Tips for Navigating Your First Week on the Job

You’ve carried in a moving box filled with photos and knick-knacks for your desk. You’ve attended the short orientation session with the HR team. Your first week at a new job is filled with new faces, new surroundings, new procedures, and new managers. It is intimidating and exciting; just take a deep breath and move confidently. Here is what you should keep top-of-mind during this time.

Jump right in, but be patient

In almost every professional setting, whether you’re C-level or entry level, observation is the name of the game during the first week at work. Be ready to absorb everything that you experience. Notice your co-workers each have different communication styles, and learn who your partners are—the people you will be working with on a day-to-day basis.

Introducing yourself is not always easy when you are brand new on the job, especially if you have introverted tendencies. But it’s a critical part of your first week. One way to ease some of the nervousness is to enlist some help. Your manager should understand the importance of a good introduction, so ask to be introduced around the office. You might consider signing up for an event or two—like a networking event, or a lunch-and-learn session.

You will quickly pick up on processes and workflows that you know you can improve. In the first week, you probably should focus on sponging up as much as you can before jumping in and making changes. There is nothing wrong with enthusiasm and wanting to make improvements, but bide your time in the first few days. Fully grasp where it’s important to adapt versus where you should attempt to change. That type of clarity usually takes longer than a week to achieve.

Nail down your KPIs and performance metrics

Every position should have certain metrics attached to how performance is gauged. You many have had a conversation during the interview process about what key performance indicators (KPIs) look like for the role you have taken. The first week on the job is a good time to nail that down. Having a short one-on-one with your direct manager to firm up performance expectations is absolutely fair game in the first week on the job.

Remember, a good KPI will have a number of tangible components:

• Qualifiable – goals should be measurable and objective measures of success.
• Understandable – goals should make sense to any generalist working at the company.
• Actionable – goals must be impacted by something that you control.
• Repeatable – goals should be meaningful over the long term and applicable at any point in the term of the KPI.
• Timely – goals must be attained and tracked over a specific time period: Annually, quarterly, monthly.

If your company does not have pre-defined KPIs that are ready-made for you position, you can simply have a few open-ended questions prepared for the conversation to show management that you are thinking on their plane. Ask questions about what clients and end users find most valuable in the product you help create. Ask about ways your role contributes in delivering that value. You can explore your role in the overall context business strategy. Get used to asking questions, because you are about to ask a lot of them in your first 30 days.

Ask lots of people about what success looks like to them

Hopefully your conversation about KPIs was enough for some initial goal setting in the near term. From that, formulate a quick elevator pitch for interacting with your new co-workers, and in it, you will talk about your why—that is, why is the work that you do important to the company, and why is it important to you.

Your first 30 days, before the day-to-day intensity of the job kicks in, are when you should gain an understanding of what success looks like long-term. A great way of doing this is knowing your manager’s KPIs, and how those fit into the scope of the company. Ask away. Then branch outside of your department. Memorize the organizational chart and learn as much as you can about what people do in their respective positions. Learn what their success looks like. Again, don’t be afraid to ask.

If you are in a production role, get to know the customers by interacting with sales and marketing. Peruse the materials they use to work customers through the sales funnel, like e-books and white papers. You might even eavesdrop on a few sales calls or client presentations. Many companies have client success managers who are a great resource to get up to speed with what customers care about. Engage with the brand on social media. Approach everyone with genuine curiosity.

 Inquire about professional development and get involved

At most offices, employee training programs are under the auspices of the human resources department. That means HR personnel should be on the list of people to get to know during your first 30 days of work. Ask HR professionals about what their success looks like, and you will find that your success is their success. This is why many companies offer professional development programming.

Companies treat employee training programs differently at every workplace. The overarching trend is that training is more of a necessity than a privilege, especially at many forward-thinking places of work. It is shown that providing opportunities for training is way for a company to retain top employees and drive more productivity from their workforce. Professional development is a win-win, and hopefully there are opportunities to pursue at your new job.

HR personnel that handles professional development should be able to point you in the right direction. They will reference documented policy for professional development, make recommendations about associations to join, external training functions that are available, and company parameters for subsidized training outside of work—whether that is workshops, seminars, or coursework at a partner educational institution. Once you discover the lay of the land, it is in your best interest to get involved and move your skills forward.

 Integration into company culture is the end result

If you think of company culture as the sum total of management goals and successes, plus understanding the needs of the customer, plus the operational ins and outs of addressing those needs in a profitable manner--it is far and away more than you take away in an orientation session. If you give yourself a deadline of 30 days to have the kinds of conversations we outlined above, you should have a solid understanding about what company culture looks like, and how best to fit inside of it.