An Onboarding Guide for Staff Augmentation
Are you thinking about how to best integrate new employees into your company?
Onboarding is exactly that, the integration into your work team and the process of adapting a new employee to the organizational culture of your company. This is, without doubt, a very relevant task that has to be executed by HR and that can’t only be understood as an orientation process, but also as a strategic one for the operations of any company.
The new member of the team will be excited to begin a new job, but will also be worried about fulfilling the expectations, integrating with other people and finding out how their work will contribute to the success of the company.
A research by Jobvite shows that 30% of applicants to a job have left the position within the first 90 days, because the culture of the company and the day-to-day work doesn’t fulfill their expectations. The lack of a well-structured integration process contributes to this situation.
What happens when a company hires new personnel and resources through the Staff Augmentation model? If a new supplier that provides talent for specific projects is hired, how is this onboarding process carried out? In the following guide, we present the best way of implementing this process with staff augmentation.
How does onboarding for staff augmentation work?
If you need additional help to complete an existing or a new project, the staff augmentation model is an excellent way to limit stress and make things work. With staff augmentation you can have direct control over the work being done and at the same time, it gives you the freedom to focus on other aspects of your job.
While this model is an excellent option in most cases, it is necessary to implement some simple things to make sure that the new resource is incorporated without any trouble and is ready to perform their job correctly.
First, it’s essential that the staff augmentation provider you choose has knowledge of the work you are looking to carry out and can offer many options of augmenting or reducing your team through this model. Moreover, they must completely understand what you’re looking for and make sure they can offer the necessary skills to be successful and meet your expectations.
Furthermore, after having chosen a staff augmentation partner, it’s important to have in mind some actions that will help you make sure that your efforts with the model are successful.
Steps for a successful onboarding:
The onboarding process plays a critical role in the productivity and the retention of good talent. This is why it’s important to do it properly.
Here are some steps you can follow to carry it out:
1. Clear expectations
Before you start working with your developers or augmented team, you need to have clarity of the service you are acquiring with staff augmentation and define how many hours a week you’ll need this new employee. This is a process that is defined with the staff augmentation partner.
Moreover, you need to expose the specific needs and expectations that you have with your new employee, this way a good relationship will be established in which you’ll get what you need to complete your project successfully.
2. Communicate beforehand
It’s important that, before the first day, the new employee(s) get in touch with your company, this can be through an email from HR or a phone call from who will be their leader or project manager. They will serve as a guide for the first day of work and at the same time will provide an introduction to their work. Regardless of the method, you need to contact new employees before they start, so they don’t feel blind at the beginning.
At SunDevs, before we hire new talents, we speak with our clients to know their organizational culture and how the onboarding process currently works in their companies. We also share information with the augmented staff about the client, so they can have a knowledge base about the company they’ll start working with.
A research by HRDive.com revealed that almost 89% of new employees said that they wanted to meet with their new manager on their first day, while 83% had the expectation of being introduced to their work colleagues on the first day to begin with a positive note, which will be important to consider for the next step.
3. The first few days
During the first days of work, augmented staff should feel welcome and have many opportunities to meet with the members of the company, as well as have something to focus their efforts on from the beginning. This successful integration requires collaboration between various departments: HR must coordinate with IT to ensure the employees have access to everything they need on the first day. You have to make sure that your employee has access to all your platforms and tools, as well as to the information relevant to their job.
A survey by Microsoft showed that employees that meet their manager or leader during the first week, have a larger internal network and collaborate more with their team. This leads to a bigger feeling of belonging and increases the chances of this person staying in the company.
4. Training
It has to be taken into account that for new employee(s) to be able to start working, they must receive training from the company. This onboarding process shouldn’t be accelerated, since it could have a negative effect on the retention of workers.
Effective onboarding takes some time and it’s recommended to have someone from the team who is responsible for training this new team member, to know how the company systems are used and everything they need to know to carry out their job.
Tip for remote onboarding: make sure that your remote employees have the same tools for success than your in-house employees.
At SunDevs, as partners and providers of augmented staff, we’re constantly in touch with developers during their first weeks, to know if they have access to everything they need or if they are lacking any tools. We also monitor the performance of the employee and their adaptation to the company, every 15 day and eventually once per month.
5. Integration
One of the most relevant points in the process of onboarding augmented staff, is to accomplish the integration of this external personnel as part of your company.
According to research by Brandon Hall Group, organizations with a solid process of incorporation improve the retention rate of new employees by 82% and the productivity by over 70%
Even if you’re using the staff augmentation model, you need to take into account that the developer or IT professional should be treated like your internal staff, since having a different treatment can create a negative work culture.
The augmented talent you are bringing on for your company should feel part of the team, not as an extension of it. It’s fundamental that during the integration process you work to unite the work cultures of your internal and external team(s) and for you to accomplish working as one unit.
How can we help?
At SunDevs, we forge partnerships and build great products. We have delivered digital products to more than 20 companies in the United States and Latin America; from growing startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Audi, and Cinemark. Through our experience we have learned clients are often faced with the challenge of ensuring their development teams have the capacity and level of knowledge required. As a way to address this challenge, we work with clients on staffing their development teams by ensuring they are equipped with knowledge and experience in Agile Methodology and understand the importance of contributing to a DevOps culture.
As a result, we constantly enable our clients to deliver the quality and efficiency of development and deployment of their products. Get in touch with us here.
