Mentoring at Gearset

We think giving new starters a great mentor is the best way of helping them hit the ground running. This is a guide for how we think about mentoring at Gearset. We wrote it to give mentors a rough outline of what they should be doing and what they should be thinking about when they’re helping a new teammate settle in. It applies across all divisions and job roles, and we make sure every mentor reads it before their new starter arrives. In the name of transparency, and inspired by Monzo’s fantastic Tone of voice guide we’ve opened it up to the world — we believe in everything we’ve written, and we want to be held accountable to our own standards. Hopefully it also gives you some insight into what it’s like to start a job at Gearset. Introduction Starting a new job can be pretty intimidating! There are always all sorts of unwritten rules, conventions and group habits in any workplace — we often call this “culture”. Although we try our best to broadcast our values throughout our hiring process, any new starter is probably only going to have scratched the surface. On top of that, there’s a whole new product, customer base and way of working to get to grips with! It might even be their first experience in the job role that they’re starting, in which case there’s even more to think about. Your role as a mentor is to help your new starter settle in as smoothly as possible, and to be someone other than their line manager who they can go to with any questions they have as they settle in. You’re there to make sure they aren’t left to fend for themselves. It’s not your job to have all the answers(!) — but it is your job to make sure they get an answer from someone else if you’re not sure. It’s worth pointing out that you shouldn’t be their only point of contact – if they ask something you think someone else would be better at answering, encourage them to speak to the right person so that they get to know everyone. They shouldn’t be lost as soon as you’re out of the office or unavailable for half an hour. We’re one big team, and we need to be comfortable with talking to anyone across the company. You’re also there to help introduce them to the Gearset culture in its many forms — how we work, how we give (and take) feedback, what we value and how to get better. Their line manager, and every single person at Gearset, shares responsibility for all this, but you’ll be a big part of their experience of Gearset for the first few weeks/months so it’s important that you’re thinking about this stuff. Lots more later. This document is intended as a rough guide to: What you can do to make your new starter feel welcome, and get up to speed as quickly as possible What your responsibilities are as a mentor What a new starter should pick up in the first week/month/going forwards It should be a living document — if something is missing that you think should be here, or that you wish you knew when you started mentoring, make sure it gets added! Before they start A little bit of prep can go a long way! Make sure you know roughly what you want the new starter to achieve in their first week, before they arrive. Mostly, this is set out in our internal notion page (see below). Obviously, the specifics will depend on lots of things, including what previous experience the new starter has, what role they’re coming into and how quickly they get up to speed, so there’s no need to plan every day out in advance — broad strokes. The onboarding docs All our onboarding documents sit on Notion, which constitutes the new starter manual for the first week or so, and one of the first things you send across to your new starter is a link to it. There’s also a Welcome to Gearset document. We have a rough template that we use and that evolves over time, but it’ll be your job to tweak the details (make sure the right name is in all the right places!) and review it to make sure it makes sense. You should also add a bit about yourself at the start, and if you want to add any other personal touches, you absolutely should — the more personal it is the better! Get it printed before they start, if they’re not remote. The welcome document should tell the new starter who their line manager is. They’ll start out spending most of their time working directly with you, but they’ll have 1-1s with their line manager. Desk and computer It goes without saying, but your new starter will need a desk, a computer, and all the software they’ll need to get up and running for their role. If you’re both in the office, ideally they’ll be sitting next to you (their manager will have booked a desk for them on Envoy), or at least very nearby, to make working together easier and so that they feel more comfortable asking you questions (which you should absolutely encourage!). If you’re working together remotely, make sure you’ve set up time together to help them settle in during the first few weeks. The computer setup will probably have been handled but you should check with plenty of time whether anything needs doing. The details will depend on the job role, but at a minimum they should have a laptop and a company email account set up. The first day Check what time your new starter is starting for their first day, and make sure you’re around to say hello (on slack or in person). Most of the time we ask them to start around 10am on their first day. If they’re office-based, it’s a good idea to meet them at the door, along with their line