Remote Onboarding & Immersion at Incubyte

Employee onboarding is the important process of introducing newly hired employees to the organisation. It is everything that leads up to the employee’s total immersion into the organisation’s culture. An effective onboarding process helps the new employee relate better with the company values and helps them get up and running quicker. Immersion is the process of creating a common future and common purpose for all employees by aligning expectation, values, purpose, mission and goals.

Rather than an onboarding checklist, we believe that a successful onboarding process covers three broad areas:

• Operational
• Technical
• Cultural

These together, help provide a holistic understanding of the company and the employees’ role within the company.

Next, we’ve given a brief overview of our approach to onboarding and what our remote onboarding process looks like.

Offer Acceptance to Day 0

The process starts with a call from our People Success Team to go through the terms of the offer, details around compensation and benefits, best practices, expectations and etiquette for remote working.

A workplace Buddy from the same team is assigned to each new employee for a smooth transition into their new role. The Buddy makes a huge difference and helps new employees understand workplace systems, processes and culture, resulting in a shorter settling in period. They also walk through our recommended reading list, video list and any relevant pieces of training that the new employee might be required to complete prior to joining. Post joining, this is their go-to person for any questions, technical, procedural or organizational that they might have in the initial weeks on the new job.

Next, we do an AMA (Ask Me Anything) call with the founders or senior colleagues for the new employee to ask any lingering questions ahead of the start date. This is a no holds barred time to talk about anything and everything, or just plain simple socialize with their to-be co-workers.

We also like to get all our hire paperwork wrapped up and a laptop delivered prior to joining, so that come Day One, they’re ready to jump right in!

Day One and Two

For introducing the new employee to current employees, we invite them to attend ‘all-team stand-ups’ on Day One.

They talk to their Buddy about what a typical day looks like, including getting introduced to the team’s agile boards, iteration life cycle, pairing practices, lightning talks, IDE usage, among others!They’ll do calls with the People Success Team to understand company policies (or lack thereof 😉) and talk to the founders to learn more about our company culture and expectations we have of them.

Day Three to Five

In the first week, we encourage the new employee to do regular one-on-one meetings with each person in their team to get to know them, their role in the team and just in general, say hello. They also dive deep into learning the ropes of the product they’re working on. The long-term goal of this exercise is to make sure communication remains open and hierarchies flat despite being part of remote teams.

Week Two and Three

This is when the new employee starts dipping their feet into actual work and starts seeing their name on the agile board. Domain knowledge sharing continues at each and every stage as they start pairing and participating in day-to-day activities and projects.

At the end of the second week, the People Success Team checks in on how they’re doing and that onboarding has been effective. This also helps us continuously improve and evolve our onboarding and hiring process!

Week Four

By now, the (not so) new employee has a more structured understanding of their role and responsibilities, how we work, company policies and culture as well as communication expectations.

Towards the end of week four, we do one-on-ones with the founders and the People Success Team to discuss how things have gone, performance feedback, any mutual concerns and areas of improvement.

And that’s the end of onboarding

We hope that through this process of remote onboarding, we are able to set clear expectations and immerse new hires in the Incubyte culture. We aim to provide them with the tools, context, information, connections and other key details they need to get started.

Employees are our most valuable asset, and we’re committed to doing everything we can to ensure a seamless start to our exciting journey together!