After accepting my offer from Flexport and ironing out my start date, a new fear started to kick in. I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to perform at my best given that I would be onboarding in the middle of the pandemic from my home. With Flexport’s large domain and my lack of knowledge about the freight industry, I thought it would take me forever to get ramped up. The first week’s calendar didn’t help either when it looked like this:

During our first few weeks here at Flexport, we have a Flexport Academy and an engineering specific Makers Academy. These academies are used to teach new hires about the freight forwarding business and Flexport’s best practices. My onboarding schedule seemed daunting at first, but as the days went by my fear turned into excitement. Even though half of the topics still didn’t make sense to me till later on, it was exciting to see how much effort Flexport was putting in to make us feel welcomed.

After being at Flexport for two months, here are some things I learned that helped me a lot during my remote onboarding.

Use the resources provided

There are a ton of articles and different training classes available from Flexport to help understand the industry and also get an idea of what the goals of the company are. Honestly, you can spend years reading through everything there is, but I would get started with your own team’s wiki pages and then continue with topics that interest you. As concepts and ideas started clicking inside my head, I realized what questions I wanted to have answered. This whole process helped me better understand my team’s goals and why the tasks we were currently working on were important to the overall vision.

Ask questions

If there’s one thing you can take away from this article I hope it’s this: never hesitate to ask questions. Especially now, with everything being remote, it’s easy to feel lost when joining a new company. Luckily, Flexport assigns you an onboarding buddy to whom you can ask any questions that come to mind. On top of that, one of my favorite parts about Flexport is that everyone is willing to help as long as you are willing to ask. Although it may seem like asking for a lot at first, try receiving your help over video chat through Google Meet or Slack instead of just messaging your coworkers. This way you’ll be able to more effectively communicate and also build some rapport with your coworkers as you work together.

Don’t overdo it

When everyone is working from home the times between work and home start to blend. After spending a full day working, don’t try to over exert yourself just because you’ve just started in a new environment and feel the need to ramp up as soon as possible. When onboarding, there’s a ton of information being thrown at you and everyone needs time to decompress. Those hours spent away from working are just as important, if not more important than the ones spent on your desk.

Join the social channels

While working remotely, it’s hard to get to know coworkers outside of your team. To help mitigate this issue, there are some social channels available to talk to coworkers about other things besides work. If by any chance, you don’t find anything it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take initiative and get one started either! For example at Flexport, we use a Slack extension called Donut which creates groups that you can join, and every two weeks you’re paired with a new member so you both get to know each other. This is a pretty great way to get to meet some other members of your company outside of your immediate network and once you get back to the office you won’t feel like a stranger either.

Overall, there is a lot going on at Flexport and coming in it’s pretty easy to feel overwhelmed with the influx of new information. However, there is a lot in place that Flexport has established to help us new hires get up to speed. Onboarding remotely is definitely challenging, but one thing to remember is to use all the resources we have available to us and never be afraid to ask any questions no matter how simple they may seem.