A week in review

The first week of any job is always full of emotions. The range is anything from what will I wear, is there a dress code… to will I work with good people? So of course the night before “Day 1”, I was a bit nervous. A good nervous though, the sort that focuses the mind and starts the critical thinking processes. 

Now one of the aspects of my role that I enjoy is the onboarding process. During this you get to really relieve the reason you had for joining an organisation. The same is true for interviewing. I find that when I start to share with people the aspects of my organisation I become even more enthusiastic about both my role and the responsibilities therein and the organisation in general. It’s not often that the tables are turned for me so it was lovely to jump out of bed and sit on my bike for a while, getting my thoughts together before heading to the office. 

I won’t lie, getting out of bed to train before work has been a shock to the system, but I’ve stuck to my training plan and been on my bike each and every morning. 

Heading to the office. What a lovely experience. I’ve not really done that in the last 2 years. OK that’s not entirely true, I was generally the only person going to the office and I was entirely on my own in a huge building, very not fun. I literally bounded from the tube station and was delighted to see people in the office doing their thing. How is this the new new?

I don’t know how many times I’ve joined companies to find that my network access and/or my equipment has not materialised, hats off to the People Ops team here at Busuu, not only was there a welcome email and bunch of equipment/swag on my desk, in fact I had my log in details and a toolkit with all the information that I needed well in advance of my start date, not only that I had access to my email, slack etc. 

I was very privileged to have met with many colleagues before I started, in fact Busuu was one of the only companies I interviewed with who offered me the chance to come and meet my stakeholders. That was a huge game changer for me. I loved the dynamics in the room during that meeting and so on my first day, it felt like I was meeting people who I already knew well. 

Not only was the equipment side of things sorted, in fact I was greeted with a full onboarding plan to get me up to speed quickly, however, unlike some organisations where the onboarding is a plethora of back to back meetings, in fact I had plenty of time to get to know the various teams I would work with and also the future plans for the business. All in all a very exciting time to be joining. 

Now it’s unusual for me to get this far into an update without mentioning the people. I have to say a huge “THANK YOU” 🙏 to everyone who has welcomed me this week. When I say welcomed, that doesn’t even start to describe the experience. For me that’s not just the usual “welcome to the company”, but the way in which people have been open and honest with all aspects of their role and expectations for me. I have now notes and notes (those of you who have worked with me will recognise this 🙂 ) and I’m already starting to pull together some ideas of what we can do to get things up and running in the right manner. 

To summarise the week, any nerves I had disappeared by about 09:10 on the first day, I’m so excited to be working with a company that is having the sort of conversations about how to engage with their people and do both the really cool strategic stuff as well as the things that make a real difference in peoples lives. There is a lot to do, but it’s gonna be an interesting journey. 

Thank you to everyone who has been part of the last week. I can’t wait to get to know everyone in Busuu! Full steam ahead. 

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