Creating a new team, particularly when using a co-design approach, can feel messy and even intimidating. A strong onboarding process provides structure and grounding, ensuring that everyone has the information they need to do their work well. While onboarding will look different depending on the size and capacity of your organization, the fundamentals remain the same: team members need to understand who the organization is, the purpose of the team, and how they will work together.
Onboarding Documents
When the EST was first established, the Alliance did not yet have a formal policies and procedures manual. To ensure the team was supported from the outset, a concise team handbook was created in advance. This handbook included:
- Organizational information (background, mission, values, team directory, and board of directors)
- Team specific information (the purpose of the EST and its guiding principles)
- Key policies, including confidentiality, payment, discrimination and harassment, complaints procedures, code of conduct, dismissal, hours guidelines, and social media guidelines
The goal was to clearly establish that EST members held formal roles within the organization, rather than being an ad hoc group whose positions could be withdrawn at will. As the organization evolved, the Alliance later developed a comprehensive staff handbook with more robust policies.
It’s also important to research local labour laws and their applicability to the hiring process. Any documents for tax purposes, liability purposes, etc. will need to be addressed at hiring.
Phased Onboarding Process
The onboarding process for our first cohort of team members followed a staged approach.
- Meeting 1: A full-staff meeting focused on relationship-building and shared understanding. This meeting provided an opportunity to get to know one another and to discuss the vision and aspirations for the team. The team handbook is distributed prior to the first meeting, with the understanding that it would be reviewed together.
- Meeting 2: A dedicated onboarding session to review policies, answer questions, and invite feedback. Team members were asked whether anything felt missing or unclear in the handbook.
The following several meetings focused on co-creating how the team would work together. These conversations explored questions such as:
- How do we want to work together as a team?
- What has worked well in your experience on other teams?
- What has been challenging or harmful on other teams?
- How will we handle disagreement or conflict?
These discussions led to the development of shared team guidelines and a consensus based decision making process.
In the years following the founding members’ onboarding, we have hired smaller groups of new team members three times. In each of these cycles, the EST took a leadership role in onboarding new members. The onboarding process evolved as follows:
The Engagement Manager shares the staff handbook with new hires and meets with them to review policies and address human resources and administrative questions.
The Engagement Manager provides a glossary of key terms and acronyms so that new team members can acquaint themselves with housing jargon.
The EST then leads the orientation, covering who the team is, how they work together, how decisions are made, how they keep engagement meaningful and the work completed to date.
Each team member also gives a brief presentation highlighting an area of expertise or passion (for example, veterans’ homelessness, the opioid crisis, or other focus areas).
Following orientation, it becomes the responsibility of the Engagement Manager to identify ongoing opportunities for training and capacity-building. These may be based on observed gaps or needs identified by team members themselves.
Avoiding Assumptions About Skills and Capacity
It is common for organizations to assume that teams of people with lived experience require extensive training on basic workplace skills or conflict management. This assumption risks underestimating people’s skills and reducing lived experience of homelessness to a lack of professional experience. Instead, it is more effective to wait until the team is hired and then assess what support and training are actually needed.
In the case of the EST, team members brought a wide range of experience, including extensive work in the housing sector. While some knowledge-levelling can be helpful, it should be intentional and thoughtful, ensuring that training is relevant, respectful, and not redundant or patronizing.
In practice, the skill building opportunities our team requests are as varied and diverse as the team members themselves. None of these areas could have been predicted prior to onboarding. Our team is strong and effective not because one standard of effectiveness has been upheld, but because we invest in each individual’s goals. These goals range vastly from opportunities to practice writing or public speaking, all the way to admission in formal professional development programs.