Everyone has experienced that feeling of nervousness the night before starting a job. But when you’re on the other side of that, when you’re the person who has hired a new employee, what should you do to make sure that they integrate seamlessly and happily into your company? Here are some tips that will help out during the ‘onboarding’ process.
Be Honest During The Hiring Process
First of all, you need to make sure that you’re truthful during the hiring process. Be completely transparent about what exactly the job entails and what the day to day responsibilities of your new hire will be. If you’re dishonest it will only backfire. If you make it sound like the person will have more input than actually is the case, they will get frustrated, and if you land them with a load of tasks that they didn’t sign up for, they will be overwhelmed.
Create A Welcoming Environment
Make sure that you welcome new hires to your company. Send around an email letting everyone know that there’s a new person there so that they can come over to say hi and to introduce themselves. Make sure that you ask for their input and celebrate their ideas right from the beginning to make them feel wanted and comfortable.
Provide Training
Providing development opportunities for your employees is one of the benchmarks of being a great boss. Enabling people to improve and to get promoted is one of the best ways to inspire confidence and loyalty from them. When a new hire joins the company, you need to start training them right away – everyone has had awkward moments at new jobs during which they spend far too much time reading and rereading a welcome booklet, so you need to make sure you plan training time that actually utilizes your new hire’s time and expertise wisely. This will help them understand the company at a deeper level quickly and help them enjoy their first few days.
Organize Social Events
It’s obviously questionable as to whether mandatory fun is, in fact, real fun, but it’s still a great idea to provide social occasions for your staff. That might be providing pizza so you can all eat lunch together, having a bake sale at work, or organizing drinks one evening. It’s important for your employees to socialize so they get to know one another, form friendships, and really enjoy their time at the company. Remember as a boss to keep a professional distance – although it’s good to get on with your staff, it’s best not to be buddies with them.
Ask For Feedback
Finally, it’s important to make sure that you ask your new hires for feedback on the process. As a boss you need to keep improving yourself as well as encouraging the people you work with to improve. Onboarding surveys will help people tell you how they found their early days at the company so you can improve the process for future hires and fill in any training gaps with the employees that you already have.
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Making sure that new hires integrate into your company is a mixture of preparation and friendliness – it isn’t as hard as you may have thought.