Verksamhetsberättelse 2020/Story: Improved onboarding for new staff members

Enabling

2020

In this Story we are focusing on how we have developed our capabilities as an employer to onboard new staff at a higher frequency than before. These targeted efforts will allow us to scale the team faster when funding is secured.

Wikimedia Sverige had significant funding secured in 2019 which was to be used in 2020. Because of this the association started the year with hiring a number of new staff members and significantly increased the team size. The entire process worked fairly well as a lot of effort had been invested in 2019 to prepare for a larger team. With many new staff members joining the team and sharing their thoughts, ideas and insights a lot of the material, methods and process continued to be developed. We especially invested time into improving documentation around financial routines and the tools we use. To reduce the issues and stress we also offered more hands-on support to the new team members. To that end more current staff members were given clearer responsibilities to guide the new staff members through the first few weeks.

The board and leadership also worked on simplification of policies as this was deemed important to provide a deeper understanding of the organization for both new staff members and volunteers.

Development of staff training material was initiated to be able to quickly onboard more staff in the future (see also Story: Creating a modular educational structure). For the fundraising staff entirely new onboarding material and procedures were developed. This will allow us to quickly hire and deploy new fundraising teams across the country.

The work done in 2019–2020 will allow Wikimedia Sverige to continue scaling the staff size, at a high speed, as soon as funding is secured.