How to onboard yourself

Imagine this – you have just joined a startup. 

You are new to the company, and you don’t know anyone except your boss.

Monday morning 10 am, and you are sitting at your new desk, with your newly issued laptop in front of you. 

Your email inbox is empty, but that will soon change. 

It will fill up with meeting invites, business review schedules, and general memos soon enough. 

The team (and your boss) will begin expecting you to start delivering. 

One important enabler to allow you to do that – is onboarding. 

This is when you get to know the people, processes, and perspectives of various departments in the organization. 

The sooner you do this, the better it is for your integration into the organization:

• Stakeholders will know who you are
• You will have a chance to form warm relationships
• You will understand what the unwritten rules of the org are

But if your organization doesn’t have a standard onboarding process, you will have to do it yourself. 

Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Ask yourself some key questions:
   1. What all information and material do you need access to?
   2. Which all functions need to contribute to achieving your goals?
   3. What doubts/open questions do you have?
   4. What can be an easy win for you in the first 30 days? 
2. Involve your boss:
   1. Sit down with your boss and show him/her the output of the first step
   2. Ask them to add any question/material you may have missed out
   3. Then ask them to let you know key personnel to ask for help for each qn. 
3. Set up meets with all personnel from Step 2. 
   1. A simple meet and greet is fine, but you can do better than that
   2. Go into each meeting with 3-5 specific questions/observations 
   3. Ask them for their advice/help on immediate deliverables on your projects
4. Collate action steps from these meetings, and circulate them to these stakeholders keeping your boss in cc. This will act as a contract between you and your stakeholders. 

You can do this over a period of time, in freeflowing conversations with the stakeholders, instead of rigid, tightly scheduled meetings, in order to develop warm and cordial relationships.