Onboarding to Agile Team Remotely

As an Agile Coach at a fast growing startup, I faced the challenge to structure and drive the onboarding process remotely. Onboarding has proven to be an extremely demanding and tricky process even when conducted under normal circumstances: including for a completely remote company, it’s a common practice to have an offline interview and first days of onboarding. However, the current situation has forced more and more teams to move to completely remote hiring and onboarding to meet their targets regardless of the corona crisis. This report is based on 7 year experience remote onboarding in different setups: outsourcing small companies, a fast growing startup and a big corporation that was forced to switch to working remotely. It will shed the light on how to onboard efficiently in the remote environment with boosting the creativity and realisation of the full potential of the newcomer. Our startup newcomers founded the CoP’s in their first months, conducted workshops for the new technologies that nobody else in the team tried, co-organized events within their first 3 months, while our corporate newcomer conducted a part of the first Sprint Review with clients in the sub-department in their first 5 months.