Onboarding

About this Episode

In this episode of the Acima Development Podcast, host Mike starts by sharing an anecdote about his three-year-old son, emphasizing the importance of guidance and support in learning. This sets the stage for a discussion on onboarding new employees, highlighting the similarities between guiding a child and mentoring new hires. Mike notes that new employees, like his son, have potential but require proper guidance to become productive members of the team.

The discussion then delves into various strategies for successful onboarding. Matt praises Mike's analogy and underscores the importance of mentorship and guidance for new employees. Eddy adds that providing the right tools and environment allows new hires to realize their potential. The group agrees on the significance of assigning buddies to new employees and promoting a supportive culture where asking questions is encouraged. This not only helps new hires learn faster but also fosters a collaborative environment. They also stress the importance of documentation and how it can be a valuable resource for new employees when mentors are not available.

Towards the end, the conversation shifts to the role of tools and technology in onboarding. The hosts discuss the benefits of standardizing tools to streamline workflows and make the onboarding process more efficient. They also touch on the challenges of remote work and how it can impact the onboarding experience. The episode concludes with a reminder that onboarding is not just about processes and tools but also about building trust and relationships. By treating new hires with humanity and fostering a culture of openness and support, companies can ensure a successful and smooth onboarding experience!

Transcript:

 MIKE: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Acima Development Podcast. I'm Mike. I'm hosting today. And with me, we've got Eddy, Ramses, and Matt.

And I'm actually going to start today by talking about my family. I have a three-year-old, and [chuckles] he is very much three years old [laughs]. He is figuring things out, and sometimes, he does the wrong thing, like chasing you around and hitting you with a stick. Like, no, that's the wrong thing to do [laughs]. And you tell him that, and he'll be upset and think that you're trying to hurt his feelings. Like, no, I love you. I just don't want to get hit by a stick [laughs].

And, you know, three years ago, he just laid there and cried if he was hungry, right [laughs]? He had a lot of abilities, but none of them were developed at all. And I honestly don't expect him to be a contributing member of society for another 15 years [laughs]. And that's pretty normal because that's true for all of us. We all get this start, you know, we've got this potential, but not really any knowledge about the situation and got to figure out as we go. And it takes a long time before we're productive.

I mention this because today, we're going to talk about onboarding new employees. And, hopefully, you're not putting your three-year-olds or your infants to work [laughs]. But we all start, to some degree, you know, in ignorance. You know, we come into a new job and there's a lot of stuff we don't know. We have a ton of potential, but there's so much that we don't know and things we don't even know we don't know that make it very hard to get up to speed.

And, you know, depending on how well that onboarding process goes, depending on how much support is given to those new employees, it may take them a fairly short period of time to get up to speed or...hopefully, not 18 years [laughs], but it can take a while. I mentioned the support they get, and that's something we can influence. To some degree, there's also the intrinsic complexity of the systems that we're working with that we don't control. There are some things we can do, you know, we can do refactoring, try to improve our systems, but, you know, some problems are hard, and it's going to take people a while to get up to speed. These are real problems, and they're worth talking about.

And that's our topic for discussion today is, how do we onboard? It's also timely because we've got some interns starting on Monday, and we'd really like to give them the support that they need to quickly get up to speed. Now, I have some thoughts about the things that are most important for helping somebody in their onboarding, but I'd like to open the floor. What do you all think about what's important for helping people do that onboarding?

MATT: I'd first like to say you are always so great with your segues and analogies because this one makes perfect sense, right? You have a three-year-old who is learning as he goes. And would he probably figure out life on his own? Yeah, eventually. But without your guidance and without some leadership, it would take much, much longer than it would instead of you providing it for him, right? And I think that's kind of what we have to look at when onboarding new employees, whether it be new to the company, new to a role, or switching departments, you know, any of those things. I think everyone requires a little bit of instruction and guidance until they get up to speed.

MIKE: Absolutely.

EDDY: You mentioned individuals having potential but not the right guidance, kind of paraphrasing a little bit. And any individual that you hire, you interview, and you say, "Yeah, this person's got the right attitude. They got potential," but if you expect this person to hit the ground running, they're going to fall over, or they're going to drown. If you're patient and you provide the right reinforcements, and the right help, and tools, utility, et cetera, the person will grow into their own, and they will show you what you perceived during the interview.

