I’m Not On Board With This Remote Onboarding
Two weeks ago I thought had I cracked the code for this whole career reinvention thing. I was pitching my first client and had lined up some freelance work to bring money in while I build my business and brand.
The freelance work showed a lot of promise. It’s for a company I lobbied hard to get into and hoped to show my best work for future opportunities. I was beyond excited.
Then the onboarding began.
Imagine the last time you started a new job. Remember how nervous you felt? How overwhelming it was to learn a new corporate culture, workflow and office jargon (which in TV, jargon is the predominant language and every team has its own dialect). Now strip away the physical office and access to the people you’re supposed to learn from and work with. Then take away the faces of the people you’ll be working with and replace them with emails, texts and instruction guides.
This is what it’s like to start a new job while working from home.
During training I’ve encountered maybe 30 people in just over a week. Five appeared over video. I’ve taken part in a handful of live video demonstrations for the key computer programs I’ll be learning. And I’ve been given numerous, lengthy instruction manuals to read and refer to as I learn the job. In terms of actual job shadowing, it’s all been over G-chat with seven different writers and maybe two introductory phone calls.
If you’re the type of person who can learn a new job this way, with little to no human contact, I applaud you. I admire your ability to thrive in this type of onboarding. Correction, I envy it.
For me it’s been a next-level nightmare.
Turns out, I need to connect to a human in order to learn from said being. I need to see when they’re busy and when they’re able to ask a question in the moment. If I wait, I’ll forget what I wanted to ask and maybe even the why. I need to hear their approach to a project and then watch it come together in real time to understand what’s expected of me.
That’s just the type of brain I have.
I also learn from mistakes. I need to be able to really know my job instinctively, not refer to endless style guides, notes and instruction manuals. That just slows me down. For my entire career I’ve listened to instructions, demonstrated how I understood, listened to any correction and then intuit where I misunderstood so I never make that same mistake again.
Because that’s the type of brain I have. You know what’s not effective or pleasant? Correcting a new hire over G-chat with very little explanation why.
I also need to understand the bigger picture of how a production operates. I need to know how my actions affect the work of others. It helps me understand best practices for communication. It also helps me understand how to streamline my efforts and help a production run more smoothly.
Because that’s also the type of brain I have. And it’s what I’ve based my career on.
After a week of onboarding, do I have a broader sense of how this production runs? Yes, but not because of anything I’ve been taught or shown in real time during training. I’ve had to piece it together from various disembodied voices. It’s frustrating and demanding mental labor. And it’s caused me to question how badly I want to improve my work, either on my own or with more training.
I know what I need to learn and practice to be a better new hire. And the straight-A keener in me is prepared to do this on my own time so I can be the employee they thought they were hiring. But the enthusiasm I had at the beginning of this training is long gone. I don’t feel connected to this team the way I would if training happened in person. Or even over video with cameras on.
We forget how powerful it is to communicate face-to-face, even if not in person. Without that feeling of belonging and teamwork, I have to push myself to stay engaged — to remind myself that the future opportunities are still there. Maybe one day I’ll work with this team in a newsroom, but that day isn’t happening for quite some time.
I get it. I know training a new person is draining, and when reserves are low it’s hard to put in the extra effort. But don’t forget, I’m coming in as your relief. It benefits you to share everything you know about your job, instead of leaving it to me to ask questions about things I don’t even know to ask about. It’s this extra mental labor we’re all going through that’s contributing to burnout.
Starting a new job is a partnership. I keep coming into these video meetings with my camera on because I want them to know me — to know there’s a person on the other side of G-chat taking notes, trying and learning. So why is everyone else on the call choosing to be an empty black box?
