jobs they were hiring the workshop to do. Since I considered the workshop a proxy for the book, I could use these jobs to define the key requirements.
[image error]Job 1
[image error]Job 2
[image error]Job 3
[image error]Job 4
Armed with a better understanding of the demand, I could flip to the supply side. How do I explain what we do? How should I structure the way we work into some kind of outline?
To do that, I used a technique I learned from Bob Moesta that he learned from Genichi Taguchi. The principle goes like this: to learn how an engine works, follow a drop of gasoline over time— from pouring it into the fuel tank and onward. For us, that meant trace the path of a project. Before it was a project, it was… what? An idea? A debate? A conversation?
With this point of view, we used a system mapping technique to spell out how a “drop” of work moved from one phase to another when we developed product at Basecamp.
[image error] Following a “drop” of work through a series of systems
That gave me the three-part structure for the book and the outline for all the chapters in the first draft. Part Three turned out to be tricky because there is a lot of looping. To arrive at the final structure for part three, I interviewed a couple people at Basecamp about situations when they reached for the techniques. That revealed struggling moments (“I hate asking for status…”, “I don’t have any progress to show…”) that I could use for the macro structure of Part Three.
The last major trick was the cartoons. Jobs have functional, social, and emotional components. The system map was intensely functional—all about how to get from this step to that step. The cartoons were a way to set the emotional and social context for each step. They also helped me focus by framing each chapter not just as a “step” but as a situation: who’s there, how do they feel, and why are they motivated to do this?
[image error]Setting the social and emotional tone for a chapter
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I wrote the first draft and drew the first sketches in dark mode on my iPad Pro. It helped me get out of the intimidating feeling of staring at a blank white page. I used Bear for the first drafts and drew the sketches in Notability. When I was purely writing, I’d use the Smart Keyboard. For times when I was alternating between sketching and writing, I folded back the keyboard and used a Logitech Keys-To-Go beside the iPad.
[image error]Writing and sketching at the same time in split window mode on the iPad
One thing took a lot of pressure off: Jason’s idea to launch Shape Up as a web book. Releasing it online meant a wide audience, a better chance for the ideas to spread, and — most importantly for me—the ability to make changes after the fact. The book had only the lightest editing when we launched it. Thanks to many tweets and emails from readers, the book was typo free within a couple days of launch.
Shape Up is available to read free online (we don’t even ask for your email address). Just today we released a downloadable PDF version.
The feedback so far has been amazing. Thanks everyone for reading and sharing the book.
August 19, 2019
Managing up
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You want to manage up – but what you really mean is that you simply want to work well with your boss.
Who doesn’t? Especially when your boss is pestering you with questions via Slack after work-hours, or failing to give you enough time to complete projects…
You sigh and think yourself: “How do I manage up effectively?”
This is one of the most common questions I’m asked – and, unfortunately, one of the most common situations that you might face, whether you’re a manager, executive or individual contributor.
Based on research we’ve done over the past five years with hundreds of managers and employees, and the insights shared in our online leadership community, The Watercooler, here are the 5 distinct ways you can manage up to have a better relationship with your boss:
Share progress more often than you typically would.
Your boss is craving to know what you’re working on. We recently conducted a survey of 355 people and learned that the #1 piece of information that managers want to know is the progress that’s being made on a project. As a result, you’ll want to ask yourself:Am I sharing the progress I’m making day-to-day or week-to-week? You can also ask your boss directly: “How can I give you more visibility into my work?” or “Are there any decisions or projects you wish I were more transparent about?” Additionally, in Know Your Team in fact, we have a tool called “The Heartbeat” that helps you do this with little to zero effort – it’s an easy way to automate daily or weekly check-ins with your team. I highly recommend taking a peek if you feel like your team doesn’t have an effective process for sharing progress.
Uncover your boss’ work preferences (even if they don’t do the same for you).
