Company values show up in some facet of our roles every day, whether we’re making a hard choice or determining priorities. They help guide our team towards shared business goals and, in doing so, shape company culture. With many technology companies having faced working remotely in the past months, culture has become a greater priority and a shared responsibility. Getting everyone on the same page about culture begins with defining values.

When it comes to learning, we have all benefited from social learning in the workplace. Social learning is an opportunity for people to learn from one another through programs that help us share knowledge such as peer mentorship, or attending a lunch and learn, where someone shares their expertise with the broader company. Though sometimes unconscious, we are able to learn and observe by example and then apply what we take away to our own work.

Welcome, New Roacher! That’s how all of our Welcome Documents start, though you can expect yours to start with your name on top. Welcome Docs are how we help our new teammates get started and get past the natural new job jitters at Cockroach Labs. We understand there’s nothing worse than not knowing what to do or where to go on your first day, so we use Welcome Docs as a nice roadmap for this transition. In a previous blog about onboarding, I share how we structure Your First Weeks at Cockroach. We designed our onboarding process to be robust and informative, covering information about best practices at Cockroach Labs and providing an overview of our product, CockroachDB. However, it doesn’t account for the various nuances of each role, team, or department. That’s why our People team makes an effort to create personalized Welcome Docs to account for those specific role differences. In a partnership with hiring managers, we build the docs to make sure there’s clarity in what’s expected of you in your first 90 days. Here’s a bit more on what they look like:

For new employees, starting at a new company isn't always a comfortable transition. Even if they’re excited about their new role, day 1 at a new office can be scary. They’ve left the familiar feeling of their old position for the unknown situation of a new company. Onboarding is meant to answer some of these unknowns. While the HR team can sit you down and walk through how the company came to be and when you’ll be paid, there’s some amount of onboarding where a meeting with HR doesn’t cut it. At Cockroach Labs, we’ve made onboarding a team sport. New hires are paired with a Roachmate -- their go-to resource -- with many other Roachers helping to get new hires up to speed on our product and how things work. The process is organized by our People Ops team, but with lots of help from every department at Cockroach Labs. We also refer to our onboarding process as MOLTing. Of course, we're a company called Cockroach Labs, and if you didn't already know, cockroaches molt. It's a process they go through early on in their lifecycle to shed their skin and build that resilient outer shell for which they're known. This reflects our onboarding program in that we hope you learn useful things during the start of your time here to become a resilient Roacher.