I am sharing my personal experience of starting a new job during the pandemic when everyone was working from home and all the onboarding processes were virtual.
Date: 1st June 2020, the day I officially joined my first job after freelancing for 2.5 years, but that’s not the catch, my life cannot be that simple, and you know it.
However, just a night before joining the new job I had a sudden breakup, I was on stabilizers and my brain was numb, and nothing made sense, but there I was facing the onboarding presentation.
I really needed a break, but how do you ask for one on Day 1 of the job, so I wrestled through, and that kind of helped me focus away from the grief.
I joined as a Digital Marketing Manager, the job description was to manage the Digital Marketing ops for the company, and here is how it went.
Difficulties I faced on the new job due to work from home:
- Onboarding :
The virtual onboarding just didn’t feel right, I didn’t know what the company looked like, I couldn’t understand the values that drive the company or even whom should I contact if I needed something.
Yes, there was a presentation, but it was made for physical onboarding where you have already seen the office during interviews, you have already interacted with a few people from the company and you know the vibe before the onboarding starts, virtual onboarding just felt like there was a gap, but we cannot blame the company for this, nobody would have ever contemplated that they would even need such a setup if coronavirus didn’t happen. - Connections:
When you start a new job, you build connections, you talk to people around, participate in conversations, talk to people at lunch, and at awkward washroom breaks. This helps you get a better picture of the capabilities of the people and company you work with.
Now how do you do that in a disconnected environment, it is impossible to replicate those not-so-forced conversations. - Responsibility Handover:
I was hired as a marketing manager and it is really important to understand the ongoing marketing activities, understanding the work that my predecessor had done, and the outcomes.
This is easy when you are in an office environment because you can easily ask around and won’t have to send 100s messages on slack. - Understanding the workflow
Every company has its own workflow and tools they used, I had worked with many, but had never worked for a core IT company before, so tools like Jira for work reporting was foreign to me.
Adding to it, there was an app for time monitoring called time doctor and the company had its weird ways to use it, I had to unlearn a lot of my freelance workflow to settle down for this new one. - Mis-aligned expectations
As a freelancer, when a client comes to you, you do a thorough analysis and suggest what all things need to be fixed, and that’s exactly what I did for the first few days, I audited all and every resource to figure out what wasn’t working and planning how to fix it.
Then I figured out that I was expected to perform certain tasks that were high on priority rather than do a complete overhaul audit of the system. - Freelancer to Job shift
Apart from the workflow difficulties, there were a lot of physical difficulties, as a freelancer, you work for long hours, but those long hours were spread across the day rather than one block of 8 hours, this did discipline me a bit.
In the initial days, my huge attention was at the timer app, it used to notify me even if I was not active for 3 mins, and I was too scared of taking breaks as a result of which I used to move around less and would avoid water and pee breaks, this caused a lot of anxiety, acid reflux, and lower back pain, but then I learned that it wasn’t all that serious.
Well, no company or employee was ready for such a drastic change in the entire process of onboarding, but I guess this has been a very big learning opportunity and has made the gaps visible.
All this while I was suffering from depression and my work was my only escape, and so I stuck at it for whatever it took.
Would I recommend someone to join a new job in the middle of the pandemic?
Depends.
If you need the money, need an escape or you lost the current job, please do it, it helps.
If you are happy as you are, please do not start a new one.