I'd like to believe that some of the individuals who are engineering now are showing that on a day-by-day basis, right? Individuals, you know, who were ambitious, you know, who had the courage, you know, to push forward and be given the opportunity to do that shift in career have now been able to provide all that throughput, you know, that was initially observed during the interview. So, I think that so long as you do provide the patience and the right atmosphere, people will grow into their own, and they will surprise you.

MIKE: I can say that's true of you, Eddy [laughs]. You've done amazing work. And, honestly, I would say that's true of each of you. I know many of you listening are like, oh, I don't care about that. I do. I'm going to call it out publicly. I'm working with three people that I'm very happy to be working with.

MATT: And I second that. One of the things that I think is really important and maybe sometimes we overlook when we're onboarding people is that in this process, we can also empower them to be mentors and help them be able to onboard the next people that come on. And I've found, at least throughout my career, that one of the important things as the mentee or new person being onboarded is to ask questions and not be afraid to ask those questions. And as mentors, we can help guide that with our new people and encourage that. That can go a long way.

MIKE: I think that culture does make a huge difference. If you shut down any question quickly, there's not going to be very many more questions, and you do a lot of harm. Back to the three-year-old, you know what three-year-olds do? They ask questions. "What's this? What's this? What's that? What's this? What's this [laughs]?" And you can shut that down and not respond. And the result is that curiosity will be lost, and that's an awful outcome. You wouldn't want it to happen to your three-year-old. I don't think you want it to happen to your new employee, either. That curiosity is probably a lot of why you want them there—is that hunger to grow.

MATT: Yeah, and it creates isolation if you do shut it down. As annoying as those "What's this?" questions might be, that's how they're learning, and that's how they're gathering all this new information. And will they retain all of it at once? Probably not. But that's why they need to continue asking these questions.

You know, I've been in the industry forever now, but here with the company, I'm in a new role, and Mike is present in most of the meetings I am. And I am one of those people who's always asking questions. And it may feel a little disruptive at times, but I try to ask the question once and remember those things so I don't have to again, and that way, if someone asks me about those same things, I have the answers for them.

EDDY: Can I say how much talent it takes to understand something that's been directed to you the very first time [laughs]? I will have the individual reiterate three different ways for me to really understand that before they say, "Do you get that?" "Yeah, yeah, I get that [laughs]."

MIKE: Okay, so let's talk about that. So, going, you know, with the analogy we've got here, this morning, my toddler asked me, "What's this?" And he was pointing at a cell phone tower. And I said, "It's a cell phone tower [laughs]." And he now has, like, some label for it that he's probably going to forget [laughs], and that's probably about all he has. He has no concept of what's going on there. He's three. I'm not going to explain to him electromagnetic radiation and, you know, low-frequency waves that can travel through a lot of distance and through even solid materials sometimes, and how those resonate with your antennas.

I can just say, "That's a tower," right? If you don't have something to hold that information onto, to kind of pin it to, it's like trying to remember 20 numbers in a row. You're not going to remember it. Your brain won't do that. You can only hold about seven. But if you have that narrative, if you actually have the story, you have something to pin it to. So, you're going to need somebody to repeat and repeat and repeat with greater depth each time. Because the first time, you might, if you remember it, learn the name. The second time, maybe you have a little more story around it, and so on. And with each iteration, you're going to internalize more information.

MATT: Yeah, and let's face it, when you're starting somewhere, you're drinking from a fire hose, and you definitely can't retain everything that you're being told. You know, you just have to try and pick the things that you think are important and hold on to those, and maybe they aren't the right thing sometimes. But you're right; things do take more than once to really ingrain.

EDDY: In order for me to reassure myself that I've been able to internalize something new, I try to explain it to someone else who has no context, right? I read this article a few weeks ago that basically says if you're having a hard time explaining it or dumbing it down, you probably don't understand it. And so, I've gotten into the habit I'm like, oh yeah, cool, I think I get it. But let me try to explain it to someone else and see if they can at least get the concept of what it is. It has done wonders because if I'm able to be like, oh, huh, wait, I don't know if I'm sure about this analogy; let me just make sure, it really harps that ideology down.

MATT: Yeah, if you want a better understanding of something, teach it. And you're probably going to pick up something along the way while you are.