We all have preferences around the way we like to work – including our boss. Make sure you spend time asking questions to your boss to figure out what theirs are. The more you know about how your boss likes to work (e.g., how they prefer to receive feedback, when they’re most productive during the day), the more you can adjust your own behavior to increase the likelihood of a positive relationship with them. It may seem frustrating (rightfully!) that you have to be the one to instigate this conversation, if they haven’t already (they are your manager, after all) – but some people need the nudge. You can provide it
August 12, 2019
Giving unactionable advice
One of the common dings against our books REWORK and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (less so with REMOTE), is that we don’t include a lot of actionable advice. It’s a fair swipe.
It seems everyone’s after actionable advice. The advice that tells you exactly what to do. Read this, do exactly that, and here’s the outcome you can expect.
Yeah, no.
Most actionable advice isn’t advice at all, it’s opinion. Sure, you can give someone advice by giving them your opinion, but when you stitch actionable to the front of advice, it masquerades as fact. But it ain’t.
Why don’t we give actionable advice in REWORK and It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work? Because we don’t know how you should act. The action required in any specific situation is highly contextual. If we guessed we’d probably be wrong most of the time.
We can’t tell you what to do. We don’t know what you should do. We barely know what we should do! And most of the time we don’t.
What we can tell you, however, is what we’ve done. In our own unique situation, our own context. From there you can form your own opinion about how it applies to your situation. It’s an input, not the input. Maybe it’s a perfect fit, maybe it’s a partial fit. Maybe it’s not a fit at all. The important part of the equation is you bringing your own mind – and your own situation – to bear. Apply that heavily, not actionable advice lightly.
Seek out unactionable advice. You’ll figure more out.
How to build social connection in a remote team
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I’ll be shocked if you’re shocked: Building social connection in a remote team is the hardest part of managing a remote team. According to a survey we ran this past fall with 297 remote managers and employees, “fostering a sense of connection without a shared location” was seen as the #1 most difficult part of being a remote manager – and the #1 most difficult part of working remotely, in general.
It’s predictable. When you work in a co-located office, you walk by someone’s desk and give them a friendly hello, catching up about their weekend. You notice a coworker’s body language appears a little “down” so you ask if they want to grab coffee later. You share a joke over lunch with another colleague when you realize you both oddly adore the same brand of obscure New Zealand mints.
Those serendipitous moments of social connection don’t happen with the same frequency or fidelity when you’re working remotely. As a result, the sentiments of “Ah, we’re in this together” or “You’ve got my back” can be absent in a remote team, unless you deliberately foster them.
Scholars have described these sentiments as helpful for building “affective trust” – a form of trust based on emotional bond and interpersonal relatedness. It varies from the “cognitive trust” – which springs from reliability and competence. Both are influential to performance, but affective trust tends to be more salient for a team in the beginning of a relationship, according to studies.
Other studies show how detrimental the lack of social connection in a workplace can be. In a 2018 State of Remote Work survey conducted by Buffer, they found that loneliness was the biggest downside for 21% of remote employees, and one of the reasons that made them more likely to quit. Furthermore, in a separate survey with over 2,000 managers, 60% of respondents said they would be more inclined to stay if they had more friends at work.
The data doesn’t stop there: Another study revealed that individuals who had 15 minutes to socialize with colleagues had a 20% increase in performance over their peers who didn’t. Not to mention, there’s extensive research that exists on the positive impact that social relationships have on life expectancy.
Given this, how do you build social connection in a remote team? I pulled insights from our survey data, as well as from our online leadership community, The Watercooler, with over 1,000 managers from all over the world.
From it all, here are the most commonly cited – and reportedly most effective ways – that remote teams stay connected:
Ditch dull icebreakers for dynamic ones
How many times have you been asked, “How was your weekend?” or “Do you have any hobbies?” Shrug. Too many times. The questions feel tired, so the answers are tired. Rather, if your icebreaker questions are intriguing, cheeky, humorous – the answers you receive will be, too. One of my favorite icebreaker questions is, “What’s the one song you can’t stand right now?” We recently asked that here at Know Your Team, and the answers were nothing short of hilarious. Looking for more icebreaker question ideas? Check out the 25 specific best icebreaker questions to ask.
