You've identified just the kind of talent your company needs. It's time for orientation. Your new hires are ready to be prepped on how to become meaningful members of your team. That’s great. But you're going to create doubt around your company that your new hires will mull over during lunch if you don't make the mission of your business and the role you want them to play in it inspiring and clear. Read on for tips on how to make bringing new people in informative and dynamic.
Don't neglect to sit down with each of your new staff members and let them know that choosing them was a meticulous process. Many times newly arrived employees are unsure about why they were offered the position. They can also often be insecure about whether their presence will really make a difference in the company’s success, telling them straight away that a deep search was conducted for the right person to fill the role they’re now in, can alleviate some of their worries. Letting them know that your conclusion was that they had the best background and credentials, can give them the motivation they need to roll up their sleeves and get down to work right out of the gate.
While inspiring a new hire through meetings and gatherings that make them feel welcome and providing them with training material is invaluable, concrete examples of what behaviors drive growth are better. Some companies show new hires hollywood movies in which characters achieve the unachievable by exemplifying traits and strategies your company strongly identifies with. Providing them with reading material written by top thought leaders in business can also help them to understand what management expects to happen once they begin. It can also be an effective way to assist them in internalizing your company’s unique idea of what winning is.
Instead of bringing new staff onboard on mondays, which is a notoriously gloomy day of the week, some companies have begun to make fridays an orientation day. Fridays help lower your team's defenses. It’s the psychology of it being the last day of the week that can make doing things like introductions and roundtable discussions more relaxed. Fridays are days when employees tend to be dressed down, which can also lighten the mood and drive more spontaneous interaction. There won't be as much high-pressure work on the desks of other members of the team to distract them from being fully part of the onboarding process of a new member either.
Companies who want proactive people ready to start work as soon as they arrive, provide them with as much training material as possible by email before they sit at their desks for the first time. Ernst & young has its own platform full of corporate information that an incoming employee can log into and immerse themselves in as soon as they accept a job offer. It eliminates a lot of the suspense. It reduces the height of the learning curve. It gives a new employee the chance to get up to speed before those first critical meetings, which can really help build their confidence before they even walk in the door. Some may consider it one of the most effective employee onboarding best practices of all.
Most companies fail to make the promotion path transparent, which ultimately leads towards high turnover. Holding early sessions with new hires in which the growth process that they need to go through to develop the soft and hard skills that will move them further up the corporate chain, can be the greatest confidence boost of them all to an employee who wants to feel like they’ve chose the right company to work for.