MIKE: Absolutely, and that connects back to the onboarding. One thing I found, so kind of the first tactic I'm going to throw out here that I have found to be extremely helpful for onboarding, is to pair people together who are starting at the same time or starting near the same time. If somebody started three months ago, they have everything fresh in their head. And they're going to be able to probably more easily help the person who just started than actually somebody who's been there a long time. And it has the added benefit is now they're explaining it. Now, they're finding where the gaps are and deepening their understanding.

And if people are starting at the same time, it's kind of a back-and-forth, right? It's this pairing that allows them to do that, you know, in a very tight loop with each other, and it works out really well. There's another tactic I'm going to get to in a minute. But I think that that's one of the most helpful things I've seen is to pair people together who have started at around the same time. Have you all seen that to be similarly effective?

MATT: Yeah, absolutely. And each of them are going to retain different things. So, if you have them together...in fact, we are just going through this on one of my teams. I have two new hires, and it worked out that I could start them both the same day; much, much easier that way because then they can work off each other, as well as it frees up some of our engineering time, right, to be able to do that with two people at once. But it's a much broader conversation when you have three people involved versus two.

MIKE: So, in short, it works, right [laughs]? Put people together. You know, to bring up another tactic that I've found is extremely valuable, is give somebody a buddy. Give whoever is coming in an assigned buddy. Like, "You, this is your friend [laughs], and you're going to work with them." In the absence of that, people don't know who to ask, right? You're like, well, I should ask somebody, and they'll go and try to ask whoever they saw first because [inaudible 12:22] familiar face. You don't know who to talk to. And you can go talk to the person next to you, like, oh, I don't know, right [laughs]? And then, you drop right into that isolation. You need to have a line of contact, somebody that you can ask.

Now, they may not be the right person to answer your question, but they can point you to the person who can answer that. They can point to the documentation. They can bring you down to IT to get you a new laptop. You know, having somebody have a person is just one of the most important things I've seen.

I think I mentioned in a podcast, a recent podcast that we were on, I remember a job I had over 20 years ago, comfortably over 20 years ago now, well over 20 years ago, where I was doing some construction work. And my first day, they set me up with somebody else, and there were some language challenges. We didn't understand each other very well at first, well, mostly me not understanding [laughs] him very well. This was in Louisiana, and he had a French background, but we still communicated. And, man, having that buddy made such a difference. It made such a difference. And pretty soon, I was able to understand. And we worked well together. I learned the ropes, and we actually got to be really close friends.

RAMSES: Do you speak French now, too, Mike?

MIKE: Not a word [laughs]. Well, probably a word but not meaningfully [laughs].

EDDY: How's your Spanish?

MIKE: Not a paid promotion, but I use Duolingo, and it has been helping. I've been studying Duolingo for almost four years daily.

RAMSES: Oh, nice.

MIKE: It has been very beneficial. I can read Spanish pretty well now.

MATT: I do love that we can practice those languages here at this company. I've been trying because I went so long without speaking any Spanish, and Eddy and a number of the other team members have really helped out with that.

EDDY: To be fair, this is a side [inaudible 14:11], but I've always associated programming terminology in English. And I've never once thought, huh, how do I say array in Spanish, right [laughter]? So, like, I can say everything else except array, and I'm like, oh, man, how do you say that, right? But, like, it's kind of funny, right? You're like, yeah, I understand, but not all the lingo.

MATT: Have you looked? Is there a direct translation?

EDDY: There is, and if you're interested, I can tell you.

MATT: I am.

EDDY: Yeah, array in Spanish is regla like a ruler.

MATT: Great. Interesting.

EDDY: It is, yeah.

MATT: So, one of the other things I think is really important for onboarding is to have a plan instead of just flying by the cuff every time we bring someone on, and I know I'm guilty of that. But having a plan, having a schedule, assigning these buddies, assigning a pair, those things, if you have them lined up up front, will really help improve the process.

MIKE: About seven years ago-ish, more or less, Acima was running their first apprenticeship program. And the one who had been running it actually took a position in a different company after they were about two weeks in. And I was brought in to lead that program and a team two weeks in [laughs]. That was a challenge [laughs], I've got to say, because that continuity was lost, you know, and the preparation was [inaudible 15:45]. And I put a lot of time into getting on top of that. And I really wish that I'd had the preparation ahead of time.

