The right way to welcome someone

A one page template allowing your team or yourself to write down your thoughts during an onboarding period.

📦 What's included?

A simple, generic and duplicable page with pre-filled topics and identical questions for each topic. There are also an introduction to the report and resources to help understand the mindset behind the tools.

🤔 For whom ?

Freshly new employees, managers, companies, HR team…

🧐 What is a discovery report ?

A discovery report is a strategic HR management tool that newcomers complete during their first month in a new context (company, team…).

Long story short, it’s a tool that will help the collaborators and the company because a fresh pair of eyes will take the time to analyze and give feedback on a lot of subjects.

The template here is quit generic so you should try to adapt it to your context, let’s say you’re working in a IT team: you should then try and list topics that make the day-to-day of any engineer.

It was made to allow your collaborators or yourself to write down your thoughts during this oh-so important period that is your onboarding. ”Onboarding” is too broad a word, you can actually use this template whenever your become a newcomer. Here are a few examples, a member of your team or yourself can be:

• newly hired in a company,
• changing team within the same company,
• choosing a new career in your current company and now have a new context, new team mates, a new hierarchy…

You get it, this template is made to help in the process of writing first impressions on many topics.

🤑 What is the value of a report ?

To a newcomer 👶

It’s a chance to have their opinion heard, an opportunity to have a critical look at existing processes/habits and to level their expectations.

To a manager 💼

The hiring process generally does not give you a clear understanding of the person that stands in front of you. Listening to the report of someone can help you better grasp their priorities, their strengths and even areas of improvements.

Apart from that, it will help you create a bond with this person, his or her voice has been heard, which is always positive.

Once the report has been presented to you, you can also encourage its author to present it to your team, it probably can be tweaked a bit in case of there being a bit of finger pointing, but generally speaking, allowing your new managees to express his or her opinion to your team could drive your entire team to have an epiphany and even overcome bottlenecks

To a company 🏢

It’s a beautiful continuous improvement tool. Collaborators tend to get used to their working environment and will have a hard time taking a step back sometime. Since they have been doing it for a long time, they can no longer objectively assess processes and sometimes situations even.

Hiring a new employee is a great opportunity to collect new and fresh impressions. This allow the company to highlight its strength and to reveal what is in need of an improvement.

🙋‍♀️ What are the topics ?

Topics are very generic:

• the company,
• the onboarding,
• the department,
• the team,
• your job,
• and your manager.

But feel free to add anything that make sense. At the end of the page a button is here to create new topics.

🙋‍♂️ What are the questions ?

Those are the same for each topic and keep in mind that you can add or remove topics depending on your context:

😀 What fits your expectations perfectly

🤩 What surprised you in a good way or exceeded your expectations

😔 What you were disappointed about or didn’t reach your expectations

😵‍💫 What you were confused about

🤓 Your suggestions

Assets

Where does the assets that you use come from ?

The animated cover has been made with an illustration from Storyset.

About me

My name is Virgile, I’m a french engineering manager and I use Notion on a daily basis both for personal and professional reasons.

🤔 Why is your package named “The forgetful manager” ?

There are a few reasons behind it name: I’m a manager, I have a really bad memory, a tons of thoughts, mediocre priorization skills and a tendency to only do what give me pleasure. This is where Notion come in place: I know how I’m wired, so I come up with ways to… bypass my instincts 😂

I was a developer and there is a principle in software development that is call “DRY: Don’t repeat yourself”. Wikipedia says that it aims at reducing repetition of information which is likely to change, replacing it with abstractions that are less likely to change. To keep it short, the goal is to avoid redundancy. So I kind of apply thing principle to my templates, I can create a few pages that will help a lot of people.

I work with a lot of people and some process are not well known or documented. This is particulary true in small to medium company.

Like the title suggest, this template is made for manager, they generally are the one that should recommend the usage of this kind of template to their managees BUT it works for everyone, managers, contributors… With this package I’m aiming to help people, mostly from small company to structure their thoughts.

🐠 What is The forgetful manager ?

The forgetful manager is a Notion templates suite intended to people that are working in any kind of industry. It will be useful in small to midsized companies. If you’re in a big company, with lots of processes, chances are that you’ll not find my work very insightful. “No-nonsense templates” are products that go straight to the point, with no detour and with enough tips, tricks and resources to allow people to reflect on what they are doing. In those templates, I’ll be advocating some practices that I find sane and relevant to the workplace. My goal is to create, instructive, easy to use and practical contents for both managers and contributors.

“Discovery report” is one of many templates that I want to publish but more on this specific template below.