Accelerate the onboarding of new project managers

Published by Lisa Zibamanzar on

How to accelerate the onboarding of new project managers?

Table of contents

Onboarding can be a challenge for any new employee. However, the onboarding of new project managers is a particular challenge. This is because they are both customer-facing and internal facing. At the same time, they need to be trained on your product (or offer) as well as your processes.

If the process will be remote, you’ll face even more challenges and will need a strategy to bring onboard them.

To accelerate the onboarding process and effectively get the new project manager up to speed, you need to focus on some key points.

The importance of company culture in onboarding of new project managers

Any new project manager will have their own style of managing. Ideally, they will bring new ideas and ways of working and will want to make changes to your processes.

However, before they can start changing things, they need to understand how things work now and why.

Culture is a major factor in how your business works. To help them settle in and pull in the same direction as the rest of the team, it’s essential that they understand your business culture.
Training your new project managers on how you do things, why and what your business culture is, helps them to understand where they can change processes and why things work as they do.

onboarding a whole team

Onboarding of new project managers: handover plan

If a new project manager is stepping into another project manager’s position, try to plan their handover.

It is important that the new project manager has a period of time to attend meetings and shadow the existing project manager. This will allow them to see the existing company culture in action. The onboarding of new project managers requires planning with your existing project management team if you already have one in place. Otherwise, you need to make sure they spend time working hand in hand with the delivery team to understand how the company works. 

Learning by doing

Learning by actually doing is critical. When we do tasks, we learn faster, but there is a risk in letting them jump into the actual hands-on work too fast

Allowing them to get familiar with the processes and tools they need to use will also allow them to quickly understand what they need to improve.

Performance feedback in onboarding

Getting feedback on initial work performance is critical for a new project manager. Without it, they won’t know what they did right or wrong or where they could improve. Be specific when giving feedback and provide suggestions for improvement. That way, they’ll be able to learn and progress further.

Feedback is also an opportunity for the company to understand how their business operates from a new perspective – suggest including something about using the opportunity to provide feedback as an opportunity to listen to feedback and improve onboarding processes in future.

Also, it’s important to be supportive and genuine in how you offer feedback. A timely and heartfelt “well done” can go a long way.

onboarding managers

Digital experiences in onboarding

The shift to digital has impacted all aspects of our working life, and onboarding is no different. This shift to digital has been accelerated by the move to remote working following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Digital experiences are a critical training tool for remote onboarding because they incorporate all of the topics covered above. 

Digital experiences provide training, then allow the new employee to actually try doing the work before they offer performance feedback. Of course, digital experiences are not a substitute for oversight and feedback, but they help you bring new employees up to speed much faster. 

By their nature, digital experiences are immersive and rewarding tools for your new employees to use. Ideally, you will want a custom digital experience so that you can build in detailed information about your product, offer and company culture.

The onboarding of New Project Managers is tricky because PMs touch so many different aspects of your business. Digital experiences can help here because they allow for comprehensive and immersive training for the new PM. They can learn all aspects of your business in their own time and with very little oversight. 

Onboard project managers for success

Onboarding plays a critical role in the success of transitioning new project managers, especially if they’ll be working remotely. The right onboarding process not only helps your new PMs get up to speed faster, but it helps them understand your company and thrive in their new role as well.

Digital experiences offer the best way to onboard project managers.

Given the complexities of their role, digital onboarding allows you to train them on everything from your product to regulation, processes and even company culture.

At BAD, we build custom digital experiences to help companies like yours onboard customer-facing employees. Contact us today to learn how we can help!

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Categories: Onboarding