This week I was chatting with a colleague who’d recently moved team. As you’d expect they had a whole bunch of new stuff to learn and new people to meet, and the first week was pretty full-on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like you’re not contributing much, especially if you’ve just moved from a team where you knew Everything.
My colleague had an excellent idea however, of blocking out some self-reflection time at the end of their first two weeks. This protected time could be a couple of hours or half a day, doing some or all of the following:
- reviewing and organising onboarding notes
- noting what areas of work look the most interesting/terrifying
- drawing up a list of questions / things they weren’t sure of
- figuring out the best person to ask those questions
- catching up on any team docs or reading they were ‘saving for later’ (close those hundreds of browser tabs)
It can feel a bit awkward to ask your new team for several hours out of the day to do this, especially if the team has pressing deadlines. I think it’s absolutely worth investing this time reflecting though, and properly building it into the onboarding schedule.
My colleague is too modest to take the public credit for this idea, but has given me their permission to share it with you lot. I’m definitely going to suggest it to any new starters on my team!