Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding (Slides)

Below are the key points and a link to the presentation slides for my presentation on team culture, Designing the team experience: Building culture through onboarding.

Title slide from presentation. Click to view slides

My presentation is a case study of an enterprise project where onboarding was not a priority and the project was a giant mess. Meanwhile, the little sub-team that I was on paid a lot of attention to designing the team member experience, including onboarding, and in turn ended up developing a reusable process for designing the team member experience.

Key takeaways:
  • Your team is an element of your project that needs to be designed. 
  • If you don’t build onboarding into your processes, people can get lost along the way.
  • In UX, when you don't design the team member experience, you sacrifice the experience of your people for the experience of your users.
  • Help new hires become part of the team and set them up to be productive contributors. 
  • Create a ramp-up process to show new hires how their work will make an impact.
  • Establish and share your project folklore early in onboarding so everyone tells the same story about the project.
  • Foster teamwork by developing a shared understanding, encouraging good behaviour, & assigning clear roles and titles. (No UX unicorns, gurus or Jedi!)
  • Create a plain and simple team Code of Conduct to help the team work toward shared goals.
  • Even if you don't run the project, you can still onboard the people you work with and have a small impact.
You can download my presentation slides here. Got feedback? Tweet me @spydergrrl or drop me a line: tanya at spydergrrl.com.