A conversation with Jill Geisler

A veteran journalist and newsroom leader who also headed leadership programs at the Poynter Institute for 16 years, Jill Geisler is the author of the book “Work Happy: What Great Bosses Know,” a workbook for managers seeking to build positive workplace environments. Now, Geisler is the inaugural Bill Plante Chair in Leadership and Media Integrity at Loyola University Chicago, where she leads a popular course titled “Master Class for Media Managers.” The Innovation in Focus team recently met with Geisler to talk more about best practices and advice for newsrooms looking to onboard employees smoothly and with care.

Anderson: What is the first step when making an onboarding guide?

Geisler: [Gather] the things that are about how you get paid, the things that are about how to keep from getting in trouble: Your employee handbook, your code of ethics if you’ve got that, the things you would give to pretty much everybody. There are some never-changing things that you want to have on your checklist. And then there may be some things that apply to some people and not others. For example, you may have a process for checking out gear and that would apply to people who are going to be doing that, but it wouldn’t apply to someone who’s in the development department. So you can go through your checklist and you can put it into columns. What are the things that are universal to the station, what are things that are specific to your job, what are things that we need to tell you about that require training? When we are bringing on new employees, if they’re coming fresh from school, how we create a training plan for them that helps them become confident in their skills can make a huge difference. 

A checklist can outlive the person in charge. Let’s say you get a new news director and they say, “I don’t want to start from ground zero. I’ve got the checklist, I can always modify the checklist if I need to.”

Anderson: Should you incorporate a timeline into the onboarding guide?

Geisler: Many organizations are so small they can’t afford to not have you start working right away because during that search process to fill your job, other people might have been working a six-day week to cover. So you think about the timeline for your checklist. Here’s the checklist. And then next to it you can put: “first week, absolutely important to do.” These are the things that are sort of the basic survival guide things. This is how you’ll get your paycheck processed. And then in the next week there may be some more sophisticated things, right? We may do much more on how to create a multimedia package for our CMS. 

Anderson: How do you build things into the checklist that support brand new staff?

Geisler: You can put optional things, like [assigning] a “buddy.” You can also use the word mentor. And I’m not saying everybody has to have that, but, especially if it’s a small group and people are very accessible to each other. The idea is to have a person feeling that we are setting them up to succeed, not to fail, that we trust that they’re bringing in good ideas and good experiences, and that we can help them and they can help us.

“Don’t wait to talk about ethics, don’t wait to talk about values. Don’t wait to talk about what you stand for and why that is important.”

Jill Geisler

They need to know that it’s safe to ask questions. I’m a manager, I’m going to tell you all kinds of things about this place. But I want to turn you loose in the newsroom to go talk to anybody. You want to find out what it’s really like to work here. And I think it becomes really important that people shouldn’t have to learn the culture the day they walk in the door. We should have helped them understand the culture. 

Anderson: If you have a lot that you want to include and you need to simplify things, what are some things that you might cut out of the initial guide? 

Geisler: What are your priorities? Don’t wait to talk about ethics, don’t wait to talk about values. Don’t wait to talk about what you stand for and why that is important. Not just because we’re trying to keep people from making mistakes. More importantly, there are people who think it’s just understood. That we value inclusion, that our story should reflect the true complexity of our community. If you just assume that everybody knows that and don’t say it, you’re missing a chance to really make it a living value in your organization. 

The other thing is every [newsroom] has its own approach to storytelling. Those are the kinds of things it’s helpful to tell people. Getting those things written down so that someone doesn’t go out, cover a story and then come back and are told later. Oh, well, we needed another version of that for the web. Or did you get us some video that we could have put on our site?

So, it is just a checklist of priorities, a timeline and then identifying who’s responsible for each of those things.

Anderson: Do you have any best practices, templates or tools that have been helpful in the community creating sometimes complex systems for running things? 

Geisler: I don’t have any templates per se, but in organizations, sometimes they create one. So I was teaching in Canadian broadcasting and the person responsible for digital at a show called The National, which is their flagship broadcast, created a PowerPoint guide to the use of social media and the use of digital media. She turned it into a handout. So you can create your own in-house guides, but they should probably be done in a format that can easily be edited.

I worked with one newspaper organization that had run into some ethics challenges and realized that they needed a stronger ethics guidebook for everyone, and they intentionally did it in a Google doc so that they could continue to update. 

Anderson: You had mentioned at the beginning of our conversation about communicating to new employees, especially younger employees, that they have the agency to ask questions and to propose change. What advice do you have for people wanting to create change in newsrooms?

Do your homework. Make sure that the change you are seeking isn’t an overreaction to a one-off situation. Don’t ask for a change that’s built on a situation where you haven’t used complete critical thinking to assess. Check with a person whose judgment you respect and say, “I’m thinking about proposing this.” Then, you can say, I did my research. I have an ally and I want to tell you about what my idea is. 

Suggested reads

• Onboarding New Employees without Overwhelming Them — Harvard Business Review
• New Hires Lose Psychological Safety After Year One. How to Fix It. — Harvard Business School

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Cite this article

Anderson, Sophia (2025, Feb. 25). How thoughtful onboarding documentation can set staff up for success. Reynolds Journalism Institute. Retrieved from: https://rjionline.org/news/how-thoughtful-onboarding-documentation-can-set-staff-up-for-success/