We Included Every Member of This Team in their New Teammate's Onboarding, Here’s Why

In 2021, we geared up for our first hiring push in the Customer Advocacy team (our customer support team) for quite a while. Due to strategy and personnel changes, we would need to hire five new Advocates throughout the year, which is more than we’d hired in any year since 2016. Between hiring and other personnel changes, we started 2021 with 15 Customer Advocates and ended the year with 19.

In preparation, we took a look at our onboarding documentation and process to find holes or improvement areas.

When a new team member walks into Buffer, they’re normally greeted by their manager, a role buddy, and a culture buddy (you can learn more about those roles in this post). These three people are pivotal to the experience the team member has across their first 90 days. If there ever was a phone-a-friend during onboarding, these three people would be it!

We took a pause before starting these hiring rounds, though.

We knew that the first person who came on board would be in a unique position. They’d be the first new team member we’ve onboarded in over a year. In fact, most of our team had worked as a Customer Advocate for four-plus years. While we had oodles and oodles of documentation to explain all the things, nothing can account for the experience and context that each of these 16 team members had stacked up in their brains.

Our empathy was speaking, and it said that walking into this well-oiled machine (ahem… as we’d like to think) had the potential to make the already tricky task of switching jobs even more daunting, and perhaps even a bit isolating.

Our ideal outcome when staring this challenge in the face was to foster an environment where the new team member could integrate quickly and seamlessly into our close-knit team. What could we do to facilitate that?

That’s when we had an idea — what if every team member in Customer Advocacy had a hand in the new team member’s introduction to the company and to their work as a Customer Advocate? What could that do for the new team member, the tenured team members, and the team as a whole?

While the team member would still have their manager, role buddy, and culture buddy by their sides, they’d also now have 16 others performing as rocket boosters to their growth along the way.

For the first time, we tried this integrative method of onboarding in the Customer Advocacy team here at Buffer in early 2021 with our first new hire of the year, we then used it throughout the year with our four other hires and through this cumulative experience we learned a lot. Not only did this new approach facilitate the new team member’s integration into our close-knit team, but it brought some surprise benefits, as well.

Let’s dive into each of the benefits we’ve seen: