Onboarding COVID-19: Starting to Settle In

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This article is the third in a series. Check out the first article at Onboarding COVID-19: Setting the Scene, or the second article Onboarding COVID-19: This Gonna Be Interesting.

Day two is drawing to a close. There were some minor issues relating to working from home. Little things like helping my partner connect headphones to her computer as I was talking too much, sorting out why the audio on my iPad wasn’t working, and discovering my cat likes to show her butt on video calls. But that’s all to be expected.

I’m finding a few challenges in knowing who to ask for information and what Slack channels are used for what purposes; but this will all help me to document an onboarding process to use in future. I’m also starting to get a collection of tasks I think we could streamline for future onboarding.

Prior to starting my role I set-up a video chat room for people who are working from home. I’ve promoted this in a few places, and also let everyone at work know about it. It’s had occasional drop-ins during the day, so it’ll be interesting to see if that picks up or drops-off over coming days.

This morning was spent on video calls, I think as a team we have a bit to learn about video call etiquette, but that’s just normal teething issues when a workforce first starts going remote. Surprisingly I felt I was already able to add some valuable input to a number of discussions, so that feels good.

I’ve noticed I’m delaying some of the tasks that I would like to have scheduled already, and I put this down to having prepared myself to do them in person, now I need to re-prepare myself to do them via video. The main item is grabbing a coffee with coworkers; it seems a little awkward over video, but I’ll work out how to do it anyway.

What happened for the rest of the week?