Why start a new job on a Monday? Is it because it’s the start of the week? Is it because that’s the way it’s always been done? 6 months ago we switched to starting new people on a Thursday to make their onboarding gentler.
Starting a new job can be daunting. It’s not something we do often and each time it’s a little different. There’s people’s names to remember, company jargon to learn, and then there’s figuring how the work gets done. We have a buddy system and handbook to guide new starters, but they told us their first week was mentally exhausting. To a degree this is unavoidable, but could we make it gentler?
Our onboarding kit is split into two parts. Part one is learning about the company and core systems we use. Part two is learning about how we do the work and all the systems you need to do your job. We found new starters took 2 days to get through part one, and a few weeks of elapsed time to get through part two.
We asked the question “What if we started new people on a Thursday?”. They would get through part one on the Thursday and Friday. They would begin part two on the Monday after having a natural pause on the weekend to refresh. After switching to start new people on a Thursday they told us the weekend was a welcome break in between the two parts. A gentler onboarding.
Written by Tate Johnson on 19 Jan 2020. Subscribe to my blog's RSS feed.