Our new Business Development Manager Eeppi talks about the importance of onboarding when starting at a new job – and how his first month at Taiste was like.
Throughout his career, our new Business Development Manager Eeppi has been a member of many working communities. In this article, he talks about the importance of the first weeks at a new company – and how his onboarding experience was like at Taiste.
We all know that starting at a new job can be a stressful challenge. There are so many unknowns as one enters an unfamiliar organization. What are the people truly like? What kind of processes exist and how is one supposed to begin working on their tasks & responsibilities?
But being ready to handle a little bit of ambiguity can also be a big opportunity to learn a lot about yourself and the workplace you are now a part of. It's a potential doorway to the next step in your career.
I’ve worked at companies that have had great onboarding as well as ones that have had terrible onboarding. I’ve even created an onboarding process for my own company, which I’d like to think was pretty good. So I’ve had a lot of opportunities to learn about the process and what the first month at a company should feel like for a new employee.Based on my experience, I’d say a great onboarding process can be broken down into 4 areas:
In this blog post, I'm going to share how these critical three areas were handled at Taiste and what my experience of it all was.
Although it's true that the working relationship begins from the very first job interview, the first real experience with a company is still, in many ways, your first workday.At Taiste, my first day began with a meeting with the Managing Director and co-founder Oscar Salonaho, where we briefly went over some practical contract details.
The first real experience with a company is, in many ways, your first workday.
After that, I was shown to my workstation, which had all my work equipment and gadgets ready to go and met my a Buddy Mentor Tuomas, who was responsible for getting me up-to-speed with the company. He spent a good amount of time getting to know me and then walked me through the company’s onboarding deck. This included details on the onboarding process itself, as well as the company’s backstory, its values and metrics on how the company is performing. All in all, it was a really straightforward way to get to know the basics.
After this, I was ready to begin the tasks related to onboarding.
The real fun started when I was presented with my onboarding Trello board. It included all the most important tasks that I was expected to complete during my first month, such as meeting the representatives of various job functions, learning the ins and outs of the software relevant to my work here, attending my first customer + internal meetings, gaining access to internal communication channels, booking a photoshoot, etc.
The board served as a great checklist – I went through the items both autonomously and together with my mentor buddy. The whole process felt really well thought out and it was super easy to keep track of things.
The great thing about having a functional onboarding process is that it's much easier for new employees to get their hands dirty on real work much faster. I was able to start working on client projects during my first week, which is quite remarkable.
I was able to start working on client projects during my first week, which is quite remarkable.
I worked with a designer redesigning an app for a client who was about to present it to a potential partner and wrote a proposal based on existing templates. By the end of the month, I was already regularly attending client meetings, attended a workshop we ran for a client and became a part of an internal team creating a very big and important sales presentation.
Company culture is a kind of bedrock that everything else rests upon.If I had to pick a few words to describe my new co-workers they would be: friendly, professional, immediate and caring. This was clear from the moment I began working with them. All of them truly seemed to care about getting me up-to-speed quickly.
Taiste as a company is clearly value-driven and seems to prefer long-term thinking over short-term gains. Everyone here seems to value independence, mutual respect, sense of purpose and competence. The culture has a very organic and handcrafted feel to it; everyone here is very different from each other but at the same time seem to fit the community really well.
There’s a saying that culture eats strategy for breakfast, and looking at Taiste I have no doubt that's true. The way the company has grown for the past few years is a clear testament to the fact that betting on an authentic culture pays off in the form of organic growth in the long term.
My first month at Taiste has been a success story that I’ve enjoyed it a lot. They’ve nailed down the core aspects of great employee experience incredibly well.
So: if you’d like to join a team, where you can feel at home and thrive pretty much straight away, don't think twice about sending us an application.
Interested in reading same kind of story from a slightly different angle? Check out our new developers Ged and Niko talking about how it was like starting at Taiste during the Coronavirus pandemic.
