Onboarding and Preparing your New Hire for Success

A thoughtful onboarding process goes a long way toward making a new hire feel welcome and confident in their new role and their place within the organization. While developing the process and materials certainly takes time and some deep thinking about who your news business is and how it does things, the benefits are many, including:

• It inspires confidence in your business from the new hire and underscores that taking this job was the right move.
• It gives the new hire a sense of purpose and a clear idea of what they should be doing in those awkward first several days and provides a clear roadmap for what success looks like in the months to come.
• It ensures that everything is in place before the real work begins and the new hire doesn’t find themselves unable to complete a task because, say, they don’t have access to the required tech or system.
• It provides the new hire with source material to return to when questions come up. This empowers them to answer their own questions and, again, saves you time. 
• It saves you time explaining how everything works, and ensures that you don’t forget any important items.
• It allows you to learn what employees need to be set up for success.
• Once in place, you can simply replicate the onboarding process for all future hires.

What should I have in place before a new hire starts?

As we mentioned earlier, whether you’re a team of one or 10, it’s important to have some key documentation and processes in place before you bring a new person on board.

Develop and compile key employee policies and processes 

It’s vital that your new hire have a clear sense of how your business operates and what is expected of them as an employee. That means you’ll need to compile all the tools and information they’ll need to share during the onboarding process.

Employee handbook

An employee handbook is also known as an employee manual, staff handbook or company policy manual. Whatever you decide to call it, it should include any employment, job and organization-related information your employees need to know. Think of the employee handbook as the central source of truth for all questions an employee might have about working at your organization. Below is an outline of a few key things every employee handbook should include, and some other things you can add over time. 

Key employee handbook elements:

• Who we are: Include a short section that describes your organization, mission, vision, values and any other relevant information about your organization.
• Key employment policies: This is a limited list, and the requirements for specific policies vary by locality. Consult with an employment lawyer, and HR specialist, a professional employer organization or your fiscal sponsor for advice on what’s required.
  • Ethics policy: Clarity upfront about your news business’ ethics and standards will go a long way toward preventing problems later. The SPJ Code of Ethics is a canonical set of standards you can apply to your news business, but you might consider adapting them to suit the specific circumstances of your organization or community.
  • Social media policy: Being active on social media is a great way to connect to the local community and the broader journalistic community, but it’s important to clearly articulate what standards your team should adhere to. This is a tricky task with a lot of nuance to consider, so be sure to think through your goals for how your organization, your staff and your audience will interact.
  • Conflicts of interest policy: This is especially important for journalism organizations. You should know up front if anyone on your staff has any conflicts of interest that might impact their ability to do their job. Here’s a Staff Disclosure Form we use at LION that you’re welcome to adapt. Another aspect to consider is a broader conflict of interest policy for your business — especially if you’re a nonprofit. This usually relates to potential conflicts on your board of directors, and certain states have requirements for what to include. You can find resources here and here. 
  • Anti-harassment and complaint procedure: This is crucial for every organization to have. Here’s an Anti-Harassment and Complaint Procedure we use at LION that you’re welcome to adapt. 
  • Payments/Reimbursement policy: What is considered work-related, travel and non-reimbursement expenses? We suggest you define each with specific examples so you’re clear up front what costs will and won’t be covered. You should also detail how employees pay for expenses — is there a company credit card used for higher expenses only? How do you reimburse employees if they are paying for a cost themselves? Do you need receipts for everything? Whatever your policies and processes, make sure it’s documented and executed consistently across all members of your team. You may consider talking with your bookkeeper and/or accountant for advice on these policies.
• Benefits: List all your benefits and how employees take advantage of them. This can include work-from-home benefits, paid time off and/or sick days, which holidays the organization takes off, paid family leave policies, COVID-19 policies, and any other benefits, including health insurance, vision, dental, 401Ks, life insurance, etc. 
• Performance and compensation: Describe the process you have for assessing employees’ performance, and making decisions on promotions, raises and bonuses.

Other key elements to add to your onboarding package:

