In this week's newsletter

• How to turn ‘nice to meet you’ coffee chats into a team-wide win
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use today
• Q&A: How do I make time for thoughtfully onboarding without overscheduling myself?
• Your weekly bird break

Several years ago, when a new hire joined my team, a colleague shared an idea that shifted how I’ve thought about onboarding meetings ever since.

I’d already done my usual:

• I put together a list of colleagues for the new hire to meet within their first month
• I sent each person a heads-up so nobody was caught off guard
• Then I had my new hire do their own scheduling to take that off my plate, and help them onboard to our organization’s scheduling norms

My colleague suggested I take it a step further: ask the new hire to prepare a short presentation for our upcoming team offsite covering who’s who on the teams we work with and how we collaborate. The intro meetings would be their main opportunity to do research.

Suddenly those “nice to meet you” coffee chats had a purpose beyond small talk. The new hire was listening for team priorities and what each group valued, not just asking "what do you do?" and swapping fun facts. They also knew they’d need to retain and use what they learned.

The payoff was threefold:

1. The new hire got a quick public win at the team offsite: a substantive presentation
2. I got to check their understanding of our team’s role in the broader organization without quizzing them
3. The whole team walked away from that offsite better equipped to work cross-functionally because someone with fresh eyes had mapped the landscape for all of us

Before your next new hire starts, ask yourself:

​Click here for a resource to help you prepare to delegate that assignment in a way that sets you both up for success.

Meeting Minute

​Warm-up question​

This question turns standing meeting time into a lightweight onboarding moment. It lets the whole team contribute to a new hire's ramp-up and reinforces that it's OK not to know everything on day one. Bonus: it can give you insights into gaps in your onboarding process.

​Check-out question​

This works at any meeting with or without new hires present.

If you do have new hires, this creates an opportunity to ensure they aren’t the only one with questions and normalizes asking.

The questions people share might be answerable real-time or in a quick follow-up, or might need to be tackled at a future meeting.

Q: I have a new hire starting next week and I'm already dreading what my calendar is going to look like. How do I make time for onboarding without working nights and weekends?

A: Onboarding doesn’t mean filling every hour on your new hire’s calendar or yours.

For your calendar:

• You don’t personally have to facilitate every introduction and walkthrough. Empower your new hire to schedule their own intro meetings (see above for more on how).
• Set clear expectations for what they should do on their own versus what you’ll cover together:
  • “Before we meet Thursday, read these two documents and come with your questions. We’ll use our time to focus on Project X.”
  • This means your meetings are shorter, more focused, and you’re not repeating what they could have read.

For their calendar:

• Remember that in addition to learning about the work, your new hire is meeting new people, setting up a new laptop, navigating benefits enrollment, and learning new systems. You probably also gave them links to dozens of documents they need to digest. They need time to process!
• Blank space on their calendar is necessary to give time for all the facets of onboarding that happen outside of meetings.

What my week one with a new hire usually looks like:

• Three meetings with me: a day one morning welcome call, a “how’d it go, any questions?” check-in that afternoon, and one deeper dive session later in the week.
• I confirm standard HR/IT meetings landed on their calendar.
• I set up two welcome meetings with colleagues (without me) and, when possible, a lunch or coffee with me or someone on the team in the first couple of days. That’s it.
• Everything else is blank space or they schedule themselves.

The goal for week one:

Make them feel welcome, show them where to go with questions, and give them access to what they need to get themselves organized.

You don’t need to drop everything and spend your whole week together. The rest can wait.