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Your balena onboarding buddy

As a new team member, you will soon be allocated a "buddy" and the balenista assisting with your onboarding will make sure you are introduced. Your buddy is a balenista that has been at balena for a while and can give you more background and insight about how we work at balena, as well as answer any questions you may have while you are settling in. Your buddy might not have all the answers and might not know much about your role and/or what you will be working on but they will be able to direct you to the right resources and people when needed or help you look for the information you need.

Feel free to reach out to your buddy, schedule your first video call and agree on how this can work for both. We try to keep the buddying as informal and flexible as possible to make sure you use it in a way that suits you and your buddy, as well as helps you to settle in. As an example, some will agree on weekly video calls to go through questions and chat about how things work at balena and how you are settling in, while others will have ad-hoc calls more or less frequently and chat in between. Your buddy should be a useful resource for your first few weeks/months at balena and make you feel welcome and supported. It is likely that your buddy will be someone that you would not normally work and interact with on a regular basis, so take the opportunity to connect and learn about the different projects they might be working on, even if these are outside your area of work and expertise!

What to expect from your buddy & what a buddy should aim for​

Day One​

  • We suggest scheduling a first intro call as soon as possible to get to know each other, connecting is one of the key goals for buddies :)
  • Help the new member out with the Jellyfish basics, such as creating a 1-1 message and how chat threads work; a "win" for the first day is for new team members to successfully introduce themselves in Jellyfish and respond in-thread!

First Call​

Some suggestions for what to cover and discuss with new team members during the first call:

  • Share your journey and experience at balena and even some of your own challenges and helpful tips from your onboarding experience
  • Add the new team member to the Jellyfish main chat groups and encourage them to ask questions with @@help. Keeping your communication in the right places can help other new team members see answers to questions they might also have.
  • Mention any other key and/or fun Jellyfish chat groups to keep an eye on and any other helpful tips
  • Point out any key recordings and documents that outline our mission, core work and this year's goals (eg. summit recordings, wiki pages, useful GH repos)
  • If both the new team member and buddy are engineers, they can chat about the dev environment setup or the new team member can use the team @@help mention in any chat thread with any relevant questions
  • Help the new team member get familiar with internal apps and tools we use, check they have access to all the key services and they know what they are. They have received a ton of invites so check that they are all set up and have an idea of what everything is about
  • If relevant and you can help, have a security-related chat - full disc encryption, passwording, 2FA, etc - Employee security guidelines
  • Check what questions the new team member might have about things you might not think talking about!

Day Two and Onwards; suggested tips for the second call​

  • Let the new team member do most of the talking!
  • Check how the new team member has got along with the onboarding checklist and the new starter checklist. Do they need any help with anything? eg. Do they have access to the calendars and services they need? Are they familiar with Github already and have added their location to the team map? Are they ready to share product and team feedback? Do they need help with using our product and deploying code if they haven't done so before?
  • Encourage them to join calls and reach out to people. A great way of getting to know a few of the team members is to join a few of the doughnut calls on Fridays. If possible, you can link the new team member with teammates who can introduce them to projects and work that would be relevant and interesting to them and their work/project if they already have a defined area of work at balena.
  • Are there any other services that might be useful to have access to according to their area of work? Check that they know how to use #access.
  • You might want to mention tools we often use, such as Hubot, the scheduler, #order etc so they can start getting familiar with how to use these.
  • Check-in regularly for at least the first 4-6 weeks. You may very well be the first person connection the new team member makes on the team (besides the people who interviewed them and those helping with their onboarding). Checking in with them regularly will help them feel welcome and supported. We suggest that you let them take the lead for scheduling your calls and other little tasks so these can feel like little 'wins' and things they accomplish during their first few weeks.

Over time, the new team member will gain enough context and confidence to navigate on their own. Once the team member has successfully bootstrapped themselves, they can "graduate" from the buddy program. We encourage you to stay in touch with your former buddies, but the goal should be to get them to a place where they are self-sufficient relatively quickly. In fact, some of your buddies will likely go on to buddy up with other new team members in the future :)

What new team members have said about having a buddy​

Most new team members found that having a buddy was helpful and valuable and that it complemented their overall onboarding experience. Some common themes about how buddies have helped new team members:

'I found asking my buddy questions easier at the start, it removes the barrier for new people'

'Having scheduled calls helped me organise my questions and get the right answers'

'I chatted about the company and how things work with my buddy, it made me feel more settled'

'My buddy gave me good tips and advice, pointed me in the right direction for more resources'

'Having a buddy helps remove some of the new starter insecurities you have'

'I couldn't imagine not having a buddy, they can explain and simplify the things that seem complicated at the start'

There were also some who didn't get as much from having a buddy and there were a few different reasons for that:

'I found it easier to reach out to the teammates I am working closely with than my buddy'

'It took some time to book a call and we agreed to reach out as and when I needed more help'

'I didn't use the buddy system as much, I should have scheduled more calls'

'My buddy seemed busy so I didn't schedule more calls, maybe I should have'

Overall, it seems like having some agreed structure from the start to schedule and commit to a few calls, as well as keep the conversation going in between seem to be much more effective. The allocated buddies have agreed to allocate some of their time to get to know you and support you, so make sure you use this opportunity to make your onboarding easier and more fun!