Many remote teams will kick off their weekly meeting with an icebreaker question or insert it during their morning stand-up meeting. Even more popular is asking a series of icebreaker questions during the onboarding process when hiring someone new (you can read more about onboarding in remote teams below). In fact, in Know Your Team we have a fun Icebreakers feature precisely for this purpose.
Over-emphasize onboarding
With affective trust being so important to foster in the beginning of a relationship, onboarding new hires well becomes even more critical for virtual team building. This is underscored by our survey results from last fall: We found that 69% of remote managers and employees who responded said they have a formal onboarding process at their company.
Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, a remote company with 200+ people, has a specific onboarding process that’s often partially in-person. He explains: “AirBnOnboarding, which when we hire folks within the first month, we actually do like to have them spend a week in person out here in the Bay Area. So we’ll rent an Airbnb, we’ll bring their manager out here, them out here and then spend a week working alongside them.”
Other companies follow a similar model of a “buddy system” for onboarding (you can read specifically more about buddy systems in remote companies below). At Help Scout, a remote company with ~80 people, they give each new hire what they call a “work best friend” (they have a fantastic write-up on their entire onboarding process here). At Automattic, a remote company with ~1,000 people, they “do a mix of self-guided training and buddy feedback,” as explained by Valentina Thörner, Happiness Team Lead at Automattic. Valentina shared with our other 1,000+ managers in The Watercooler, our online community:
“Each new hire is added to a mega-check list that will guide their work during the next 12 weeks. The list includes tasks for the new hire (e.g. “finish the course on debugging shipping extensions”), for the lead (e.g. “check access to scheduler tool, Zendesk, etc etc”) and for the buddy (e.g. “check in with new hire about xyz”). We constantly refine and add to the check-list. It’s easier to just check off a “no-brainer” task then to realize that every other hire/lead did NOT think that was a no-brainer and forgot about it.”
Build a buddy system
As discussed, many remote companies offer buddy systems for onboarding – but they also implement them as a fun way for every to interact socially and get to know each other better. In fact, in our survey, we found that 51% of remote managers and employees reported having a mentor mentorship program or buddy system.
This can take the form of assigning someone an official “mentor”, with whom they have one-on-one meetings once a week or bi-weekly to ask questions, and get acclimated to the company. It could also include randomly pairing 2 – 3 people every week to have a fun video chat over something non-work related. Either way, carving out and designating a specific relationship that’s shared between people is a way to be purposeful about encouraging social connections in a remote team– rather than merely hoping that an informal connection will form on its own.
Interestingly, mentorship within a company not only benefits the mentee. A 2013 studyfound people who have the opportunity to serve as mentors experience greater job satisfaction and a higher commitment to their employer. The benefits of having a buddy extend both ways.
Set scheduled video chats
If you can’t talk to folks face-to-face, the closest thing you can get to is to chat over video. It may seem unnatural at first, but as one survey respondent remarked: “Get comfortable with the awkwardness of video calls, and have them often.”
Help Scout organizes 15–30 minute coffee breaks over video between randomly assigned team members called Fikas. At Litmus, week to week, they get “Coworker Coffees” over video, drink beers on Skype, and play video games online. Other companies, as discussed in The Watercooler, will hold book club discussions or have specific topics or themes about video chats, such as food, music, etc.
In general, video being used for social connection in a remote team should feel more and more second nature. The most common frequency for video chats, according to our survey, was several times a week (32% of respondents).
Carve out a dedicated non-work chat channel
If you’re a remote team, you likely already have some sort of non-work-related chat channel. Many Watercooler members who work remotely remarked on its importance. Whether it’s a #cats channel in Slack, or a place to say “good morning” to everyone once you hop online, it’s essential for recreating the “watercooler chat” that you might have in an in-person office.
