DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating. But it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.
DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward. Today we’re bringing you a bonus episode on starting a new job remotely. The coronavirus pandemic has forced many organizations to tell people to work from home, including new employees just starting out.
ALISON BEARD: And one of our listeners is in that strange position. On her first day of a new job, she can’t actually go into the office. She sent us an email asking how to deal with it. We wanted to help her and others in the same situation out. So, we’re answering promptly.
DAN MCGINN: We’re bringing back our expert guest from Episode 19 on remote workers. Siobhan O’Mahony is a professor at Questrom School of Business at Boston University. Siobhan, welcome back.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Thanks for having me, Dan. Hi, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: Hi.
DAN MCGINN: So Alison and I are each recording ourselves from home. Siobhan, we’ve reached you at home, too. Right?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Yes, where my two nine-year-old twins are homeschooling, distance learning.
DAN MCGINN: How’s it going with the nine-year-olds?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Well, we are stressing our network to new levels, and the kitchen at new levels. [LAUGHTER]
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I know. I hear you. I’m home. My husband’s working full time. I’m working. And I’ve been at HBR for ten years. Dan has, too. So it’s even been a transition knowing the organization as well as we do.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah, I would think it would be so disorienting for my first day on a new job to be sitting in my house like this. It just has to be a very difficult transition.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: But I think anyone starting a new job right now is one of the lucky ones.
DAN MCGINN: For sure.
ALISON BEARD: Alright. Should we get started?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Yes.
ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I will soon be starting a new job. It was always supposed to be a remote position, but I was going to do my onboarding onsite. I was really looking forward to meeting my team in person. I wanted to build relationships before interacting remotely. Now, because of social distancing from the coronavirus pandemic, the onboarding will be remote. I’m worried that will put me at a disadvantage. I’ve worked remotely before and been successful, but I found that it takes much longer to get to know people than when everyone is working at the same location. And if I’m not going to the office for onboarding, it’s only going to be harder. How do I get off on the right foot in this new job that is 100% remote from the very beginning? Siobhan, what do you think?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Well, my first thought is that when we look at studies of remote and distributed work, and one of the things that pops up is when some people are colocated, somebody’s at headquarters, someone is in a branch, or someone’s on the road as a salesperson. The rest of the people are in the office. The situation we have here, first, relax, because we’re all remote. Right? So that kind of evens the playing field a little bit.
DAN MCGINN: That’s a great point. I’ve thought about that with all these video meetings we’re doing. You know, it used to be, if someone went wrong in the background, or your dog barked, that that, you know, I would get very tense about that, but we’re all in the same place now. It seems like tolerance for all those sorts of things has just, you know, people are much more patient and understanding.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, and I think this crisis has been a really unique opportunity for everyone to see into each other’s homes. You know, I’ve gotten such insight into my colleagues’ pets, how they decorate, you know, where they sit, who is the big reader because they have huge bookshelves behind them. And I think it’s been delightful. So maybe she can use that to her advantage.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Exactly. And you think about how do people get to know you? Like aside from having a good photo on your Zoom or interesting backdrop, how do people get to know you?
ALISON BEARD: It’s always harder to build relationships when you’re not face-to-face with someone and you’re not able to get the full read on the organization and how people interact with each other. So I would encourage her to find a virtual onboarding buddy. And so I wonder if there’s someone in the organization she can find, maybe asking the recommendation of her boss, to say, who would be a good guide? Who can I chat with about what’s going on and ask questions of?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Well, I think that’s a great first start because you might be coming in as part of a broader cohort. So you want to reach out, identify that group, set up some kind of network or communication. It doesn’t have to be a set time. But you know, maybe it’s a Yammer, it’s a WhatsApp or it’s some kind of Slack chat, that you can say, hey, we’re all new. Let’s share tips and learn together. There’s a set of questions that you can ask this group that you might not feel as comfortable asking a group that’s been there at the organization for a longer time.
DAN MCGINN: There might be a temptation in this situation to schedule kind of a flurry of one on one meetings with all of the colleagues to try to start those conversations and get that going. Is that a good strategy in this environment? Or is there a risk of overdoing that? What do you recommend when it comes to a sort of formally scheduled one-on-one get to know yous?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Yeah, I think this is an excellent question because you know, you think about emergency, crisis, or disaster management, you have response and recovery. Many organizations are still in response. We’re not even sure we’re, what recovery looks like right now. So when they are trying to actively problem solve, and you’re saying, hey, could we have coffee, that might come off wrong. And I think you need to be incredibly sensitive to that. You need to first get to know your immediate team really well and demonstrate confidence there. And before you start networking out with the adjacent teams and organizations.
ALISON BEARD: I completely agree with you, Siobhan. You don’t have any idea what stresses people are under. I think the boss can be a key source of advice here. It is the boss’s job to help onboard. So, you’re not putting undue demands on him by asking for a one on one to talk about priorities, how those goals might have shifted given the changed environment, and also, just the very key stakeholders that you need to talk to and get to know immediately, being really sensitive to the fact that everyone is under pressure right now.
DAN MCGINN: We’re in a crisis business environment in many places. Does that create too much urgency around early wins? Do you think that there’s a danger that as everybody’s sort of running around trying to deal with the falloff in demand, that a new person might feel too much pressure to perform too quickly? And do we need to calibrate that correctly?