Having a buddy should be as structured and flexible as you would like to suit your working and learning style and needs but we would encourage you to give it a go and schedule some calls as you will definitely have more questions during your first few weeks/months. It is ok if you get that support from another colleague and/or Jellyfish, but we just want to make sure that you have that support in some way that you feel comfortable with :)

How to be a balena buddy​

We have a list of people that enjoy being an onboarding buddy and support new team members to feel more settled and we are always keen to grow that list as the team gets bigger. If you are one of these, thank you for being a balena buddy! We’re asking you to play an important role in the onboarding of new team members because you have context about our mission, team, culture, and product that is useful for people who are new to balena. You understand what it takes to be successful at balena and care about helping others be successful, too.

A buddy is someone who serves as a critical link to a new team member during their first few weeks/months at balena. They support the new team member by helping them learn the ins and outs of balena, and begin to develop relationships across the company. Essentially, the buddy is there to help new team members learn how to navigate the company, understand how we work and why, and bootstrap themselves to be successful. This relationship is informal, with its core purpose being support, guidance, and connection. There’s no one right way to be a buddy; as long as you keep the core purpose in mind, you should tailor your approach to match both your style and the style of the person you’re buddying.

Advice from veteran buddies​

Matt (@xginn8): To be a good buddy, the most important thing is just listening to the new person! Remember back to your first days at balena, when everything was new, exciting, overwhelming, and panic-inducing at the same time. Typically I try to introduce myself by email before the new person comes online. I then start to chat with them and get to know them a bit when they come online in Jellyfish. I usually try to schedule a call with them for their second day. In that call, again I just try to get to know them and talk with them a bit about what it’s like working at balena. I typically do far less talking in that first call than they do. Over the next two weeks, I then let the new folks schedule calls, perhaps every 3 days or so. That helps give them direct feedback on how to get things done, and what’s expected of them. I’ve found pushing that scheduling onto them helps get them acclimated and feeling like they are accomplishing something early on. Since balena can sometimes be hard to navigate, I tell them to reach out to me any time they are not getting help in the way they expect, which I am rarely taken up on but I think helps them get comfortable knowing there’s a lifeline or some real person (not just a username) willing to listen.

Thodoris (@thgreasi): Buddying is super-informal so feel free to ask anything and ping about anything. - repeat this often!

  • Never ask for approvals, always ask for re-reviews or extra-reviews. We know what you mean but we are allergic seeing such messages.
  • Making sure to utilize Jellyfish bookmarks is super useful. It's great to be able to point at a later point of time to a thread where you were asked to do something in a specific way. Or you can easily find answers of questions that you had asked at some point and be able to reference others.
  • Try cross-linking everything. Link Jellyfish threads into GH issues & PRs and link them to GH urls back to Jellyfish. This way everyone will be able find the reasoning of what was discussed, where and why you had to do something.
  • You are expected to join the All Hands call on Monday (except if you really can't, which is fine). You are not expected to join if you are on leave but you are expected to watch the recording once you are back, so that you don't miss any PSAs. The policy in that call specifically is to try to keep your camera on.
  • In Jellyfish, try avoiding markdown links, but use See: <url> in a new line (as per the process wiki).

Konstantinos (@konmouz): Try to have a few calls with the new balenista to have a more direct approach (not just 1-1 chat)!

  • Make an introduction of the company and the way we work
  • Communicate the culture and values as much as possible
  • Create an environment where the new balenista is comfortable to ask questions
  • Follow up for a couple of weeks until the new balenista can navigate comfortably within the company

Chris (@chrisys): I usually take a mostly hands-off approach but make sure that I am always available for any concern/question no matter how small or trivial it may seem. I make sure to give quick responses and check in frequently (and reduce appropriately depending on how the person is doing) to see how they're getting on and make sure there's nothing on their mind that they perhaps aren't voicing. I encourage people to take their time to look around and figure everything out and absorb everything that's going on, as the first couple of weeks should be pressure-free. My main aim is to create a safe conversation channel where new team members feel supported and comfortable to ask anything.

Jordan (@notnamed): Being a buddy gives your new colleague a safety net and helps build the relationship of trust that will expand to all of us at the company. Especially in our remote-work world, building this trust is critical, and people's expectations for How Communication Works At Work are usually quite different from the reality of balena. Be sure to emphasize that no question is unimportant, and no question is too basic to be asked in public. If your buddy has a question, someone else who has also joined recently almost definitely has the same question. Asking in public helps everyone, and helps your buddy contribute to balena immediately. Your buddy might feel like they're not making progress in their onboarding, or not learning fast enough and contributing to the team, but by asking questions publicly they're helping those of us who have been here longer question our assumptions, improve our documentation, and make the company better for everyone.

Giovanni (@nazrhom): I start by trying to understand the background someone is coming from and if they have any idea what they will be working on (general areas or specific projects). Based on the answers I get I try to give them knowledge I think is useful for what they will need to do: this can be as simple as pointing them to the right person to speak for a problem, or diving into specifics if I can help them. Since I work on the CI I usually will take the chance to give them an introduction on how that works for the projects they will be following. This is usually carried out in 2-3 calls over a couple of weeks. After that it tends to vary a lot: I always tell my buddy in those calls that they can come to me if they have any questions/doubts about anything, which sometimes leads to a couple of other calls in the weeks after.