In subsequent years, I learned my lesson [laughs] and tried to get well out ahead of that. You know, for an internship or apprenticeship, you know, we've got a schedule. We've got a project. We've got the person they know to cling to and talk to. We've got the buddies lined up. And having those things lined up means that you can come in and have it go much more smoothly.

MATT: I think another new challenge we're facing this year, in particular, is as we're operating under the corporate umbrella, some of these interns are in an entirely different state now, and we're used to having them in office historically. So, that, I think, presents some new challenges that we need to overcome.

MIKE: One thing we're doing with the interns is dividing. So, in general, the Draper office, we should have local folks primarily. But, you know, the pandemic made things really interesting because we were all remote, no face-to-face contact, and that brings with its own set of challenges. Now, we're getting farther away from that. Most companies have at least a hybrid connection where some people are seeing each other sometimes. But, you know, it was all on camera or voice, and you do lose something. You do lose something, some connection. And you have to...I'm not saying that you shouldn't do it. But it takes additional work to be connected when you're not physically in the same space.

MATT: Absolutely. Even working with some of these people that we've worked with that are in our Plano offices for a few years, you don't really feel like you know them until you actually meet them in person and get a little face time. I mean, it improves those relationships so much. I think it's super valuable.

MIKE: Well, even things like...actually, Eddy and I were talking about this before we started the call. Turning on the camera [laughs] when you're working with remote people (It is a little off-topic from our main subject.), but it makes a difference. It gives you more connection. I've done a lot of remote work, decades, actually, of remote work [chuckle], so I'm very familiar with it. But one thing that I used to years ago, partly out of necessity, not have a camera on, you know, it was all just voice or text chatting. But over the years, I've become much more...well, I'll say I've developed a habit of turning my camera on, even when I don't feel like it [laughs] because it can be exhausting to have people staring at you all day. But I try to do it anyway just to establish that greater human connection.

EDDY: We were pretty lucky, Ramses, myself, and Tad, just to put names out there, sorry, guys. We were given new laptops, and we got to upgrade from Intel to Mac, right? And that was awesome. But I was also a little skeptical at first because I'm like, dang, I haven't onboarded in a while. Like, do I still remember how to do this? And we got out pretty quickly, but it's only because I had a bunch of the context already that I didn't know I had, you know, until I had to reapply that again.

And I'm like, oh crap, it is not working. What was that again? Oh yeah, cool, cool, cool. And I was able to fill stuff in. I cannot imagine doing that with this being the very first thing. Like, if I'm an intern coming in and like, hey, set up Kubes. Set up AWS. Set up your bundles. Like, it could go over your head. And I realized that maybe documentation could be a lot better. But in order to help facilitate new onboarding, I think documentation is critical to how fast an individual gets up to speed.

MATT: Absolutely. And, yes, it's really hard without some assistance and guidance setting up, especially our services. We have a pretty complex ecosystem. And I experienced that when I started with the company. It was right when the pandemic hit, and we all got sent home, and I didn't have all of my services set up yet. So, I just kind of had to fumble my way through it, reaching out via Slack where I could. It was tough. So, you're absolutely right. And I think something probably everyone, at least through my experience, can improve on is documentation, especially with onboarding new employees.

MIKE: Well, let's dig into that. We've talked about having a human connection, but that person can't be there all the time. That's just not possible unless you're some privileged person who can pay for a personal mentor [laughs], but, you know, generally, you're not going to get 100% of somebody's dedicated attention. And you're going to need to figure stuff out on your own sometime. How much do you think we should invest into documentation? Because documentation can be very expensive because it's an artifact, just like code is.

One idea that has really stuck with me is the idea that code is debt. Usually, we think, no, we're building this great thing. Well, yes, you built something, but now you've got to maintain it. It may provide value. But what's providing value is that you solve the problems, not necessarily the code itself. And if you have that code, that artifact requires maintenance. Likewise, documentation is the same way, and it doesn't even provide value. It doesn't pay for itself by, you know, having users use it. It indirectly pays for itself by making things go faster. It doesn't mean it's not valuable. But it's expensive. It's expensive and hard to maintain. So, to what degree should we invest in documentation to make onboarding easier?