ALISON BEARD: I think it’s been such a great opportunity for people to jump in. I mean, I know there’s probably a better chance that she can score more early wins now as everyone’s scrambling and needs help. Getting involved in whatever works has to be done as a result of this crisis, she’s going to get this sort of on the ground experience and relationship building in a way that might eventually be more valuable.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Exactly. I mean, building on that, I’d like to challenge this notion of onboarding or socialization as something that’s done to you. Right? We don’t want to rely on the managers. If our managers are stressed and busy dealing with the crisis response, you may have to take on more of this role, and I don’t even want to use the word, onboarding. I mean, what are the learning goals you have for the first 90 days? You know, if we borrow Michael Atkins’ “First 90 Days” approach, what are the things you want to learn or become active? Where can you contribute? What might happen, you know, going back to Dan’s question, is that there is so much going on that the normal onboarding that might happen when you’re there and present, and remind her, it may slip through cracks a little bit. So you might have to take responsibility for your own learning. That’s not a bad thing. As Alison says, it’s a chance to show what you’re made of.
DAN MCGINN: It’s not nice to think about, but people are starting to get laid off in a wide variety of businesses. What’s the best strategy to deal with the fear that I’m new. Nobody knows me. They’re cutting costs. Is this job going to be stable, secure? Is that something that should be forefront in the mind? Or do you need to sort of put that out of your mind right now?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: I think that’s an excellent point. And I just gave this advice to my brother last week. I said, become indispensable as quickly as possible. What the coda is, is that when you about proving yourself, the thing to remember is that if you’re getting a new job right now, it’s probably a very mature and established organization. And how do you show, how do you do these things, jump in, demonstrate confidence, while showing deference to how things have always gone before? Right? So how do you learn so that you can figure out how to add value in a way that isn’t proving something in a very overt way, and that shows deference to what’s gone on before?
ALISON BEARD: You know, we’re all operating so differently than we have before, and maybe that will result in long term changes. But the insights that you glean from this insane period might not be a true reflection of how the company has operated and will operate in non-crisis times. Is this period a true read on a company’s culture?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Yeah.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah, that’s interesting, the idea that you are getting this sort of skewed version of reality if you try to draw too many conclusions from what’s going on right now.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Yeah, culture is a live thing. Right? So right now a meeting culture is being created online. You know, do meetings start on time? Is there an agenda? Do they end on time? Do people always keep their video on or off? But I think that these are questions kind of, for now, maybe not for the culture going forward. And the living organizational culture that goes forward, maybe we’ll see coupled.
ALISON BEARD: So eventually, all of our colleagues who work at headquarters will go back into the office. She will be in this remote job, as was always intended. Should she at that point go in to do face to face onboarding meet and greets as she would have done now?
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Absolutely, I think.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah. I agree. The sooner she can get into the office, recognizing that we’re all waiting for governments to allow us to do that, the better off she’ll be.
ALISON BEARD: And there might be one silver lining in this whole thing, is that because everyone has now worked remotely, they might do a better job at interacting with her and making her feel included in the long term.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Building on that idea, Alison, I think if she does get the opportunity to go in, let’s do a collaboration checkup. Right? How could we be teaming better? What are the developmental goals of the team as we work on projects for clients? Like, how do we think about win/win, not just working sort of effectively, but working at peak?
ALISON BEARD: So in a way, her postponed meetings will be more valuable because she’ll have experience with these colleagues and be able to take the conversations that she’s having with them much further to say, how can this work get better? Not just how we’re going to do it, as she would have done in that traditional first day or first-week onboarding.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Exactly.
DAN MCGINN: Great. Alison, what’s our summary?
ALISON BEARD: So first, we would tell this listener to relax. Everyone is remote right now. People are working harder to be understanding and humane. We think that as a first step, she might find a cohort of other new employees, maybe set up a group chat with them, or find an onboarding buddy, maybe someone that her boss recommends that can guide her. She should remember that this might be a skewed version of reality for now, but that the way the organization is operating might influence how it operates going forward. There is a temptation to schedule a bunch of one-on-one meetings. We don’t think that’s totally advisable when everyone is in crisis mode. She can talk to her manager about who the very key people are. We see huge opportunities for her to get early wins. There’s so much going on, she can just jump in and help, which is a great way to build her reputation and relationships through collaboration, rather than conversation. We want her to make herself indispensable as soon as possible. How do you do that? Well, show you’re competent, but also that you can learn and add long term value. And then as we move back into sort of normal operations, we think that she should go back into the office and not necessarily do the onboarding that she had planned, but actually have more substantial conversations about how she and her new teammates can move the organization forward together.
DAN MCGINN: Siobhan, thanks for coming back on the show.
SIOBHAN O’MAHONY: Thank you for having me, Dan and Alison. And I want to say, congratulations on your new job to our listener out there.
DAN MCGINN: That’s Siobhan O’Mahony. She’s a professor at the Questrom School of Management at Boston University. Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions. Now we want to know your question. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is, dearhbr@hbr.org.
ALISON BEARD: On our next episode, we’ll be talking about coronavirus career limbo with NYU Stern business school professor Scott Galloway.
DAN MCGINN: To get that episode automatically, please subscribe.
ALISON BEARD: And if you like the show, please give us a five-star review.
DAN MCGINN: I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR:.
