[_jss]

I currently have 12 direct reports, approximately 50/50 split between remote and HQ engineers.

Onboarding: I create onboarding documents for every incoming engineer broken down by week with 1 or 2 "people to meet" items in the checklist. There is one person in HQ, one person remote (if available) for a remote engineer onboarding. If the engineer is in HQ, they don't have a remote person assigned but they're tasked to meet with everybody on the team. The expectation is within the first couple of weeks to have met at least once with everybody on the team. There are some suggested questions only if they ask (I like to let people feel around and will ask if they feel comfortable talking to strangers, etc).

Management: I'm fairly process oriented, but believe in very light weight processes where every step in the process has some value to an actual person. When we plan our tasks, I ask for rollups on what we're really trying to do and why. This enables me to talk about people's work and know what I'm talking about. The benefit is that we give coherent answers, and have a list of things that are ongoing that are at a higher level than tasks and lower than long-term plans (2 week segments).

For growth, every half I ask a series of questions about their aspirations for the next 6 months and align them to our company's evaluative criteria. I write it down, share with them to edit and correct (this makes sure I understand it). Then at the end of every month, we spend time in our 1:1 to read through and make changes. It goes from a fictional forward looking statement to a writeup of what's been done. It helps frame the larger items that are easy to forget, and a place to put in the small unexpected wins. At the end of the half it is a great asset to see what they've done and for me to bring into performance review conversations.

For culture and team-building, I push for quarterly get togethers (which turns into every 6 months, coordinating a lot of people is hard). Mostly I try to make sure folks are working together and not just adjacent (working on different things in a team is not teamwork). The team also drives conversations to email or scheduled conversations, so folks don't have to be watching Slack to see a decision that may impact them and be lucky they're around (we have a lot of timezone spread, too).

Hope this helps!