MATT: Well, I know that you've said this before. I think that it's worth the upfront investment just for the cost savings you're going to get by, you know, increasing the rate at which people can get onboarded and up to speed. But something you've said a number of times, and it's stuck with me, is while we're onboarding, we have those new employees help maintain that documentation and make sure it gets up to date. That way, you're kind of killing two birds with one stone. You're getting people onboarded. They're getting more familiar because they have to go through and help maintain this documentation. So, it will bring up questions that maybe they haven't thought of before. It'll identify gaps in that documentation that they can help fill. So, I personally think it's invaluable.

MIKE: So, you just said something, I think, important here. A way you can keep your documentation fresh is everybody who uses it, particularly this onboarding documentation, updates it and make that formally part of the, you know, the responsibility. It builds on something we've already talked about of, you know, teaching and explaining [inaudible 22:38] the documentation.

EDDY: Actually, I've experienced that firsthand over the past couple of weeks. Part of the project that I'm working on and part of the team is integrating with a third party, right? And a bunch of that has been through the course of APIs and, like, what kind of response, what the shape looks like, what they take, you know, what attributes are required, which ones are optional. And having a robust documentation on that goes leaps and bounds, right, to answering your own questions, and so instead of waiting for individuals to respond and give you the understanding, not just there; it's just in general, right? I just want to harp on, like, how crucial it is to have a robust onboarding, right, that just grows.

MATT: Yeah, and on that, I know the project you speak of. On that project, you guys have also been creating documentation on the flows, things like that. And I'd be willing to bet that you understand it much, much better because you've had to go in and update and create that workflow and help maintain the documentation on our side.

EDDY: Agreed.

MIKE: So, we've talked about pairing people together, putting the new folks together so they can help each other out. We've talked about assigning an experienced buddy. We've talked about documentation. Are there any other key tactics that are helpful in onboarding? And we're speaking kind of generally, but this kind of applies maybe even across industries.

MATT: Yeah. I think something I try to do is help with also building soft skills. And when you're onboarding people, one of the key things is building trust. It's much easier to work with people that you have trust in. And if you can establish that upfront and help build that trust, not only will it help them trust you, but you're going to help build some trust in them as well because you're opening up those communication channels and really establishing that interpersonal relationship that I think is important to work well with people.

MIKE: That's interesting. And I had a thought about building trust. I mean, what is it you do to develop trust? You know, in dogs, you see a dog that wants to show that it's trustworthy, you know, it will, like, roll over on its back, show its belly. It shows vulnerability. It makes itself vulnerable. And one of the most important things, I think, that's maybe a key thing that we do to establish trust is show that we're willing to be vulnerable, show that we make mistakes, show that we're willing to, you know, listen to feedback. Establishing trust, I think, begins largely with yourself being willing to listen. What are your thoughts about establishing trust?

EDDY: Gosh, just having someone you can reach out to when you're in doubt that does wonders, right, to helping you feel better about your job.

MATT: Yeah, I think also, too, let them know they're doing a good job in picking up on things, you know, reinforce that. Help them build some confidence as well.

RAMSES: Related to the documentation point, I think having a system that promotes searchability. Whenever I'm learning a new thing or a new process or working on a new feature, if I don't have a point person immediately available, I like to be able to have a good tool where I can search and find out how the feature works myself. So, it's related to documentation. And I think if our system is documented well, you know, and if they don't necessarily have that point person immediately available, they can at least be able to search and try to find an answer.

MIKE: I actually got a story about that from my first dev job. That searchability is a big deal. I remember that I was writing some code. It was some Windows code accessing libraries. Was it the MDC? Whatever it was back then, a long time ago. And I was just looking through the documentation. And, you know, I looked in the index, you know, looked through the relevant sections of documentation. It was posted, but I couldn't find in the documentation an API that did what I needed to do. And I was kind of giving up. And the guy I was working for Googled it and found the answer.

And this was a big deal because Google was brand new at the time, and I didn't think to use it because I hadn't used Google before. And he pointed this out to say, "You know, I'm not trying to make you feel bad. Google is this amazing tool." Now, there are other search engines now, but that was the one, at the time, that became available and fundamentally changed the way that the documentation was searchable, fundamentally changed the way software development was done.

Because instead of poring through documentation, you could search and actually get an answer. That discoverability was just...I don't know how I would have done, you know, had a career in software without that searchability. And the productivity gains that you get from adding that searchability are amazing. And documentation tends to be pretty opaque. It is hard to get through there and find what you're looking for. That's a really great point, I think, you're making, Ramses, that doing what you can to try to make it searchable is a big deal.

