By SHANNON O. WELLS

The moment one gets a job offer, the anxiety and stress that typically carries through the interview process and the waiting period that follow tend to melt away, replaced by a sense of accomplishment and eager anticipation to take on a new professional endeavor.

Before taking on actual job duties at Pitt, however, there’s still hoops to jump through. Employee orientation, or “onboarding,” involves a virtual deluge of institutional and Human Resources-based information of varying degrees of urgency and relevance.

Suffice it to say, some new hires get more out of the experience than others.

Hannah Johnson, associate dean of faculty development and advancement in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences, said a fresh, less-intense approach to orientation known as “slowboarding” emerged from what she and her colleagues noticed at a Pitt orientation event.

“It was more a question of what we observed of (new) faculty, which was a certain amount of exhaustion, especially with a full-day event in the later afternoon,” she said. “You can see that people are flagging. You know they want the information. They want to be there, but there are just limits to what human beings can do in terms of maintaining their focus through the course of the day.”

Part of Dean Adam Leibovich’s effort to make the Dietrich School a "destination workplace" for faculty and staff, the slowboarding concept is based on providing “just-in-time” information to new faculty and staff on important topics throughout the academic year instead of what Johnson called a “giant info dump” in August and then “calling it a day.”

Around late summer of 2023, an orientation team started working together to examine elements of Pitt’s onboarding process.

“It’s been really important for all of us from the beginning to do what we could to create a welcoming environment for faculty and provide opportunities to interact and talk with one another — and talk with us — and create a sense of a friendly environment,” Johnson noted. “That has been a priority for all of us in the three years that we’ve been working together.”

Scheduled events were focused on research and developing faculty awareness of research resources on campus. “For example, the last three years we’ve had an early-career grant-writing workshop, and that slotted very naturally into the idea of an extended onboarding series and certain features of the slowboarding,” she said. “Some of the things that people expressed an interest in doing, having a kind of deeper dive in the sessions, fed into this.”

Natasha Tokowicz, associate dean for equity, faculty development, and community engagement in the Dietrich School, said she and her colleagues found elements that newly hired faculty and staff “might have wanted to dive deeper into that we simply can’t do in the format of a whole day.

“So, if you want to have all these topics that people are interested in, to enable enough time for people to come and ask the questions they want to ask, it really is better to have one-off (intermittent) sessions so that people can focus on the sessions that they care most about.”

The one hour to 90-minute sessions focused on a particular topic provide advantages over an all-encompassing one-day workshop or “welcome” orientation, she noted.

“I think that maybe it was more the like wishing for more on ‘X topic’ was part of what helped germinate this idea. For me, this idea of the just-in-times (sessions) for the faculty chairs (seemed to) evolve from a one-day event where you tried to teach them all the things they would need for the year, and turned into a piecemeal approach that seems much more successful.”

In the 2024-25 academic year, the Dietrich School created its Early Career Faculty Support Program, featuring a series of panels and presentations to support early career faculty. Topics include graduate mentoring, strategies for success, and balancing responsibilities among research, teaching and service.

In spring 2026, a visiting faculty panel was created to benefit visiting or part-time faculty who “want to know how they can make the most of their not-permanent position at the University,” Tokowicz said, noting that the panelists “started in a more transitional position at the University, so that’s been really helpful.”

As a complement to the slowboarding efforts, these topics are featured and recorded on a rotating basis in a Zoom-based virtual format and are available on the Canvas platform via myPitt. “They can watch the recording if they’d like, along with a lot of resources that (Hannah Johnson) has pulled together for faculty,” she added. “There’s a lot of recordings of useful workshops and panels there for people to look at.”

The resources are geared to new faculty, but available to ongoing faculty and staff members who have access to the Canvas platform.

“One of our goals was to try and assemble a space where faculty could find the answers to a lot of common questions,” Johnson said. “So, if you know you want to learn about the Center for Teaching and Learning, you can click a link there, and it will take you directly to that page. If you want to know about helping students in distress, there are links and a guide there. There are resources on AI (artificial intelligence).

“The idea is that we can keep adding to this library and keep building on it,” she explained. “As more and more faculty access the site, they can hopefully find these resources a little bit more easily as well.”

The workshops and slowboarding-oriented modules are created to appeal to a range of personality types. 

“Some people are, especially if they’re very new to the field or they’re quite junior in their field, much less likely to ask a question in a big room full of people, especially when they don’t know anyone yet,” Johnson said. “These are factors that come into play.

“We’ve incorporated some features into the Orientation Day in August, such as encouraging people to submit questions on note cards that they’ve crafted, for example, to take some of that kind of stage fright out of the process. Certainly, people vary a lot in terms of their feelings and how forthcoming they are.”

Orientation panel participants are invited to submit questions during registration.

“We provide the panel with those (employee-generated) questions, and we’ll make sure those get answered,” Tokowicz noted. “Some people won’t want to ask questions in the moment … There are some people who come in more prepared, less prepared, but also just wanting more or wanting less. And we’re trying to cover all of that.”

Monthly slowboarding sessions and events are expected to start around late September, she said.

The onboarding team’s goal is to announce slowboarding features and events at the half-day orientation session set for Aug. 18, with information already available on the Dietrich School’s “Events” page. Johnson said she also hopes to have all new faculty enrolled in myPitt and the Canvas portal by that point.

“If you’re a person who wants to have everything, there’s videos you can watch, and you can look at all these pages and everything. And if you want to wait, then you can just wait till you feel like you need something and have a look. We’re, I think, trying to address a range of wishes and styles.”

Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.

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