I was extremely fortunate that early in my career I worked in a department that was incredibly organized, had how-to docs for all their processes, and took onboarding seriously (shoutout to Fisher-Price and Peter Kiger!)
Moving from that position to my positions elsewhere, I realized that most creative departments are not necessarily as prepared as my first one was to train and collect knowledge, and then pass that knowledge on effectively to newcomers. So, I took it upon myself to start a knowledge base for the Nickelodeon department in an attempt to prevent new team members from facing the same questions and confusions that I stumbled through when I was new there. It started as a google doc and eventually evolved into an Airtable-based wiki website, containing all kinds of information from company holidays, where to find your benefits, who to ask for software, how to fix that one tricky Maya thing that always messes everybody up, and more! Anything that was relevant to our department and the work we did and came up as a question for new (or old) staff members, I wanted it to be on there. I wanted people to be empowered to find the answers to their questions on their own, because you can move on to solving your problems much faster that way, rather than waiting around for someone to respond to you and potentially then walk you through whatever the process is.
We also lacked a good process for introducing new team members to the rest of the team, and I thought that a team gallery with fun facts and information about everyone and their abilities would be a great way for new people to get to know faces that they might never necessarily meet in real life (even though we worked in an office together, everyone was busy getting things done and introductions usually got skipped!). Optionally, team members could submit their birthdays and work anniversaries and then we could know when they were to celebrate them properly! On the back-end this team database also functioned as a way for managers to know different artists specialties so that they could theoretically assign them to the tasks that they were best suited for.
File naming conventions - handy dandy reference sheet!
When freelancers, project-based employees, vendors and full-time staff are all working on top of eachother and deadlines are coming in hot, it can be easy for folks to get frazzled and start naming files with pretty much whatever the first thing that pops into their head. But! That makes it soooo much harder later on when other are trying to re-use or update that work and it's not filed or named in a way that is consistent.
I created this little reference chart to try and simplify and clear up our naming convention so that it would be easier for folks to follow it properly. Hopefully spongebob can keep us on track, right?