Buddy

The buddy is the role in charge of onboarding new team members. The onboarding period last 2 weeks, and the main goals of the buddy in these amount of time are:

• organize and support the new team member study about the tech stack
• explain our internal processes and transmit the cultural values that make Agile Lab work and evolve step after step

Internal Sharing

The list of the topics that should be covered by buddies during each onboarding can be found in the onboarding section. The list highlights what to explain, but not how to do that, on which aspects put more focus, how to handle new team members with different seniority, and so on.

It's ok to not having a common way of explaining things, because it allows buddies to use their creativity, experience and empathy to design the best experience candidate after candidate. In Agile Lab, we leave total freedom to people about their way of working, but, at the same time, we strongly believe the socializing ideas and using collective intelligence to solve complex problems elevates our practices to the next level.

That's why we introduced the "buddy internal sharing", a recurrent meeting where buddies can discuss old onboarding experiencse and brand new ideas for the future ones.

These are example questions that can perfectly fit this kind of meetings:

• "How do you explain the handbook? Do you just say that is a process collector or do you bring some example to the table?"
• "How do you onboard an engineering manager?"
• "How do you onboard a new team member already proficient with our tech stack?"
• "How do we introduce our culture in smooth way to people that comes from a rigid corporate culture?"
• "Did you ever onboard two new team members at the same time? Do you think it was productive?"
• "Are you able to create high engagement at the end of the onboarding weeks?"
• "Are two weeks enough to onboard new team members?"

Of course, this is not the list we use as the agenda of the meetings, it just brings you an idea of the kind of topics discussed in these sharing sessions.

Buddies should periodically discuss these kind of topics to iterate, getting feedback, and crafting the perfect onboarding experience for new team members.

How to become a buddy

The requirements

To be able to explain the company culture, it is important that you have experienced certain aspects:

• Tenure: A minimum of one year of employment with the company.
• Feedback Experience: Participation in both giving and receiving feedback through 360 reviews.
• OKR Understanding: A solid grasp of our OKR framework and how it aligns with our goals.
• Handbook Contribution: Involvement in creating or updating or discussing our company handbook.
• Purpose Articulation: The ability to clearly explain our company purpose.
• Value Alignment: The ability to explain our values, providing real-world examples.
• Holaspirit Experience: experience as facilitator or secretary

Don’t worry if you don’t meet all of these requirements. We’re committed to your growth and development, and we’ll provide opportunities for you to gain the necessary skills. For example, if you have never been a facilitator, we can do it in the training circle.

The hiring process

If the buddy's role is related to hiring (indicated by the appropriate badge in Holaspirit), reach out to the circle lead or another buddy role filler for more information. A meeting will be scheduled with other buddies to assess your skills and identify any areas for development.

To help you get started, a buddy will pair you with an experienced buddy who will guide you through the onboarding process and provide ongoing feedback.

Buddies/tutors Guidelines

Leadership in Agile Lab starts from day 1. Keep in mind that first impressions count.

Good buddies:

• treat new colleagues as peers, be their mentor but let them express their leadership skills too
• put a lot of focus on the company culture and values
• it should be clear not only WHAT is self-management, but WHY we decided to adopt such a methodology to carry on with our daily work
• don't give solutions before people struggle with the problem. The tradeoff between struggling and spending too much time on that task is up to you
• provide good examples of how the onboarding training topics can be useful and applicable in real-world use cases, this is a source of great motivation
• constantly stimulate creative and critical thinking, always in a goal-oriented way
• appreciate the good, fix the bad
• make people feel part of the team since the first conversation

Bad buddies:

• only care about technicalities
• review the work in a "yes or no" fashion, without discussing the good and bad
• are not empathic
• only talk about work kinds of stuff
• have the webcam disabled during the video calls