EDDY: I think it's cool. Google is this new thing in our arsenal, in our utility belt that we can use in order to be more productive. Now we have AI [laughs], and that takes it even a bit further. You're like, cool, now I have a catered, like, bot that I can interact with and get even faster results.

MATT: I'm on board the AI train for sure. But you said something there, Mike, that I think I would at least like to ask everyone's view on, and that is tools, right? Google, this new tool, can get you everything you need. What are you guys' thoughts on tooling, such as standardizing IDEs? You know, we use Vi. We use Visual Studio Code. We use the JetBrains tools in our company. And they all are different, very similar, but different. Do you think there's a benefit in standardizing some tools so workflows can become much more similar? Because then you can help with shortcuts, macros, things like that, code generation. Would that benefit in the onboarding process?

EDDY: If we can have everyone just use Visual Studio Code, the whole department will be really happy [laughs].

MATT: Except for a JetBrains user like myself, and I think Mike's a Vi user.

MIKE: I am [laughs]. And, you know, a lot of that's because I had a mentor who taught me Vi, who was doing a lot of server administration. And it got in my tool belt and became [laughs] really useful because I took the time with it. And that's a tricky question, right, because if you've already got people on different technologies, there's going to be a cost to making that uniform.

MATT: And I asked because the same thing, like you, you know, I started in Vi and Vim, moved over to some other tools. I think, at the time, I was using Sublime. And then, we had a project that we did a lot of paired programming on, and everyone I was working with used RubyMine. And I saw their workflows and all the cool shortcuts they were using that was really speeding things up. So, I thought, hey, I'm going to get on board, and I'm going to switch to this because this is what everyone I'm working with is using. And I've kind of just stuck with it since. But I think that was a big part of the onboarding process for that particular project that really helped me out.

MIKE: It's almost inevitable that you'll probably end up using the tooling of your mentor. And even if you don't choose to standardize, and maybe that's a discussion for another day, getting somebody set up in the tooling that you're using so that you can do something in common is probably going to help them move a lot faster.

MATT: We're all going to go back to Macromedia.

[laughter]

MIKE: Oh boy [laughter]. The olden days of yore.

MATT: Yes. It's interesting things to think about.

MIKE: Well, so, we started scratching on tooling. I mentioned, you know, search engines have changed things. I don't know how much AI is going to change things in the future, but I'm sure that it will. And the next generation of AI that goes beyond, you know, text generation, you know, maybe they add reinforcement learning; maybe they add a new algorithm we haven't thought of yet may fundamentally change the game again.

And our industry is like that. It's quickly moving, and there's new tools. And it's easy to miss that and end up getting behind. I think we need to be careful about that. And going back to the idea of trust, maybe your new hires have some good ideas. And we shouldn't get so ingrained in our flows that we're not open to improving our process, and probably should actively, you know, seek for that, look for ideas from new hires. What do they have that they can offer that might change the way we do things?

We recently hired somebody who has a lot of experience with PostgreSQL and using some of the maybe less-used features like search for doing full-text searching. And he's got some great ideas as to how we might employ those. It might change the way we're doing things. But if we don't consider that, then we might end up stuck and never end up doing it better.

A few months ago, we had a new hire who improved our unit test suite, made it go significantly faster by going and making a variety of changes from experience that he had, tooling that we hadn't used before. It made a big difference because rather than just relying on what we knew, we let the new guy show some of his experience. You know, you give a new person, let her, let him do their thing, you may end up learning a lot more yourself than you expected, as well as just teaching.

MATT: Yeah, well, I mean, we hired all of these people for a reason, right? And everyone has something to offer. We just need to be open to listening and seeing those things that they do have to offer us. Yeah, I mean, could you imagine being able to have a conversational chat and just look for something and have it go through all of our Slack history, all of our Confluence docs, all of our Wikis, all in one go, and just be able to ask it a question? "Hey, how do I patch this particular thing because my system isn't running?" And someone's asked that question before in Slack at some point. And it just responds and says, "Oh, well, here's the solution." Powerful.

