Your team isn’t working. Here’s why.

You’ve added 10, 25, maybe 50 people to your team in the last year. You’re probably interviewing quite a bit, and saying “no” twenty times as often as you’re saying “yes.” You only want to hire people who you think will make valuable contributions, who’ll work the best with your existing team, and who’ll be right for the stage your startup is in. Imagine all your hard work combing through resumes and running interviews just disappearing. Unfortunately, that happens - a lot. A great deal of the productivity and value you hired for is never realized due to ineffective team practices. If you’re finding yourself still burnt out from last quarter’s challenges, ask yourself, is your team really working?

Teams don’t work for a lot of reasons - constant change, team members who can’t get along, and many others. I’ve worked with a dozen engineering teams, ranging in size from 10 people to 250 people just in the tech organization. I can tell you the top two reasons teams didn’t work - and it might not be what you think. I saw teams struggle because of two things: one, they didn’t share knowledge effectively, and two, they didn’t support each other through change. I’ve put together two quick practices for overcoming those challenges.

Practice # 1: Everyone’s Onboarding All the Time

Winging a new hire’s onboarding means new folks who aren’t sure what their jobs entail, how to do their work, or who to ask questions of when they run into trouble. Throwing your new hires “into the deep end” also means that your current team doesn’t know what’s next or how to respond proactively. Instead of bringing on your new employees one person at a time, try to organize cohorts. This allows new team members to get answers to questions they were too afraid to ask, and it allows you to dedicate more time to sharing information effectively. I promise the practice will more than pay for the annoyance of having to push out a start date a few days. Effective teams also include everyone in the onboarding process: current team members are briefed about who’s joining and how they’ll be adding to the team, and some are tapped to be buddies for the new hires. Finally, managers are supported by an onboarding framework that makes their lives easier - namely, templates that they can copy and tweak rather than starting from scratch for every new hire.

Want to read the other two practices? Head over to Edify's blog for the full post!