Most remote managers and employees in our survey shared that this kind of synchronous chat was their primary mode of communication (45% of respondents said this). Given this, a non-work related chat channel should fit well already into your existing work flow as a remote team.
Invest in company retreats – and do ’em right
At the end of the day, when it comes to social connection, nothing beats meeting in-person, face to face. According to our survey, we found that the most common frequency of meeting in-person was “several times a year” (25% said this), and that they spend on average $1,001 – $5,000 per employee (29% of respondents said this) to accomplish this. This can take several forms:
Most remote companies host some sort of yearly or a few-times-a-year meet-up. At Know Your Team, we try to get together at least twice a year in-person. Other companies do week-long retreats three times per year. Balsamiq takes a lighthearted, personal approach to their all-team retreats that focus getting everyone together to have a good time. Other company retreats optimize for working together side-by-side, having strategic discussions, thinking through tough problems. If you’re looking to plan a company retreat, here’s an excellent piece Buffer put together about their most recent one.In some companies, occasionally, mini-meetups happen where only some of the team members will meet in a location for a very specific reason. For example, a design team will get together for a few days to hash out a project.At other companies, throughout the year, they’ll fly in people to the HQ (if there is one) to kick off new projects, go to conferences together, or go to client meetings together.Some remote companies will often encourage team members that live closer together to meet, by reimbursing lunch etc.
Lastly, this came up from our Watercooler members, I promise: Use Know Your Team
I know, I know, this seems like a shameless plug. But in fact, it came up organically in our Watercooler community (see the screenshot) below:
Managers in remote teams have found us to be particularly useful for building social connection from afar. We in fact built Know Your Team as a means to help make social interaction in remote teams easier. Everything from our Icebreaker feature, which welcomes new employees, to our Social Questions, which ask a different, fun, non-work related question periodically, is centered around this. As a remote company ourselves, it’s how we get to know our own team.
Whatever you decide to implement – video chats, a buddy system, better icebreaker questions – social connection in a remote team will only happen with a little elbow grease. Be intentional. Set aside the time. Know it will require deliberation. It won’t happen organically.
Sure, it’s a little work. For many, it’s work well spent.
Claire is the CEO of Know Your Team – software that helps you avoid becoming a bad boss. Her company was spun-out of Basecamp back in 2014. If you were interested, you can read more of Claire’s writing on leadership on the Know Your Team blog.
August 6, 2019
No Half Measures
Pam Daniels had an idea to make an everyday household item—a set of measuring cups—more useful and fun. When her first plan to get her product into the world fell through, she found a different path. The latest episode of the Rework podcast tells the story of what it took to get one product launched.
A quick programming note: This is our last Rework episode until September, as we’re taking a short hiatus for the rest of August. During the break, we’ll play some reruns of the old (like ten years old!) 37signals podcast, so stay subscribed! We’ll be back with all-new episodes in September.
August 5, 2019
How to share your company vision as a leader
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“Company vision” might be the fluffiest business term I know.
Thrown around by every nearly business book and article, “vision” is often used vaguely, without nuance or thoughtfulness.
Yet despite it’s watered-down usage, “vision” is the most important information for us to communicate across a team. According to a survey we conducted with 355 people in the fall of 2018, vision was ranked as the #1 information people need to share in a team.
Given its significance, how to best share a company vision within a team?
Before we can answer that, we must start with what company vision exactly is and why it’s important. Then, we can dive into to how you can make sure it’s shared across the team.
First of all: What is company vision?
A vision is a picture of a better place. You see this picture in your head: It’s what you want the world to look like because your product or team exists. In many ways, your team’s vision is your opinion for how you think the world ought to be. A vision answers the question, “What world do you want to create?”
Vision is often misconstrued with other business-y terms, like “mission,” “purpose,” and “values.” But a vision is different from any of those things. For example, the company vision of Know Your Team is NOT “software that helps managers become better.” Nor is our vision to be “innovative” or “authentic.” Rather, our vision is “a world where managers and employees work well together, make progress, and communicate openly and honestly with one another.” It’s a place.
