Changing job can often be a stressful experience. Despite the thrill that you’re about to join a place you consider a good next step in your professional career, there is a discomfort related to leaving a known environment, your comfort-zone, a place you’ve spent several months or even years at. Even after carrying out thorough research, asking friends or even friends of friends to gather as much data as possible, there is a little bit of uncertainty present about what your work is going to look like or how your new company will look from the inside.

When someone joins SoftwareMill, these questions might not be the only ones they might have. Our unusual (or, as some might say, unique) approach to running a software development agency, might add even more question marks. Especially when a new person has no prior experience in remote work or was never a part of fully transparent, self-organizing, independent teams without managers.

Because all these things make SoftwareMill different and unique, we think that our onboarding process is even more important and should help the newcomers understand what their first days will look like and what they are expected to do. In this post, I will describe how we try to achieve this.

Start early

We know that a candidate is about to join our company, a few months in advance. During this period, the new person will have more and more questions, so the sooner we try to answer them, the better. Frequently people are more than happy to know as much as possible before joining a new company, so that they have fewer things to worry and think about when they actually onboard.

First things first — the hardware

For the new people, we provide a computer of their choice. It could be a new Lenovo or Dell laptop, a MacBook Pro or a powerful desktop. Not every custom configuration is available off-the-shelf, so we order it as soon as possible to let the new person enjoy their new computer starting from the first day at SoftwareMill.

Something to read

Since we are a remote company, a large part of the communication during our recruitment process is done via Skype/Google Meet. So in the end, a candidate who will soon join our ranks may not remember many of the answers for questions they asked during these calls. That is why we have prepared a short e-book titled: “SoftwareMill Starter Handbook”. It is a guide for the newcomers about work in our company. On thirty pages you will find out how to set up an effective home office, learn important tips about effective remote work and, most importantly, get to know how your first day and first weeks in SoftwareMill, a period that many might feel overwhelmed with, will look like.

To help people adapt to the new working environment, we list the most important tools we are using, explain most popular company internal terminology and include links to posts on our blog that should help to understand our culture and working approach better.

Last but not least, our Starter Handbook serves as a reference for the whole onboarding process, and could be read every time a need arises.

Grasping company tools…

Most of our daily communication is done using Slack, a super cool text-based communicator for teams. For some people getting accustomed to a completely new communication tool that is heavily used from day one, might take some time. To alleviate this and help them learn Slack a bit, we have set up a dedicated channel for newcomers where anyone who will soon join our company could ask questions about SoftwareMill, the onboarding process or remote work in general. This gives you an opportunity to talk with future co-workers or even meet Janusz, our Slack bot, who helps us with everyday tasks.

… and company culture

During almost 10 years, people in SoftwareMill have created a unique company culture that takes some time to understand — the way we work, the way we make decisions, the way we run IT projects. Being a new person, you could feel lost at the start so when it is possible, we invite newcomers to join us at our monthly meetings. During that day they could feel the atmosphere and meet SoftwareMill crew even before starting working with us. Thanks to this, first days at work won’t be so difficult as there are some familiar faces that you have already met.

Let me be your Guardian

Joining a new company is a big change in your professional career. It is like joining a full-blown party when you don’t know anyone. It’s much easier when you have an insider who will be your guide, tell you who is who or answer all your questions.

This is the reason we have created the role of a Guardian — a dedicated person with a few years of experience as a SoftwareMiller and knowledge of all company internals that might be difficult for a newcomer. Their role is to answer all your strange questions, assist you in solving problems and be someone like a winger — always there to help when you feel lost or stuck.

Gather feedback

We couldn’t call ourselves agile, if we did not try to improve as a company. The same applies to our onboarding process. At the end of your third month at SoftwareMill, the Guardian talks with his mentee and asks for feedback about the entire process and our company in general. We try to identify areas that could be improved and work on them. In fact, the feedback received from newcomers a few months ago triggered changes in our onboarding and resulted in creating our “SoftwareMill Starter Handbook” and a dedicated Slack channel.

Wrap up

The onboarding process is important in every organization, but it is almost critical for a remote company that runs in a way very distant from a traditional approach to doing things. As we grow, we needed an effective way to tell new people how we work, what our values are, so we could build this company together. We achieved this in several steps:

creating a mini ebook explaining our approach,

inviting newcomers to our monthly meetings,

and introducing personal Guardians to help people settle in a new environment.

Curious how our onboarding works in practice? We have good news for you — we’re hiring! Apply today and find out.