Onboarding

The practical

I’ve been impressed with the following:

An onboarding session run by the “people ops” team (Hippo’s term for HR). There was the right amount of practical information without feeling overwhelming.
The Hippo Wiki has guides for nearly everything, which means I’ve asked fewer tiresome questions.
Senior people run 30-minute meet-and-greet sessions for new starters, with slides that systematically describe their business areas. Although I’m not new to consultancy, it was helpful to hear how Hippos work together to serve customers.
All digital tools are linked from the Google Apps menu and accessible via Single Sign On, making them easy to find and use.
Using Halp via Slack to get help when I need it without having to remember who to ask.

I made the most of not being on a project by diary-stalking people and booking intro sessions with folks in the UCD professions. Everyone was lovely, warm and genuinely enjoying working at Hippo.
I went to the London office on Wednesday. The travel was predictably long. The office is in a bustling part of Holborn with dizzying lunch options.
I tried a couple of travel options. The most effective is to stay on the train from East Croydon, skip London Bridge, and get off at Farringdon. However, this does miss out on the always spectacular view downriver from London Bridge.
I attended an in-person line management training session. Everyone kept apologising for throwing me into training on week one. Far from it! It’s excellent that Hippo invests in developing its people.
It’s great to hear lots of northern accents. I was at the University in Huddersfield, and northern twang is close to my heart.

I love a good Community of Practice. There’s a big community here, around 30 in my area, User Experience, with many more across Service Design, User Research, Business Analysis and Product.
The “user-centred professions” all have their own communities but don’t often mix.
Next month, there’s a joint User Experience and Service Design away day at Hippo’s HQ in Leeds. I volunteered to help and was made to feel welcome by the event’s organisers.

I’m delighted that Hippo has a skills framework. I created a Trello board to track my performance against it.
In a conversation this week, I heard, “Many people don’t know what others do.” I suspect this is true of most multidisciplinary teams and something I recognise from all the teams I’ve worked with. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out and how the community can help clarify people’s roles and responsibilities.

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