{"id":3496,"date":"2026-04-21T09:56:05","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T09:56:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=3496"},"modified":"2026-04-21T09:58:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T09:58:56","slug":"on-onboarding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/on-onboarding\/","title":{"rendered":"Week 0 (thoughts on onboarding)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The org chart as I understand it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
<\/div>\n

There’s a strong culture of weeknotes in government and I’ve been reading Frankie<\/a> and Mike<\/a>‘s on an off for years. Mine tend to be a mixture of magpieing and professional reflections so let’s see if I feel the need to shape them differently moving forward. To get me in the mood, here’s what I hope I get from my onboarding conversations next week:<\/p>\n

Draw me an org chart<\/strong> For whatever reason (I blame Microsoft), org charts are hard to get a hold of and tend to hide in HR tools. But as someone who often thinks through diagrams, drawing and visuals, I find them useful. I was sent a couple of docs last week so made one up. It looks like I’ll be working as part of a function that is a little bit bigger than TPXimpact when I joined them back in 2023. I can wrap my head around that. I have no idea what my own team looks like yet but I think it might be around 20-40 people. I can also wrap my head around that as it’s the size of a busy classroom. I’m not a teacher and this isn’t school, it’s just a useful spatial analogy. I’ve always suffered from a little bit of face-name associative memory problems so having an org chart helps me make longer lasting visual connections too.<\/p>\n

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“Dessine moi un mouton” from Le Petit Prince (1943)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How fast are we going? <\/strong>Speed is relative. For some organisations ‘move fast and break things’ is de rigueur, for others, reducing attrition\/lawsuits\/bad leavers is best. I’ve worked in both kinds of environments and I can adjust up or down, but it’s nice to get a sense of that quickly. The KPIs might hint at this but I find they don’t tell the full story. I also get a feeling for this from the values\/mission statements, the Sharepoint folders, the Slack structure or the handover notes. Everything is a weak signal that over time adds up to a more complete picture of how fast I’m expected to go.<\/p>\n

Where is the fire?<\/strong> There is always a fire somewhere. I don’t need to know why it’s there to begin with, and I don’t even need to put it out, but it’s useful to know its location relative to me, my team, my function. It’s also helpful to know what firefighting culture<\/a> might exist, but that takes time and I don’t expect to glean that in my first weeks.<\/p>\n

I intend to be in the Canary Wharf office every day of the week. I hope people will come say hi if they spot me. I’ll probably be wearing big earrings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There’s a strong culture of weeknotes in government and I’ve been reading Frankie and Mike‘s on an off for years. Mine tend to be a mixture of magpieing and professional reflections so let’s see if I feel the need to shape them differently moving forward. To get me in the mood, here’s what I hope… Continue reading Week 0 (thoughts on onboarding)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,117,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-design","category-business","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-Uo","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3496"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3499,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3496\/revisions\/3499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}