See the difference?
A vision is what you want to create (remember, it’s a place!). The mission of your team is why you want to get to that vision. Your team’s values are how you want to get to that vision.
Why does sharing a vision matter?
Sharing your company vision is important for four reasons: (1) it clarifies decisions (2) it decentralizes decisions (3) it makes decisions easier and (4) it can be the greatest source of motivation for your team. Let me explain.
Clarifies decisions.
In our online leadership community, The Watercooler, many members strongly emphasized the importance of sharing vision as the ultimate tool for decision making. One manager explained, “When the vision is clear, you give your team something explicitly to point to in decision making.” The vision is the compass that all decisions are oriented around.
Decentralizes decisions.
When the vision is shared across the team, each team member can have greater autonomy. Your team now has a shared destination on the map, so your manager doesn’t need to be ordering a series of coordinates instructing everyone how to get there. No more micromanaging.
One member of The Watercooler, a CEO, discussed how he shares the vision with his team deliberately with this in mind:
“My goal with this is to transfer the ability to make decisions to every person. If we are clear about why we do what we do, our [vision] becomes a filters through which any employee can make decisions that align with who we are and what we’re about. But all of this is predicated on us as leaders regularly sharing this stuff.”
Makes decisions easier.
A shared vision also helps a team make decisions amidst disagreement. When people argue over how to grow the sales or whether to pursue a project, this shared vision is a uniting force that can override seemingly irreconcilable differences in opinion. It can also give your coworkers the courage to speak up and offer dissenting opinions, since they know what the ultimate vision of the team is that they’re trying to achieve.
Greatest motivator for your team.
When shared, a company vision is the most powerful way to motivate a group of people. It gives your team a common place to strive for. When each person clearly sees that same picture of a better place in their own minds’ eye, each person connects to it and feels that pull of motivation to want to create that place.
How can you share the company vision in your team?
Here are three recommendations you can put into practice:
#1: Over-communicate vision at all-team meetings
The most common way cited by our survey respondents to share company vision was to utilize team meetings (57% of people do this). All-team or all-company meetings are an ideal opportunity to have this discussion: Everyone is present (most of the time, at least!) and you’re carving out time to talk about broader team and company issues. Twenty-nine percent of people said that their teams hold these meetings once a month, while 28% of them do them once a quarter. Regardless of the frequency, the most important thing is that you hold some sort of regular all-staff meeting and that you make a discussion of vision a part of it.
Specifically, at these meetings, how should be talking about your team’s vision? In the Watercooler, managers offered these suggestions for what can be talked about, as related to vision:
The “why” behind the actions in each department and how they relate to larger company goalsChallenges each department is facingTop projects of each departmentCompany-wide retrospective on what’s been working, what’s notMission, vision, and values and give examples of how a specific value impacts an every-day decision (sometimes this is a discussion, sometimes it’s a presentation)
What’s most important is to not make these meetings a progress update. We found that employees often feel they know what’s their coworkers are working on, for the most part. we asked through Know Your Team, “Do you know what your teammates are working on and how their work is going?” 83% of people said “Yes” (asked to 183 people across 17 companies). So don’t use all-team meetings to be purely a status update. Make communicating the vision the focus.
#2: Leverage your one-on-one meetings.
Communicating the vision isn’t just about broadcasting the vision: “This is the vision and you must be on board…” Rather, sharing company vision should be a conversation. After all, a vision that is shared across a team is only built from the personal visions of each individual. That’s how the vision becomes shared in the first place.
To do this, you’ll want to discuss the team’s vision during your one-on-one meetings with your team members. We found in our survey one-on-one meetings were the second most popular means of sharing the vision within a team.
Ask questions about the person’s personal goals and aspirations, what they think about where the team is headed, and if they feel aligned with that direction. For example, you can ask:
What goals, personally and for the team, can I better support you in?What about the direction of the team concerns or worries you?What’s a decision you feel like I made recently that you felt could have been different, or wasn’t 100% aligned with the team’s vision?
