Welcome back to the first true work week of November! With Thanksgiving on the horizon, we are excited to continue to offer different ways to express gratitude in your personal or professional lives throughout this month. Today, we’ll take a spin on the idea of gratitude as it relates to coworkers. Have you ever joined a new company? Made a career shift? Or taken on an internal promotion/new role? The answer is likely yes, and with that comes stepping into a new space and the unknown. As we’re all bound to undergo change throughout our careers, it’s crucial to exude a helpful attitude to all new and current coworkers and teammates experiencing role transitions. Read below to learn about all of the ways that you can help others at work by lending a helping hand in training and daily task development.  

Helping Others at Work

• Create Standard Work: Where applicable, I highly recommend creating step-by-step guides on how to complete tasks that your entire team is responsible for knowing on a consistent basis. Whether this is an access request, workflow with a cross-functional team, submission in a commonly used software/platform, etc., it will not only help them but also YOU to have a reference guide! Often, the more “mundane” tasks that you’ve become used to are those that are most ambiguous to a new employee, so make sure to be mindful of all inputs that you execute daily.
  • Extra Tip: We all know that joining a new position or organization feels like ‘drinking from a fire hose’. Sometimes, it feels impossible to differentiate high-priority items from longer-term learnings. For that reason, we encourage you to include a goal tracker in the standard work you produce. Think about it this way, how long should it take to become proficient at each task? To understand a software platform? To lead meetings? To achieve general team milestones and understand the department? Embedding timelines into work resources will greatly help assist your new teammate in mentally prioritizing the most important tasks.
• Create Best Practices: On the same note, create best practices or include them within standard work resources! Whether this means a certain way of titling projects or inputting descriptions, communicating to teams, engaging in a meeting cadence for weekly team connects, fonts/formats/layouts utilized in presentations or documents, and more, there is likely a quicker avenue to the finish line that’s guided by knowing your best work! Especially as it relates to the preferences of the cross-functional teams you work with, assisting someone new on the ins and outs of how you work is key to their successful team integration.
• Create Tracker of In-flight Projects: If you’re leaving a team at any point in your career for a promotion or new company, it is also super important to have written documentation of projects or tasks that are incomplete upon your departure. Documenting the resources (like employees across the org.), who the tasks are being assigned to, the status, and any relevant documentation will ease your team’s ability to take over where you left off.
• Free Up Some Space! Free up your calendar when and where you can. Simply stating to the new teammate to “find some time on your cal” will not suffice in being welcoming and engaging. Make sure to suggest optimal times to chat live or via video, and meet in person when able! This is also helpful to your own ability to set boundaries; while it’s crucial to lend a helping hand where you can, it’s also important to not sacrifice your daily productivity to another teammate or role. So, creating expectations around training (i.e.: daily, weekly, or even monthly) will help set your new coworker and yourself up for long-term longevity and success!

Searching for a new position? Read through our open jobs!