manager. Show them their desk, and the rest of the office, and introduce them to whoever is around. The People team will have organised an office access card which will be at reception for them to collect. If they’re remote, set up a call with them and send them a link in advance. Most of what they should be doing will be in the onboarding docs, but broadly: Give them some time to read through the onboading docs. Help them get their computer and all their accounts set up. Get them into Slack, get them to say hi in #starters-leavers-and-people-changes, and invite them into some channels they might find useful. Help them get acclimatised with Gearset, what it does, and why it’s useful to people (this will probably involve some rabbit hole conversations about what Salesforce is and the many ways in which it is used.) Make sure they’re included in things! Invite them to tea whenever you’re going, make sure they get lunch with the team, and that they’re introduced to anyone they don’t know. Going to do something social after work one day with some Gearset folks? Invite them along! Don’t just assume they’ll be comfortable to tag on of their own accord — they might feel like they’re crashing the party. Check in with them at the end of the day to see how it went, and whether there’s anything they’re worried or unsure about. The first week Again, the mechanics of this should be outlined in the welcome docs. Broadly, you’ll need to find something small that you can work on together. Ideally, this chunk of work will be: Something you already pretty much know how to do, so that you can spend time helping them get up to speed rather than figuring out what needs to be done. Limited in scope. For example, for an engineer, a change that touches a small, fairly self contained part of the codebase is a good idea. For a customer support engineer, perhaps responding to a few simple customer questions via Intercom. It’s important not to be overwhelmed with too many new concepts all at once otherwise it’s hard to make progress on understanding any of them. Something that would take you less than a day to do. It will take you much longer to do it together, since you’ll get into all sorts of distractions like setting up environments, explaining the product, explaining Salesforce, etc. — the aim is that the new starter will be able to achieve something concrete from start to finish, and see themselves having an impact, within the first week. Bonus points if the work has been requested by a real user and they can notify the user when it’s finished! At some point, you should try to introduce them to how we talk to customers — how we do it, how we try to come across, and how we handle different types of request. It’s important to make clear that everyone can pick up support requests, and that it’s okay to say you don’t know the answer (as long as you then try to find out!). Talking to customers is one of the best ways of getting to grips with the product, the Salesforce ecosystem, and our customer base. As time goes on you’ll be able to pick up bigger chunks of work and introduce them to more and more of what their role entails. It’s hard to prescribe this — it depends on lots of things, including what work actually needs doing! For engineers, Intercom, Uservoice and #engineering-weekly are often good source of ideas for what to work on. Your line manager and your team should be able to help, too. In any case, you’ll need to play it by ear to some extent. At the end of each day for the first week, make sure they go home/stop working at 5PM. Don’t throw them out of the office at all costs, but try to be fairly insistent about it for the first week. People are often a bit reluctant but make it clear it’s not a test — we really do want them to go home! (and no, that doesn’t mean they need to get in at 8am sharp to do more hours). We want to make it clear that we mean it when we say it’s about the contributions you make, and that nobody is breathing down your neck counting your hours. Actions speak louder than words. It’s easy to feel a lot of pressure when you first start to try to look like you’re working really hard and we want to take as much of that pressure off as possible — stress doesn’t help people settle into the team, build relationships and get up to speed! Make sure to check in at the end of the week and make sure everything’s still going OK. What they should know by the end of week one Again, this will vary massively by job role, but broadly, they should know: Everyone in their team, and a good cross-section of Gearcitizens from other teams and departments. What Gearset does, and how that helps our customers How we work How we pick up work and decide how to work on it How we know it’s done and that we’re happy with it How we get our work in front of customers How we talk to customers (in general terms) Who to ask if they have questions (and that they can always ask you if they don’t know who else to ask!) What we expect from them and what they can expect from us Going forwards Your role as mentor as time goes on As time goes on, your new starter should get more independent and should feel more comfortable and confident to get going on a problem. How quickly that happens varies a lot. You should be looking out for them, and trying to make sure they get a nudge in the right direction if you think there’s something they could be doing better, or something they don’t know that would make their life easier.