ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT David Loftesness Once you grow beyond ifve or six teams, or start hiring employees at a faster clip, a rotation-based onboarding process may be impossible to scale due to the sheer number of teams. But while growth complicates certain onboarding practices, it facilitates others. “At a certain scale, you’re growing so fast that you might have ifve to 10 or more employees starting in a given week. Take advantage of these new hire cohorts and help them to bond like a freshman class at college. Even without team rotations, they can use these personal connections to learn more about other teams. It’s a particularly effective way to formalize onboarding without sacriifcing rigor,” says Lotfesness. “Plus, those cohorts will likely end up in different departments, and they will form and facilitate connections and empathy. When people have friends in other parts of the company, that can be a really useful way of knitting those teams together over time.” Make room in your onboarding process for informational check-ins with key cultural gatekeepers, too. “Get new hires in a room with your veteran employees, for example, to maintain a thread to your earliest days. Encourage them to share stories, both diiffcult failures and energizing successes. This can give the new folks some perspective of what the old-timers went through to get the company to where it is today,” says Lotfesness. “At Twitter, it was really common for a newbie to come in, look at some cruddy Ruby code in the Monorail and think, ‘Oh my god, what were these people doing?’ But once you’ve heard the origin story for that bit of code, how it saved the day at two in the morning, just before the Grammys, when the site was about to fall over, you’ll have a lot more empathy for what the old guard went through.” 87