Remote onboarding / Onboarding Retrospective

This article is a combination of a retrospective that I created (the ‘feelrospective’!) based on Non-violent communication, and the subsequent insights about onboarding a new team member remotely (which I feel will become increasingly common).

If you don’t know anything about Non-violent communication (NVC), this post will hopefully serve as a nice introduction and, ideally, inspire you to look it up. Worthwhile.

The original purpose of our retrospective was to check in with our new scrum master, retrospect on the first month so far, and to see what’s missing so that we could deal with any unmet needs at this crucial time. The fact that this was all done remotely, made it all the more crucial.

Since I don’t have much experience of formally “onboarding” people (let alone remotely) I wanted to know what his needs were, particularly as a new member of the team. I could anticipate many of his needs from my own experiences – but, even then, had they been met? Likewise, were there other needs that I didn’t know about which are uniquely specific to him or specific to the situation right now (Pandemic 2020)? How would I know? Hence the retro based on needs.

Why needs? Why NVC?

NVC provides a framework to communicate feelings and needs in a safe and meaningful way – thus also in a non-confrontational / non-violent way. Marshall Rosenberg (founder of NVC) would argue that most communication can be basically boiled down to needs and the expression emotions. People are surprisingly responsive to needs and feelings of others – if they are communicated honestly and clearly. Most often they’re not which is why we get into also sorts of pickles.

Preparation

I started off by asking Felix to list basically all things that went well and all the things that could be improved in a fairly standard fashion for a retrospective. He had the opportunity to think about this in advance and this gave us a starting point for our “Feelrospective”.

I loaded up a Miro board and added all the notes he made.

I then created three extra columns for observations, feelings and needs.

Part 1: observing

In NVC, it’s important to observe the situation without any moralistic judgement. This is tough! Unless you’re a Zen Monk, you probably don’t do this. A classic example is someone saying, ‘The boss talked too much in the meeting’. This is passing judgment about what is enough and what is too little. Do you have the right to make that judgement? An observation might instead be, ‘the boss talked for twenty minutes’.

What could be improved – an example

It’s already a solution and even if we did this, we may not in fact resolve the unmet need – which is actually what we want to do. But what is that need? Let’s now look at the observations when we unpacked it.

Observations of the situation

So, it turned out we had four observations.

Feelings

The next stage was to look the feelings at that time. So, when you observed the situation how did you feel? The key part here is to actually express a feeling! Too often we misuse the word ‘feel’ by combining it with the word ‘like’. This removes us from the actual feeling. So, for example the person who was in the room with the boss who talked for twenty minutes, might say, ‘I felt like I was wasting my time!’. This isn’t actually feeling. If anything, it’s an opinion and a judgmental one too. It’ll only serve to wind people up even more. The feeling may have been ‘I felt frustrated.’

We need to be honest about our feelings if we want people to relate to us.

To help us, we needed to complete the sentence “I felt …”

Sometimes, however, it’s not easy to know what our own feelings are. Or we’re too embarrassed to admit it.

A facilitator in an NVC session can make suggestions, such as, ‘Did you feel inadequate.’ It doesn’t actually matter if we, as facilitators, get this wrong five times or ten times. People will respond completely honestly if we haven’t targeted the correct feeling. Once we target the correct feeling we get a resounding, ‘Yes, that’s it!’, because deep down feelings are true and undeniable.

Right, so now we know what their feelings were. What needs were unmet to prompt this feeling. If we can find out, maybe we can do something about it.

Needs

Again, it’s not easy to express your needs so openly and readily, especially when you have just joined a new team. But again, a facilitator can make suggestions until the need is clearly identified.

So it turned out there was a need for clarity about information and a need for independence. I would never have guessed the latter. As a result we have started working on a way to consolidate that information and ensure that new team members can access that – but importantly, they need the time and independence to explore and understand the information, too.

This was especially important for a remote onboarding when, under normal circumstances, all the crucial onboarding information can be communicated quickly and informally simply by asking people next to you or watching what others are doing.

What else did we find out? I think many of the needs that we identified will actually apply to most people so it was well worth doing this exercise.

Review of the needs that were highlighted for the remote onboarding

I need support whist I join, so that I feel included.
I need to communicate with someone regularly, so that I don’t feel lost.
I need to time with current team members, so that I feel appreciated and welcomed.
I need support for my role (to shadow), so that I don’t feel shocked when I take over.
I need clarity about what to focus on for my role (right now), so that I don’t feel confused.
I need relevant content shared with me over time, so that I don’t feel overwhelmed with information at the start.
I need to know what to expect from formal onboarding sessions, so I don’t feel frustrated (about how I spent my time).
I need an introduction to the tools for my role, so that I don’t feel insecure about which tools to use.
I need an overview of teams and what they are working on, so that I don’t feel confused (about the project) / so that I feel aligned.
I need to know where to look for information so that I feel independent (autonomous).

Incidentally, as you can see above, once you join the need with the feeling, you have a perfect user story.

Reflections about remote onboarding

There are clear themes about support and clarity, but I think the last two are quite interesting. They refer to alignment and autonomy. A key question becomes: how to achieve high alignment and high autonomy (which is what you want) for a new remote team member. I think this will become an increasing priority of any new team members who are onboarded remotely.

Reflections about the Feelrospective

I think the ‘Feelrospective’ helped us to identify the needs in this crucially important stage of someone’s employment, and moreover, gave our new teammate the opportunity to be heard. I think it’s also a type of retrospective that I’m like to use for other purposes. If you’d like to use it as well, I’ve included a sample template for Miro here:

Sample Miro template for the Feelrospective

Interestingly, to use NVC, you don’t need all parties to be familiar with it in order for it to work.