Onboarding, or as it is formally known as organizational socialization, is one of the most crucial processes for each company to get right. It is an activity of introducing your new employees to the company culture, knowledge, expectations, and company policies. Most companies split their onboarding process into two categories - actions needed before the employee’s first day and activities from their first day onward. We divided our onboarding process into three subcategories: legal onboarding, general onboarding, and team onboarding.

As it is super important, Memgraph dedicated plenty of time to design the best onboarding process and experience for our new hires, and here’s our guide to it.

LEGAL ONBOARDING

Did you know that almost 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a company for at least three years if the onboarding was a great experience for them? Onboarding starts way before employees’ first day of work. It actually begins right after they accept the offer. Since transparency is one of the essential things in our company culture, we immediately inform all our employees about the new person joining us as soon as the new hire accepts the offer. Usually, it takes around two weeks between the new employee accepting the offer and their starting date. This time frame is something we strive for, but it may vary depending on the candidate’s needs and preferences. The rest of our legal onboarding includes, on the one hand, more internal things such as coordinating all personal employee details (employment contract, legal paperwork) with the accounting department, and on the other hand keeping in touch with the new employee and providing all information needed before his day one.

GENERAL ONBOARDING

General onboarding starts once all the legal paperwork has been done. Firstly, our new employee gets all the necessary equipment in their onboarding pack - from laptops to monitors to the inevitable company swag. This part of the onboarding includes opening all general accounts, informing the new employee about their Pecha Kucha, and scheduling presentations for their first week at Memgraph. You might wonder what Pecha Kucha is! We’ve come up with a way, and it sort of became our tradition, for the newcomers to do a short and quick presentation about themselves called Pecha Kucha - a simple, informal, and snappy presentation style. Pecha Kuchas are being held on our regular All Hands meeting that happens every second Monday. This way, we get to know each other better in the remote world.

On the first day, the new employee is invited to the Welcome to Memgraph presentation where we share insights of who we are, how we are structured, how we work, tools we use, more about our culture benefits, and how the whole onboarding process looks like. We also do a Meet the Founders presentation on their first week when our founders Dominik and Marko personally share Memgraph’s history and future and the company’s mission, vision, and values. Since Memgraph is a completely remote company, we started to build our company wiki on Notion - which happened to be a very useful collaborative workspace where everyone can find all the general information about policies, procedures, benefits, etc. To make it easier for our new employees to navigate through all those information, we created an onboarding checklist that includes all those tools and policies in one place.

TEAM ONBOARDING

Teamwork makes the dream work, right? So it’s pretty important for each team to onboard their new member in their own way. All managers have some general guidelines for the team onboarding, such as opening team-specific accounts or having regular 1:1 meetings. Still, we leave it up to them to accordingly shape their team onboarding strategy. It’s important to know that the onboarding process doesn’t stop after the first day or the first week on the job. That’s why we send a few onboarding surveys throughout the year to gather as much feedback as we can about their personal onboarding experience. Ultimately, a good onboarding process, in general, includes regular checkups with the employees until they are fully settled.

So, how does our onboarding process sound to you? Check out our open positions! We would love to welcome you aboard :)