MIKE: So, we've talked, you know, having a group to work with, having a buddy, documentation, discoverability in that documentation, and flexibility of the tools, taking time to think about tools and work together on tools. Again, these things aren't even necessarily industry-specific, not even work-specific, because a lot of these things could apply to a three-year-old. You know, without thinking about it, we can easily overlook it and not take the time, not invest the time, to make that onboarding process work well. Are there any other key things that we're missing that you all want to bring up?

MATT: As you are summarizing things, I am also taking notes to make sure that not only are we talking about it, we're putting some things into action and helping to improve our process here.

EDDY: Would you think that the individuals who are local can get some benefit with being desk buddies with the individual who's mentoring them?

MIKE: I do. I remember starting at a job a lot of years ago. It was a startup, and they were in a tiny, little office, and [laughs] me and three other people basically just crammed in a corner of this [laughs] space, kind of almost on top of each other. It was hard to even get out of the little corner we were in. And later, we moved to a bigger, nicer office space where we were separated from each other. And then, we ended up just...we ended up very much more isolated. Because we all just ended up messaging each other, doing some sort of text messaging, rather than talking to each other because, you know, you don't want to talk across the aisle and interrupt everybody else around you.

So, we ended up not talking nearly so much as we did when we were kind of forced to be in a closed space. And I'll tell you, when we were in a closed space, I learned so much. I learned so much, and part of it is that I was new. But my understanding of what I needed to do just leaped forward because I was just so closely exposed all the time as to what I needed to learn. Have you had that experience?

MATT: Yeah. You know, what is the likelihood, even though it's right at our fingertips, of someone who's sitting at home working remotely, spinning on something versus sitting next to one of their peers in conversational range just turning their head and asking the question? I personally think that the likelihood of the question in person is going to happen much, much more quickly than if you're isolated at your home, even though we have Slack right here and everyone available. I'm going to ask that verbal question much sooner than I am going to reach out via some form of messenger and ask the question.

MIKE: It requires work. You have to develop a habit of becoming...it feels annoying when you're not used to it. You have to make a real effort to be much more assertive than you would otherwise be when you're in a remote position. And that takes time, and so that's a gap. That's a barrier that absolutely is there that takes time and effort to overcome. Now, maybe you're a remote-first company. That absolutely happens in a lot of cases. If you're in that situation, you have to make that effort. You have to encourage that culture strongly to encourage that inquisitiveness.

MATT: Yeah, and I think by just general human nature, we don't want to be invasive, and we don't want to bug other people. But I think in order to be successful, we have to ask those questions. And the likelihood that the person on the receiving end is perfectly fine with it is pretty high, you know, I mean, people ask me questions, and they think they're annoying me. I am not annoyed whatsoever. If I am available, I'd love to have those conversations. I'd love to answer questions and help people. And I think most people really feel that way.

MIKE: Absolutely. I'm usually buried in questions [chuckles], to tell you the truth. If I'm not in a meeting, I'm answering questions somewhere else. So, I'm answering questions in a meeting, or I'm answering questions in some sort of messaging tool. I don't find that annoying. That's, like, my job, right [chuckles]? To go and help people. It's what I expect people to do.

And if people are not asking the questions, that's worse because then I feel bad. You know, then I'm thinking, well, now you're unable to be effective, and I'm unable to help you because you didn't ask. So, I love the fact that people be proactive. But, again, you have to establish that culture. That's a critical thing for this onboarding is that...and this is brought up a couple of times now, that you have to establish that culture and encourage the safety.

MATT: Yeah. If you're not asking me questions, then I'm asking questions, you know [chuckle], entirely different types of questions than I would be asking. So, I encourage it. And I think we all want everyone to grow and be successful.

MIKE: You know, and that's probably a good place to finish this conversation is that it comes down to that relationship. You know, we're talking about solving business problems, but, in the end, we're people working together, and we should treat people with that humanity. If you want somebody to be successful, treat them like a person [chuckles] and develop that kind of human relationship. Think about what the human needs are and be responsive to them. And I think you would be far more successful and happier as a result, too.

Any final words from anyone?

MATT: As always, I always enjoy being a part of this. So, thank you all for letting me participate.

MIKE: Of course.

EDDY: It's always a treat when we can get Matt [laughs].

MATT: Thanks, Eddy.

MIKE: Well, thank you, Eddy, Ramses, Matt. Until next time on the Acima Development Podcast.