People Own the Work: Arrivals
When someone new joins your team, they should be doing real work within a few weeks. That only happens when the job is written down somewhere they can find it. If it lives in the heads of the people who were there first, every new hire starts over from zero.
The Pattern.
Most teams we meet have an onboarding checklist, but someone wrote it two tools ago and nobody has touched it since. So the new person learns the job by sitting in meetings and asking whoever looks least busy. The founder ends up explaining the same thing for the fourth time. No one ever said what a good first month looks like, which means no one can tell you if it went well.
What we Take Out FirSt.
We start by taking out the steps that point to tools you do not use anymore. Then we stop sending every question to one person, because that person is usually the founder and they already have enough on their plate. We work from what your team has already written down, so nobody starts from a blank page.
What we build
- An onboarding checklist that points to where the work lives now
- A plan for the first month, with what the new person will own by the end of it
- One place for new hire questions to go that is not the founder
- A short note on how your team works and what it asks of each person
A new person should spend their first month getting to know your donors, not hunting for passwords.
Erin Peshoff is the Founder of Vivid Operational Advisors. She has spent thirty years inside nonprofit operations, helped raise over $100 million for institutional missions, and built Vivid around the operating discipline most strategic engagements skip.
