These are my first WeekNotes at the end of a first week at CONNECTED BY DATA and I guess they’ll be a bit different in focus from others in the team by the nature of my role as Head of Delivery and Operations.
What a week it has been! Having been in my previous organisation for the past nine years I’ve spent the week stretching myself to onboard as much information as possible about how we work (excitingly is the answer to that!..and more to follow I suspect in later WeekNotes), what we’re working on (interesting current work around the Data Protection and Digital Information Bill, and building a body of stories about real life impact of data) and working out where/what is the value I can add?
I’ve been really struck by how onboarding a new member in a remote based team is different in so many ways to the face to face, everyone located together in an office model but also how many similarities there are. You still want to be clear about where the new team member can find operational information and what your processes are (setting up emails, other accounts etc). You still want time to check in with them throughout the week and see how they’re doing and answer any questions. You still hope other team members will reach out in a human / personal (as well as colleague) way to start relationship building. You still try to strike the balance between overloading them with information and making sure they know how to find things out.
I’m happy to share that the CONNECTED BY DATA have role modelled that onboarding process wonderfully and come next week I feel ready to start really cracking on with some action and fulfilling my personal mission here which is to make the rest of the teams’ lives as easy as possible - creating capacity for them to have even more impact in the work they are uniquely positioned to do.