Psst, a side note: We have a Guide on One-on-One Meetings and One-on-Ones Tool in Know Your Team, where you can find more practical tips and suggested questions, as well, if that’s helpful.
#3: Don’t just talk about vision – codify it.
Talking about company vision during your team meetings is great – but you should go beyond that as well. Watercooler members spoke from experience, saying that they often tried to have the vision be something that developed organically and was discussed when needed. But eventually, they found it useful to codify it. Especially when it came to hiring, having the vision documented in some way was key.
Documenting the vision was the third most popular method from survey respondents for how to share the company vision. In particular, most teams seem to use an internal wiki or Google Docs to document and share the company vision. Leaders in the Watercooler also shared how this often takes the form of a “culture book” or a few pages of their employee handbook.
As fluffy as the word “vision” can be, it can also be powerful when used effectively. Your team’s vision is essential to sharing well so your team performs well. Start with trying one of these best practices.
Claire is the CEO of Know Your Team – software that helps you avoid becoming a bad boss. Her company was spun-out of Basecamp back in 2014. If you were interested, you can read more of Claire’s writing on leadership on the Know Your Team blog.
July 31, 2019
The worst part of hiring
We ask a lot of job applicants at Basecamp. First, they have to make it through a long, detailed description of the opening. Then we request a dedicated cover letter that’s unique to Basecamp. And then there’s the polishing of a CV. It can easily take hours to apply to a job at Basecamp.
It used to be even worse too! For programmers, for example, we’d ask everyone upfront to submit code samples as part of their first application. Finding a good piece of code, either through open source, learning apps, or whatever, takes time. (Thankfully we don’t do that any more. You have to make it to the second round for us to talk code.)
So it’s not an unreasonable expectation to hope for some detailed feedback if the application isn’t successful. It’s entirely human to wish for feedback on “why didn’t I progress in process?”, “what could I have done better?”, “what else were y’all looking for?”.
And yet the math simply makes that impossible for us. A recent opening for a senior programmer drew over 400 applications (for customer support, we’ve seen over 1,000 applications per opening!). For that programmer role, someone spending just 20 minutes giving diligent feedback per application would keep them busy for almost 7 weeks, if they worked on that for 4 hours per day, 5 days a week!
That really sucks! It’s easily the worst part of hiring to reject hundreds of applicants who’ve put in a lot of their time with a generic “thank you for applying, but unfortunately we’ve moved forward with other candidates!”. Ugh.
So the least we can do is to be honest that this is the process. And, evidenced by the feedback from several applicants in the last hiring thaw, we clearly failed at that. So apologies to everyone who had reasonable expectations of some actionable feedback, and were left cold with a generic rejection.
Next time we’ll spell it out in the post. And applicants can make a more informed decision as to whether it’s worth their time given the risk that the sum of a response might well boil down to “thank you so much, but sorry!”.
Hiring is hard.
July 30, 2019
Shape Up Roundtable
Basecamp’s new book, Shape Up by Ryan Singer, explores the way designers and programmers at the company build and ship software. In the latest episode of the Rework podcast, Ryan, designer Conor Muirhead, and programmer Jeff Hardy go deep into Shape Up principles, talking about the parts of the process they find most useful and sharing real-life examples of both successes and setbacks.
(If you haven’t yet read Shape Up or listened to last week’s interview with Ryan, it might be helpful to do that first. We’ve also linked to the relevant sections in Shape Up in the show notes for this episode if you’d like to follow along that way.)
July 29, 2019
How to onboard a new hire
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Something new happened recently: We hired a new employee at Know Your Team – and it caused me to rethink our entire employee onboarding process. As a small, profit-focused team, we don’t hire often. As a result, this time around, I wanted to be intentional about how to onboard a new hire.
After all, the numbers on how likely it is for a new employee to leave within the first 90 days are astounding: 30% employees leave before their first 3 months are up, according to a survey with 1,500 people.