• Tools/How we work: It can be helpful to make a list of all the existing tools you use to run your organization. Sometimes, when you and/or your team has been using a tool for a while and it’s ingrained in your workflows, it’s easy to forget that a new employee may need some orientation on the tool and how the team uses it. We recommend including some documentation on etiquette or specific ways in which your team uses a particularly key tool in your organization. Some examples may be what channels to join in Slack, or always including a Zoom link with a meeting invite or ensuring the new hire has access to everyone’s calendars so it’s easy to schedule a meeting with someone. 
• Organizational chart: If your team has three or more people, we recommend an organizational chart that spells out who reports to whom. And if you’re a nonprofit with a board of directors, you can include them in your org chart as well. Here’s a quick way to make an org chart in Google Docs.
• Job scorecards for all existing employees: In the same way that you created a job scorecard for your new employee, it can be helpful to create job scorecards for everyone on your team. And if you want to go a step further, you can make all those scorecards accessible to everyone on the team so each person has a clear sense of how roles and responsibilities are divided. These job scorecards are also useful to refer back to for annual performance reviews, which help you navigate conversations about decisions like promotions, title changes, and salary increases over time.
• RACI chart for key responsibilities across business and editorial: As you hire more employees, collaborate with more external stakeholders or begin to delegate more of your responsibilities out to others, creating a RACI chart that outlines who is responsible, accountable, consulted and informed on key processes in the organization can be extremely helpful. We talk more about RACI charts later in this lesson.
• A list of regular meetings; the purpose of each; who runs each: It can be useful to make a list of all the regularly occurring meetings you currently run, the purpose of each and who’s responsible for each. (Sometimes this also allows you to see overlap and combine meetings that may have become redundant.) Clarifying this before you onboard someone can be a helpful way of assessing which meetings they should join. It may be useful for them to join some or all meetings at least once or for a shorter period of time so they can get to know the organization, listen in on the work happening and think about how their work will fit in.
• General etiquette: Similar to the Tools/How we work section, it can be helpful to articulate some of the norms of your team culture. While new hires can eventually pick up on these over time, it can save them some time (and potential frustration) early on to see these spelled out up front. Here are some examples from LION’s staff handbook:
  • Rescheduling meetings: If you are unable to make a meeting and propose to reschedule it, you are responsible for finding a new time that works for meeting participant(s) and sending the Google Calendar invite.
  • Agendas: If you have proposed a meeting or if you own a meeting, you are responsible for creating an agenda ahead of time and linking to it in the calendar invite.
  • Respect time zones: Please be respectful of our team that lives across multiple time zones.
  • Contributing to draft docs: If you are adding items to a meeting agenda that you do not own, please add your initials to whatever you add so the meeting agenda owner knows you added it. If you are giving feedback to a document that is going to be externally published (i.e. newsletter, emails, Medium posts) use Google Docs’ “Suggestions” for edits and use “Comments” for questions/feedback.
• User manuals: If you decide to do user manuals be sure to include a handy link to a folder where anyone on staff can access/read each others’ manuals.

How do I onboard a new hire?

Now that you’ve planned the gathering and decorated the space, it’s time for you to invite your new employee to the party. Here are some high-level tips on how to onboard.

Create an onboarding process

• Onboarding should be a two-way street: You’re trying to give someone the inspiration/tools/context so they can do their job, but you’re also listening and learning from them so you can set them up for success. You should think about the onboarding experience from the employee’s point of view; in other words, it’s not just what you need and want to convey to get them up and running, but how you want them to experience the values and norms of your workplace.
  
• Onboarding checklists help you map out what needs to happen as your new employee gets up to speed, but also provides them with purpose and direction as they start their new job. Here’s a list of examples to consider.

• At least one week prior to your hire’s first day, we suggest writing up a short breakdown of what their first week will look like.
  
• 30-60-90 day plans are useful tools to help a new hire understand what to focus on in their first 30, then 60, then 90 days. Here’s a good overview and template you can draw inspiration from. Remember: onboarding takes time and is a process that should go beyond just a few initial meetings and introductions. A new employee may need time to settle into a new role, figure out how to work within your news organization’s systems and workflows, and most importantly, gel with their new colleagues. That’s why the 30-60-90 day plans are a useful way to benchmark the success of a new employee’s onboarding experience.
  
• Most of us haven’t taken the time to articulate to others — or ourselves! — how we like to work. One way for a new employee to quickly get up to speed on what it’s like to work with you and/or the rest of your team is having them fill out a user manual. User manuals are guides on how to best work with you. These are incredibly helpful for productive, respectful and empathy-centered collaboration with colleagues on your team and across your organization. Here’s a template.

Resources:

• Current: Follow this onboarding checklist to set up your team for success 
• City Bureau: Here’s a great example of a slide deck City Bureau shares with new hires as part of their onboarding

Use a RACI chart to articulate job responsibilities.

A RACI chart can be an effective tool for clarifying roles and responsibilities in very collaborative environments. R stands for “responsible”; A stands for “accountable”; C stands for “consultant”; I stands for “informed” (we’ve found that for very small teams, everyone tends to be “informed.” 

The RACI will be especially helpful for teams where leaders/founders have been doing much of this work on their own for a while. It will be important to articulate the exact responsibilities you’ve been taking on, and formally hand them off to the hire. It may also help you gain clarity on your own workload to better understand where blockages or inefficiencies happen, or even just get a view on exactly why you may feel stressed or overwhelmed. Below is an example of how you might use a RACI chart to launch a membership program.

	Publisher	Editor	Reporter	New Hire
Collect all relevant data/documentation on existing audience.	A	C	C	R
Define some user personas of who might be a potential member.	A	C	C	R
Research and propose a pricing strategy.	A	C	C	R
Write copy to announce the membership program.	A	C	C	R
Publish the membership program announcement	A	R	R	C

* Note: make sure you’re not assigning too many Rs or As on a project, or the roles won’t actually be clear

How do I retain the hire?

