Onboarding Buddies
Bringing a new employee onboard is an exciting and stressful time. And while managers play a critical role in shaping a new employees’ first weeks and months, a broader team effort can ensure the experience is both positive and productive. The buddy is the person that the new employee can ask for pointers to information they need (e.g. where is compensation information about my team), point them to other teams or people who can help them solve issues or answer questions, and answer “why is X this way”, “how to get access to Y”, “who is the right person to solve a problem Z”, etc.
Context is a precious commodity. Research suggests that onboarding buddies play an important role in ensuring a successful onboarding experience [1]. Buddies play a role by providing context, boosting productivity and improving new employee satisfaction. The buddy potential becomes the mentor for someone (but not always). “Buddies” are instrumental in helping new employees get up to speed with the work they will do.
Having buddies for IC’s is a common practice in most companies but this practice is less common for business leaders. Additionally, the needs of a manager and what they focus on are different from those of an engineer, and a lot of the business context is hidden in multiple documents. Below is a rubric to help identify the best buddy for the new manager as they onboard to your company.
Most important attributes when choosing the buddy
- Personality: Enthusiastic, skilled, and willing to help new hires with strong communication and interpersonal skills.
- Manages a team of roughly the same size (try not to choose managers that have 2x difference either way) and makeup (comprised of similar identify of engineers, e.g. data science, SRE, backend, frontend etc)
- Information Proximity: Having a buddy that works in the same or similar organization, understands how that team and the direct manager operates and helps people ask open questions to probe is extremely valuable for new managers.
- Would prefer a manager that has been for a fairly long time at the company. In many startups this not feasible so look for someone with a year of tenure or at least 6 months.
- New managers gain value from those who have navigated the landscape already. Having somebody who tells you where issues are and how to navigate them is extremely valuable. An important aspect will be that the buddy can support the new Manager to quickly get up to speed with the culture and the roles of different cross-functional teams.
- Experience: There is value in having a buddy who’s been through the cycle of a year to help managers get up to speed. A year is chosen for a simple reason — that manager has been through whatever process or activity that happens when a new Manager starts (e.g. yearly and quarterly planning, Comp / Employee Feedback, managing deliverables, Conferences, and many, many other reasons).
- Time locality: Same or closest time zone. Temporal locality is important for a buddy to be effective in communicating. It helps for the buddy to be available at similar times as the new hire.
- Teams have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s valuable to have a buddy that deals with similar issues that the manager will or may have to more regularly deal with. For example, if a manager is rebuilding a team or is starting from scratch, having a buddy who’s “done that” or is in the process of “doing it” is valuable to use as a resource.
What are the expectations from the buddy
Buddies are proactive in providing assistance and information to new Managers. Buddies should help in bootstrapping new managers with knowledge about not only how the organization operates but also providing information on how to deal with current or upcoming Rhythms (e.g. performance reviews, planning processes, dependency management, team enablement, etc).
They must be available for questions or issues that the new Manager could be struggling with during their first ~3 months. Holding a regular 1:1 will be helpful (maybe weekly for the first 2–3 weeks and then bi-weekly/tri-weekly after that) so that there is a predefined time for the new manager to ask questions or follow up on deeper conversations.
The buddy will be the person that the new Manager can ask for pointers to information they need (e.g. where is compensation information about my team), point them to other teams or people who can help them solve issues or answer questions, and answer “why is X this way”. Some further points on what a buddy can do for the new hire [2]:
- Learn more about new hires through their CV, interview feedback and the hiring manager
- Help them set up their systems
- Introduce them to other teams when needed
- Make sure they are included in social situations
- Share company values and vision
- Share unstructured knowledge
- Encourage them to think strategically
Who is responsible to identify a buddy?
In an optimal scenario the hiring manager should identify and get buy-in from the buddy before the new manager starts. If the hiring manager has not identified one, the new hire can discover one by setting up 1–1s with managers that have the above attributes. In some case, the company has setup an onboarding buddy program that
- Matches new hires with onboarding buddies
- Sends reminder for regular meetings with the buddies
- Collects feedbacks from buddies, new hires and the hiring manager;
- Creates resources with best practices for buddies to improve .
What’s the difference between a buddy and a mentor?
Buddies help you navigate the course and provide you insight and answers on the specific round and course you’re playing on. It’s intentionally focused on the specific game and moment (like the first 3 months of a new managers time). Onboarding buddies ensure that the new hire has been inducted successfully and they help build confidence in the new hire by showing how things are done
Mentors are like coaches. They help you get better at a sport. You ask for feedback on your play, approach, mindset, and many other aspects of your game. They are experienced enough to get you to play better over a longer period of time. Mentors focus on developing the new hire’s career and personal skills
Reference
[1] https://hbr.org/2019/06/every-new-employee-needs-an-onboarding-buddy
