The path of the newest colleague: How Atola onboards its team members

Quests, tours, games, fun and laughs, lectures, tastings of new food and drinks… These activities might seem like part of a festival. In reality, they are elements of the onboarding process for new members of the Atola team. How do we plan the first weeks in the office for our new employees to help them feel welcomed and valued, included and comfortable, confident and productive in their new work environment?

From day one

We at Atola Technology see onboarding as an integral and crucial part of the hiring process. So we put a lot of effort into the adaptation and integration of new team members. Our goal is to help newcomers bring out the best in them and understand the company better: its values, people, processes, and products. And it starts from day one.??

So, if you were our new employee, what would your first day at work look like?

We want you to feel welcomed and valued. To ensure that, one of your new colleagues will meet you at the door to give you an office tour (with stops in our hardware, development, QA, and marketing rooms), show you how to use the coffee machine, where to find snacks and everything you might need to feel comfortable at work. It is a good opportunity to introduce yourself to new colleagues, too.???

At the end of the tour, your fully equipped new workplace will already be waiting for you. At your desk, you’ll find a welcome kit as a small token of appreciation for choosing us as your new colleagues. ?? Among other nice little things, it contains:

• The keys to the office so that you can work at a flexible schedule that suits you best.
• A book on a professional topic, to spark ideas and further develop your skills.
• A reusable water bottle, to stay hydrated and productive during the day.
• A notebook and pen, to write down thoughts, meeting notes, and to-do lists.
• An Atola t-shirt.
• A pack of vegan candy bars.

We understand that there is a lot to process in a single day: new impressions, new people, new information. So, all the work-related guides are gathered on a dedicated welcome webpage that you can refer to anytime you need.

Atola Lunch: A fun way to know your teammates better

Phew, half of your first day at work has passed! Feeling hungry yet? Then it’s time to introduce one of our most fun onboarding activities: Atola lunch.

It’s a great (and tasty) opportunity to:

• Learn how things work in the team and typical behaviors.
• Get to know people and their interests.
• Explore company values and feel its vibe.

Here’s how it works:

1. At lunchtime, all teammates gather in a meeting room for a draw.
2. A newcomer pulls the name of a colleague from a hat.
3. The newbie and the randomly selected current team member go for lunch.
4. The company compensates for the lunch.

It continues for five days in a row. The daily ritual of a draw is quick yet full of joy due to anticipation and unexpected results, bringing forth a lot of jokes and internal memes in the process.

But the new employee can’t go for lunch with the same colleague twice. This way, during the first week the newcomer can have deeper one-to-one talks with five teammates and find out about nice restaurants, cafes, pubs, or street food points in the neighborhood.

Atola lunch is all about fun, discoveries, and good food. It’s about care and acceptance, too. Everyone who tried it loved it.??

The quest for success

Of course, finding new places to eat isn't the only thing for a new hire to learn in the first couple of weeks. Our business domain, digital forensics, isn’t widely known and easily understood, and our products, which combine tailor-made hardware and software components, are quite sophisticated too.

To pass on the knowledge about the company’s values, culture, history, technologies, markets, and best practices to new employees, we conduct informal peer-to-peer lectures in the course of several weeks. Team members can pick a topic they like to talk about and prepare a presentation. The main topics that are crucial to a proper understanding of the key concepts are covered by team leads and the most experienced employees. A listener is encouraged to ask questions anytime during the lecture: it helps build trust, boost motivation to learn, and avoid issues down the line.?

We organize no more than two lectures in one day to avoid overwhelming new people with tons of information. Since the list of lecturers can include the names of almost all our team members, this stage of the onboarding process offers another opportunity to get to know new colleagues better, ask questions, and integrate into the team faster. ??

As strong proponents of the ‘learning by doing’ approach, we also use custom-built ‘quests’ that encourage new employees to put their new knowledge into practice. The quest is basically a set of small tasks that a new hire needs to complete using one of our products, for instance:

1. Find a certain drive in our ‘Great Library’.
2. Find an appropriate cable to connect it to a forensic imager.
3. Launch an imaging process to copy the drive.
4. Print an Imaging completed report.

Each team (dev, QA, hardware, marketing etc.) has their own set of additional lectures and quests, according to the specifics of their work.?

Always ready to help

We foster a culture of mentoring and consider the willingness to help a colleague one of our core values. So, if you’re new to Atola, we've got you covered. Starting from your first day at work, rest assured that you can ask anyone for help and receive immediate assistance or advice. This approach creates an atmosphere of trust and support, allowing newcomers to feel confident and reassured.?

The main mentor for new employees is their team lead. A team lead is the one who plans the initial learning trajectory, who gives challenging quests and valuable advice, who evaluates the results. And we try to keep mentoring in as informal and friendly manner as possible. During the onboarding a team lead regularly checks if there are any questions or difficulties and calls quick meetings to provide the answers.

An experienced team member can be assigned as a mentor for a particular task and take a part of the responsibility for its successful delivery. To effectively share experience and analyze tough cases, some of our teams practice working in pairs, for example, pair programming in the dev team and pair testing in the QA team.??

Having fun together

Naturally, forming working relationships and having fun together with colleagues is not limited by the onboarding period and company office space. There’s life beyond the office doors, too. We practice company outings regularly to unwind and discover something new.

Everyone in the company can come up with ideas for an offsite event and everyone gets an invitation to join if they like. And a nice bonus: if five or more colleagues are eager to attend an event, the company covers the entry ticket.

Here are just a few examples of our past company gatherings:

• Pizza party
• Bowling championship
• Board games
• Blood donation
• First aid training
• Movie night
• Pub crawl
• Art exhibition
• Quest room
• Theater premiere
• Daily lunch or dinner

These team building activities are a great way for new hires to meet and bond with coworkers in a friendly and informal environment.??

Onboarding outcomes

So, what are the outcomes of a successful onboarding course???

For a new hire, onboarding helps to:

• Minimize the stress of adapting to a new working environment.
• Feel welcomed, included, and comfortable at work.
• Understand how things work in the company.
• Put newly acquired knowledge and skills into practice.
• Get familiar with the team.
• Keep a good vibe and have fun.

For the company, successful onboarding means:

• Keeping a new employee stress-free and happy.
• Having a new hire that understands company values, processes, and products.
• Effectively passing on required knowledge and skills.
• Maintaining company culture and team spirit.
• Ensuring long-term productivity and satisfaction of an employee.

And, last but not least, welcoming new team members on board is always a joyful and thrilling experience for all of us.???