Today was my first day as a Product Designer at Gradescope 🎉. It was also my first time going through an onboarding process all done remotely. To my surprise, that process felt great and was overall, less exhaustive. I didn’t have to meet a large amount of people and try to remember their names, role, which team they were on, etc. as you normally would when in person. I wasn’t expected to go to lunch and talk about myself the whole time while trying to scarf down some food. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy all of those things, but given that we have to be removed from physical human interaction, I realized that I felt less drained as I normally would on the first day of work.
There appeared to be several other reasons why I thought the remote onboarding worked so well. 1) Turnitin is a large and established company—who has remote employees across the world—and understands best practices to onboard these types of employees. 2) Given this climate, we’re all becoming more and more used to doing our jobs and other tasks remotely. 3) Sticking with a small group throughout the day and attending meetings together made it easier to ask questions, troubleshoot issues, and realize that we were all experiencing the same thing.
I must say, it feels great to be part of a team and company once again. I’m looking forward to continuing the onboarding process tomorrow, where I’ll start to learn more about my team and the projects I’ll be working on.
If you’re interested in why I joined Gradescope, check out this recent post.