Most of us know how to start a job in person. But what if your new position is remote? When you aren’t in an office, there are certain benefits you won’t have, such as on-site onboarding or meeting your coworkers face-to-face. And that means your early days at the company could be especially tricky.
You should always be proactive in getting acclimated to a new role, but when you’re remote, it’s especially imperative that you take an active approach to getting up to speed. Here are five things you can do to fill the gaps and minimize the bumps as you transition into the new job.
One of the hardest things about starting with a new company is that each organization has a culture of its own. And that culture is often made up of unspoken goals and norms and wrapped up in a unique language that members of your new team speak with ease. In my consulting work, I’ve frequently been baffled by terms that employees use inside companies but that have no meaning outside it.
You may have gotten a glimpse of this culture when you interviewed for your new position—either in person or remotely. (For tips on landing a job, see the sidebar “Advice for Remote Job Interviews.”) But you learn the more subtle aspects of the workplace through everyday interactions with colleagues, hearing conversations and having discussions about what other people are working on. You pick up on workplace jargon and you surmise from these conversations what activities are valued and what styles of work are appreciated.
Under normal circumstances, these interactions are a natural part of being in the office. But as a remote worker, you’re going to have to manufacture them. Reach out to your new colleagues and set up quick, 10- to 15-minute one-on-one discussions. These can happen by phone or video and shouldn’t be one-offs. Meet with your colleagues regularly to mimic the short, informal interactions you’d have in person. Use these conversations as a chance to ask questions you may have about your current projects, but make sure to ask people what they are working on too, so they have a chance to describe their tasks. Pay attention to any implicit statements about what they think is most important.
Throughout your career, you need a team of people who will mentor you. There are two types of mentors who are particularly important inside your current company. The first is someone who knows how things get done in the firm and who can help you to navigate the variety of procedures you have to go through to do everything from getting reimbursed for expenses to accessing equipment. The second is a person who is well-connected throughout the organization and can introduce you to people you need to know.
Ordinarily, you can afford to develop these relationships slowly. When you start working for a company remotely, though, you want to identify initial candidates to play these roles for you as quickly as possible. You can’t just make your way around the office finding colleagues you know who might point you in the right direction. Instead, your requests are likely to involve emails or queries via instant message, and those responses can be slow. If you put some good mentors in place quickly, you make it easier to be productive quickly.
However, don’t feel like you have to commit to having these people as mentors throughout your tenure at the company. The downside to choosing quickly is that you may settle on someone who is available but not the perfect fit. As you get to know the organization better, you may choose to reach out to other people to be your guides. But having someone early on is better than having nobody.
When you start a job in an office, people tend to notice that they see a new face around the halls. And under normal circumstances, you can expect people to introduce themselves and even offer help.
That is not going to happen when you’re the new person in the virtual office. Ideally, your new manager will introduce you, but you’ll likely “meet” many of your new colleagues as one of a sea of faces in a virtual meeting. That means you need to be intentional about getting acquainted with your coworkers. If there is a team meeting, see if you can get a moment to introduce yourself. But also let people know who you are in forums like Slack and by sending some brief emails to other people in your unit. That may be hard if you don’t like to call attention to yourself, but you want to let folks know that you’re new and that you would appreciate their help in getting settled. Many of your colleagues would like to welcome you; they just need more-explicit reminders to do so than they might otherwise.
In the office, colleagues often pick up on a quizzical facial expression or tone of voice and may offer assistance if they think you need it. On video and phone meetings, it’ll be hard for people to see if you are confused or not keeping up. As a rule, when there is something you need, say so.
As working from home has become more common, so has the remote job interview. All of the standard advice about how to perform well during an interview still applies—prepare, make a good first impression, connect your experience to the job’s requirements—but you’ll also need to think about other aspects as well:
Confirm and test technology. When the interview is scheduled, ask what video platform they’ll be using and then spend time familiarizing yourself with how it works, especially if you’ll need to use any features like screen sharing. Test out the link ahead of time. Be sure you have a way to reach the interviewer in case the technology fails.
Plan your appearance. Your goal is to look professional. You don’t necessarily need to wear a suit jacket—that could look awkward under the circumstances—but you don’t want to wear a sweatshirt either. Choose a neutral background for your interview (it probably goes without saying to avoid one of those virtual beach backgrounds).
Rehearse ahead of time. Experiment with how you might answer common questions, and rehearse in the spot where you plan to do the interview so that you can see how you look on camera. If you can’t stop looking at yourself when you practice, you might want to close the window with your image in it.
Have a positive mindset. During the interview, you won’t be getting the same level of nonverbal information from the interviewer. Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School and the author of It’s Not the How or the What but the Who, points out there’s lots of research that shows that when we don’t have feedback, we tend toward a negativity bias and assume things aren’t going well. Experiment ahead of time with staying positive and assuming the best is happening.
Exaggerate your emotions a bit. For the same reason, you want to practice being emotive during the interview. “Unless you have a sophisticated set of earphones, the audio gets compressed and you lose many of the undertones, which convey emotions,” Fernández-Aráoz explains. “So you need to exaggerate those a bit.” He suggests practicing with a friend on video to “get some feedback about the setting, your tone, and your body language.” Your goal is to appear natural and at ease.
__________
Amy Gallo is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of the HBR Guide to Dealing with Conflict. She writes and speaks about workplace dynamics. Watch her TEDx talk on conflict and follow her on Twitter: @amyegallo.
Adapted from “How to Nail a Job Interview—Remotely” on hbr.org, June 22, 2020 (product #H05OXQ).
You might be worried that your colleagues won’t want to help. After all, everyone already has a lot going on. Quite a bit of research1 by Vanessa Bohns, associate professor of organizational behavior at Cornell’s ILR School, and her colleagues suggests that people are often much more willing to help than you believe they will be. So, don’t wait for offers of assistance. Ask for what you need.
When you’re in the office, it’s easy to take care of problems as they arise. You can often just get up from your desk and find someone to help you solve it. When you’re working at home, if you dash off an email asking for an answer, your request may get lost in the noise. And if it’s a small issue, you may even forget to follow up.
End each day by going back through your schedule and making some notes about how things went. Write down the tasks you accomplished and the obstacles you faced. If there are particular issues that are still unresolved, highlight them. Then when you have your next meeting with a supervisor or colleague, raise those issues and ask for their perspective.
Your memory for what happens each day is strongest around things that are compatible with your general script about how work is supposed to go. That means that you are least likely to remember the novel aspects of your new workplace—which are precisely the elements that you need the most help with. Writing down the events of your day while they are still fresh in your mind is a great way to overcome this bias.
It’s never easy being the new person on a team, and working remotely certainly makes it tougher. But by being proactive you can more smoothly acclimate to the new team and organization and prove your value more quickly.
__________
Art Markman, PhD, is the Annabel Irion Worsham Centennial Professor of Psychology, Human Dimensions of Organizations, and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and executive director of the IC2 Institute. He has written more than 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision making, and motivation. His most recent book is Bring Your Brain to Work: Using Cognitive Science to Get a Job, Do It Well, and Advance Your Career (HBR Press).
1. Vanessa K. Bohns and Francis J. Flynn, “‘Why Didn’t You Just Ask?” Underestimating the Discomfort of Help-Seeking,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (January 2010). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2009.12.015.
Adapted from “Starting a New Job—Remotely” on hbr.org, May 4, 2020 (product #H05LLQ).