It got me reflecting deeply… How to onboard a new hire, and make sure that person feels welcomed, encouraged, and well-equipped to contribute to the team?
What 1,000+ managers recommend for employee onboarding
From the insights of 1,000+ managers in our online leadership community, The Watercooler, I noticed clear commonalities for what leaders view as best practices for how to onboard a new hire. Here were the most frequently cited elements of their employee onboarding processes:
Mentorship – At many companies, new hires are usually paired with the lead as a mentor (or a more senior person). One company mentioned how the new hire sits right next to their mentor in the office.Weekly one-on-ones – During the first month, the new hire has weekly one-on-ones with the lead/mentor (and a couple with the CEO as well). After the first month, the one-on-ones slow down to a more moderate pace such as biweekly or once a month. (You can read my piece on the best questions to ask during your first one-on-one meeting with a new hire here.)Nailing the basics – Many companies have a document that explains processes and details like getting their computer all configured. Other companies set up the new person’s desk with welcome notes, headphones, etc. and/or have an office seating chart with everybody’s name so they know who is who. (For our new hire at Know Your Team, I wrote “Welcome note” that I include in its entirety below.)A clear first project – One recommendation is to design what the first month of the new hire will look like project-wise. What will they be responsible for, and what’s the ideal outcome? You want to have something to help the person get acquainted with the company, but also have the feeling of accomplishment at the same time. (I also did this for our new hire.)
What I did for our employee onboarding process
Given the consensus around these recommendations on how to onboard a new hire, I incorporated these elements into our own employee onboarding process.
However, I also knew from our research through Know Your Team over the past 5 years with 15,000+ people, that as a leader, it would be crucial to provide our new hire with (1) as much context as possible about the business itself (2) direction as to what “success” looks like (3) encouragement in carrying out the role, and (4) a sense of rapport and trust so that we can work well together.
As a result, on our new hire’s very first day at Know Your Team, I sent her an Icebreaker through our software (it’s a set of fun questions that help break the ice).
I also wrote up a “Day 1 Welcome Note” and sent it to her. We’re a remote company, so we default to written, asynchronous communication – but I also wanted something in writing she could refer back to, if needed.
Here’s what the “Day 1 Welcome Note” included…
Why we hired you – When you tell someone why you hired them, you’re essentially saying to them: “I believe in you.” Few forms of encouragement are better. You show your support for them on Day 1, and simultaneously set your expectations for the things you want them to continue doing. Not to mention, I’ve always found it strange when you join a new company, and you’re not exactly sure why they picked you.
Context write-ups – “What are all the things someone new has no clue about, but would love to know?” I asked myself that question, and then wrote up a series of documents that attempted to answer it as much as possible. The result was separate documents on our company’s history, our purpose + vision + values, how we work (communication, meetings, etc.), business context (market analysis, product vision, etc.), and the key milestones we’re looking to hit in the upcoming six to eighteen months.
Work preferences survey – Annoyances, pet peeves, proclivities, and communication tendencies… I wanted our new hire to have an opportunity to share all those things about how she prefers to work. And I wanted her to know what everyone else on the team’s work preferences were, too. And so I wrote up a survey with 23 questions:
July 23, 2019
Shape Up with Ryan Singer
Earlier this month, Basecamp released a new book by Ryan Singer, the head of strategy. Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters is a “spiritual follow-up” to Getting Real, Jason and David’s 2006 guide to how product development happens at Basecamp. In Shape Up, Ryan goes deep into how small teams get great work done in six-week cycles without sprints, Post-it Notes, stand-up meetings, backlogs, or long hours.
Ryan sits down with the Rework podcast to talk about some of the major themes in Shape Up and how the book came together as its own product.
Next week, we’ll bring you a roundtable discussion between Ryan, a designer, and a programmer at Basecamp to go deeper into the process described in Shape Up. Be sure to subscribe to Rework in Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Play Music, or your favorite podcast app so that you get the episode as soon as it’s released!
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