The complications of being a new employee during the pandemic

Having been offered the job before the pandemic struck, Melinda Alfredéen had naturally imagined herself on campus at the Ångström Laboratory, meeting students, staff and colleagues on a daily basis.

“I am convinced that I would have got into the swing of the job more quickly, got to know my colleagues better and had more fun had I started before all of the restrictions entered into force,” says Melinda.

While starting at a new workplace often involves a steep learning curve, the curve normally levels out as the pieces of the puzzle are slotted into place. This process is quicker when crucial information about the job is portioned out in reasonable amounts and then repeated in more detail in different contexts.

“This process simply doesn’t work when working from home. It has not been difficult to manage my own learning process – I’m self-motivated by nature – but I have missed having a context on which to ‘hang’ the information.”

Context is important

This context is something Melinda Alfredéen considers difficult to find in a digital workplace. She has missed the natural rhythm that an onboarding usually has, with the equally important social elements providing breaks in an intensive learning process. She has also missed the opportunity to experience a normal orientation week.

“I was really looking forward to that. I have no previous experience of Swedish university traditions as I studied in the United States; so, not being able to meet students at roll-call or during orientation week was of course a disappointment. I had imagined all of the fun on campus at Polacksbacken and that this enthusiasm would give me an energy boost going into the autumn semester.”

Instead, without the social elements this proved to be a stressful period. The transition to working entirely digitally has not come naturally to Melinda, given that personal meetings are at the very core of the student counselling profession.

“Getting used to all of the new technology alongside everything else was quite overwhelming at first. I also lacked an image of how studies and the organisation worked before the pandemic, making it difficult to grasp the sudden new situation that students and colleagues also found themselves in.”

Tips for other new members of staff

In retrospect, would she have done anything differently if she were employed today and does she have any tips for other new members of staff in a similar situation to her own?

“To have a normal working day or working week described by colleagues with various functions within the unit, or to hear different accounts of the atmosphere, tasks, collaborative forms and the everyday ‘chores’ – I think that would have made it easier to create some kind of reference point in our internal communication.”

Melinda also recently read a related article in a newspaper that contained a useful suggestion: give everyone at the unit their own task in terms of both onboarding and maintaining contact with their new colleague. It is also a good idea to make someone responsible for getting to know the person better and, for example, inviting them for coffee.

“We will be welcoming two new colleagues to the unit in the spring and I have offered to act as a ‘mentor’, but I feel that it might be a good idea to rotate responsibility for a new colleague, including in work-related matters. New employees will probably feel like less of an irritation if they are not constantly ‘disturbing’ the same person and of course a single colleague will avoid having to bear full responsibility for onboarding.”

Aside from the fact that the past year has brought with it so many changes for everyone – and in Melinda Alfredéen’s case completely new work processes and colleagues as well – digital tools have nevertheless made life a great deal easier. Melinda quickly realised that she would need to structure all of the new information and so she created her own organisational systems in OneNote, Excel, Outlook and Kanban Flow. It has also proved very valuable to be able to ask colleagues questions using tools such as Zoom.

“There’s no such thing as a stupid question and I can search for new names that I’m not familiar with in the Staff Portal. Seeing a picture and perhaps reading a brief profile of someone makes it feel a little more like I have actually met them,” she concludes.