I once worked for a software company that had an employee who required an exit interview. We went into an executive conference room with the departing employee, and I asked him to give me some thoughts on the organization and why he was leaving. He looked me in the eye and said: “Do you have any idea how miserable my first month here was? They didn’t even have my desk ready.” That employee was with the company for almost twelve years, and his rage over just how badly he was onboarded was palpable.
Onboarding sets the tone for all things to come when an employee joins your organization, so doing it well is paramount. I urge you to consider the following four fundamentals of employee onboarding:
- Be Ready: There is nothing more debilitating to the new employee than for the employer to be unprepared for their arrival. New employees join with great excitement, a desire to do well, and an eagerness to make a contribution. To have them show up with no one to greet them for a tour, a workspace that is unprepared, and technology systems that are not up and running is a terrible way to start an employment relationship. It’s better to have the candidate start a week later than you might wish than to have them walk into an ill-conceived onboarding experience.
- Make Introductions: Show the new employee around, and introduce them to people on the work floor, especially their coworkers. Introductions don’t need to be long, but they do need to be cordial, upbeat, and friendly. Bear in mind that the new employee is now exploring a world that is unfamiliar. Be sure to include places for coffee, restrooms, the kitchen, printers, conference rooms, and a few words on where to get lunch. In fact, encouraging a few coworkers to take the new employee out for lunch is not a bad idea.
- Help with Paperwork: Personally, I’m not good with filling out forms, and I’m sure that I am not alone in this predicament. Do not toss a package of forms on the new employee’s desk and tell them it’s due in twenty minutes. New employees are often a bit nervous, and pressure on the first day doesn’t help. Take the time required to patiently review what needs to be done. Be kind, understanding, and smile often.
- Apologize: New employees understand that, at times, things will go wrong. When done well, onboarding is labor intensive and has many moving parts. The email might not be ready, or the computer might have a glitch. This is all OK. New employees do not expect perfection, but they do expect to see that you made an effort. If something is not quite ready or not as it should be, that is perfectly fine. All you have to do is apologize to the employee that this or that is not ready, and tell them when it will be. Honestly, a simple courtesy will go a long way to contribute to a great onboarding experience.
Next to the candidate interviewing experience, onboarding is the only chance you have to make a great first impression with your new employee. Good onboarding demonstrates that you care about your new employee’s entrance into the workplace. Bad onboarding demonstrates apathy toward your employees’ experience, and this is hard to bounce back from – no amount of tap dancing or speeches about how important your workforce is will undo a bad onboarding experience. Onboarding has been linked to everything from heightened levels of employee engagement to increased productivity and faster learning curves. So there’s no excuse to start out on the wrong foot by doing onboarding poorly. What do your employees think about your onboarding experience?