Many of these recommendations are designed to provide a supportive, transparent, organized work environment for your new hire, and it’s worth thinking now about how to retain your new hire during and after the program. Here are some suggestions:

Provide ongoing feedback and opportunities to grow

Hiring a great candidate is just the beginning of building a successful team. As soon as this person is on board, you should be thinking about how to retain them. After all, turnover can be surprisingly expensive! Here are some things you can do to ensure you’re listening carefully to the needs of your new employee and ensuring they stay motivated and satisfied by their work. 

• Understand what this person wants out of this role on a personal level. Of course you’re bringing in this person to help you with urgent and critical work at your news business. But in all likelihood, this person will not work for you forever. So it’s important to understand early on what this job means for this person. For example, what skills are they looking to build? What experience do they want to get? What do they eventually want to do with their career? What would a great next job look like for them? If you acknowledge early on that the relationship with your new hire is a two-way street — they’re helping you and you’re helping them — you’re much more likely to retain great talent because they’re incentivized to stick around for their own personal goals too.
• Regular 1:1 check-ins. It’s critical to carve out dedicated one-on-one time to check in with your new hire and hear how things are going for them. These can be 30-minute check-ins once a week or twice a month. Here’s a great read on the art of check-ins. Our recommendation is that you use this time to check in on how the person is doing, rather than the work they’re getting done. (Schedule separate meetings to talk about progress on work specifically!) Here’s the agenda we currently use for our check-ins at LION. We keep it in a Google doc, link to it in a recurring calendar hold and fill it in each week:
  • How’s it going!
  • What are you most excited and/or worried about?
  • Is there anything I can do to help you with your work priorities this week?
  • What feedback do you have for me?
  • Any other stuff to talk about?
• Regularly check in on whether they’re meeting the goals set out in their scorecard, and setting new ones if they hit them. People like to know how they’re doing in their job and, the great news is, you’ve already defined how to measure that by creating the job scorecard for the role. Now, you have to regularly check in on the goals you’ve set for that person and have them report back to you on how they’re doing. But setting goals is one thing —  tracking progress to them is another. And if you don’t show the person that you’re eager to check in on their progress by regularly measuring the data, the lack of accountability can cause them to lose motivation. 
• Use the user manuals. As we mentioned, these are invaluable ways to understand how we each like to work. At LION we have found them particularly useful exercises because we are a remote team and don’t have many opportunities to informally learn about our work styles. But we think it can be useful for teams who work together in person too. 
• Give them opportunities to reflect and share their successes and learnings with others in the industry. For many people, there’s no better feeling than synthesizing what you’ve learned in a brand new role and sharing that with others. Encourage them to write about what they’re learning, whether it’s on your site, a personal Twitter or Medium account or a newsletter. If you haven’t noticed, our industry is *very* interested in how journalism orgs can generate revenue, and by encouraging your new hire to share what they’ve learned, you can give them (and your news org’s work) more visibility and credit.
• Create and support opportunities for professional development. Help your new hire develop additional skills they’ll need to succeed in the role and keep them engaged and immersed in this ever-changing field. 

Develop a process or system for evaluating team workload on a regular basis

“Leaders take note: It’s now on you to build a burnout strategy.”

— Jennifer Moss, author of Unlocking Happiness at Work

Our definition of sustainability includes operational resilience, and a big part of that means your staff isn’t burned out. Burnout has been a big topic of discussion for newsrooms, especially in light of COVID-19. Below is some reading on how newsrooms are recalibrating expectations and workloads to prevent employee burnout. 

• American Press Institute: How newsrooms can do less work– but have more impact
• American Press Institute: Journalism managers are burned out. Is it time for a work redesign?
• Harvard Business Review: Fostering a Culture of Belonging in the Hybrid Workplace
• Source: Sincerely, Leaders of Color: Burnout culture is everywhere
• Poynter: How journalists can ward off burnout 
• Harvard Business Review: Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People

We suggest thinking about how you might manage workloads and prevent burnout in your newsroom. Here are a few things we do or have done at LION:

• Each week, during an All Hands meeting, we ask each person to reflect on their week using a “Rose, Bud, Thorns” framing and to measure their emotional health through colors. “Green”: means they’re good; “yellow” means they’re struggling; “red” means they’re about to crash and burn. If anyone on the team is yellow or red, the whole team is yellow or red, and we make sure to talk about what we can do to help that person get to green. Here are some other Team Health Check ideas.
• LION regularly schedules staff-wide Heads Down work time, typically for one week each quarter. We cancel all internal meetings and give staff ample notice so they can cancel as many external meetings as possible. There is no expectation of being on Slack or being available to answer questions/do things for colleagues. The idea is for everyone to have some “heads down time,” to catch up on backlogged work, do some deep thinking on bigger strategy questions or just take some time to themselves.
• We’ve also had 1:1 conversations with team members about the importance of prioritization. One exercise we’ve done is have them map out a week’s worth of tasks onto an Impact Effort Matrix and use that as a starting point for conversations about what to prioritize. This has helped managers and their direct reports get on the same page about what’s most important to focus on, and ensure that employees aren’t trying to do everything at once and burning out.