One of the most important aspects of running a company is taking the essential steps of onboarding new employees. It is crucial that you take the proper amount of time and prioritize this to get it right, as you can easily set yourself and your new hires up for success with a well-thought plan, or set yourselves up for failure with improper execution. Here are the steps to follow when you are introducing new hires to your company.
Create A Checklist
When you are starting out to create your onboarding experience and are thinking about the new employee transition plan, it is important that you materialize that plan with a checklist. Writing it down and creating a plan that you can see and adjust will help you stay organized. You may make mistakes, and that is completely natural when starting out new companies. You may not be completely familiar or comfortable with the onboarding process, but having a checklist will allow you to follow your onboarding strategy, and as you introduce more and more employees throughout the tenure of your business, you will be able to identify points where you need to improve the onboarding experience, adding or removing certain tasks or facets, and overall optimizing the onboarding checklist from where you started. Don’t be hesitant to take feedback and make changes to your process.
Teach Core Values
It is key that when you are introducing new employees to your company, you want to teach and reinforce the core values of your company. This can be done in different ways, from having them stated in different areas of your workplace, spoken and reiterated in introduction videos, and overall lived by the employees at your company. Keeping certain core values in mind, you and your team will be able to always have a cultural mindset of how you run and operate your business. From customer-driven to growth-focused, to even having fun and overall positivity, your values may differ from company to company, but they will be what you are reminded of as your ultimate achievement on a daily basis.
Establish Individual And Company Goals
Before you hire a candidate, and even throughout the onboarding experience, you want to consider what each other’s goals are. As a company, you have your own goals, and you have to understand that each of your employees has their own career goals as well. Ideally, those goals will align with each other, and having that conversation and understanding will allow you to work in unity to reach your success together. Having your goals laid out with clear objectives will ensure that you are giving your employees an understanding of their expectations as well, meaning there are no surprises when it comes to what you want from them in terms of their responsibility and workload.
Get Them Set Up
You want to create an onboarding experience that is seamless and efficient. The goal is to have your employees adjust as soon as possible. This is outlined by the people from Zenefits.com by providing your new hires with everything they could possibly need. You will give them all the information they would potentially want and have questions about as an employee. You start with logistics of the contract of their employment such as paperwork regarding salary, moving on to things like a review of your products, your company’s guidelines, tools and equipment, and introduction to key team members, everything they need to complete their jobs.
Proper Training
Every company is different in terms of how they run and operate their business. This means that even though your employees may be comfortable with certain programs and tools, they may not be familiar with how you run things, especially if you choose alternative methods. It is important that you provide your new hires with the right training to get them started and provide them the directions they need for their jobs. Training videos will make your onboarding experience much more efficient to get them started.
Expectations And Challenges
As touched upon earlier with the goals of the company, you want to have expectations with your new employees to ensure they are meeting your goals. These will change from the first two weeks to the next two months, and so forth, as you want to accommodate the comfortability of your employees as they make their adjustments. As they settle in, you can increase the demand and workload, ultimately challenging them to not only meet your expectations but surpass them in hopes to develop their skills and performance.
Taking the essential time to properly onboard new employees will ensure that your business runs smoothly. Not only will you cut down the adjustment period that your new hires need to settle in with their roles and responsibilities, but you will also provide yourself consistency and confidence for future onboarding experiences to run just as smoothly.
