by Raghu Nandhan | Jun 26, 2019 | Blog, Industry Trends
Remember how you felt going to work on the first day of your new job – Excited, Eager and Ready to get started, right?
It is the responsibility of the HR, IT and Facilities team to make sure everything is ready – right from the work station, ID cards, network access and more. To get all these, there are usually a lot of backend processes that take place. This often causes the unnecessary delay and interferes with the productivity of the teams involved.
It is time to hit refresh on these Onboarding Trends!
Onboarding is the integration process used to ensure a smooth transition of new employees into their roles and the organization. It is more than just providing new employee orientation.
It’s the role of onboarding to help new employees welcome and get them prepared for their jobs, and to successfully contribute to organization’s mission, vision and values.
Here are 3 Employee Onboarding rules essential to the immigration and smooth transition of employees into their roles and to the organization;
- Have a plan and follow it
- Commit to 365 days
- Checklist – Build great resources
Let’s take a look at each rule in more detail and explore some tips and tricks for each.
1. Have a Plan and follow it:
Organizations must invest the time, energy and resources necessary to create an Onboarding experience.
Create a plan using the Three C’s of Onboarding:
- Clarify policy, expectations and how the employee’s work adds value to the organization.
- Help employees navigate culture, providing a sense of values, norms and unique language
- Make connections by fostering interpersonal and organizational relationships for the new employee.
This strategic approach requires HR professionals to deliver onboarding experience and support managers in doing the same.
2. Commit to 365 days
Onboarding is so much more than a day one orientation session.
Understanding in organization is associated with the employee commitment, satisfaction and engagement.
So use milestones such as 30,60,90 and 120 days on the job, and up to one year from day one to facilitate experiences and check in with your employee.
Onboarding best practices:
- Have everything ready.
- Make the first day on the job special
- Use a formal new employee orientation session
- Develop a written onboarding plan
- Consistently implement
Be crystal clear about objectives, roles and responsibilities.
3. Checklist– Build great resources
A checklist provides the road-map for the onboarding journey. HR professionals must provide for the understanding and support of the new employee and the manager.
It helps in ensuring consistent onboarding experiences.
Let’s take a look at 3 critical areas to cover in your onboarding checklist:
Before arrival of the new employee (Pre-boarding):
- Have all paperwork ready
- Have an on-the-job training and work plan ready
- Have the employees workstation ready and waiting to hit the ground running
- Create a what-you-need-to-know list – (tools used for the job, programs used to communicate with the teams, etc.
Day One for the new employee:
- Let them in on what’s going in the organization
- Lay out your expectations
- Impart your company culture
- Have projects or training programs, ready for them to work on.
- Remember to have someone they can go to with questions.
First whole year of the new employee
- Help them build a foundation in the organization
- Socially integrate into the team and the organization
- Build engagement and commitment through intentional experiences that meet their needs
- Conclude by recognizing their year one milestone
Follow these 3 simple rules of onboarding to create experiences that integrate and build connections between employees work and the organization’s mission
Joining a new company for hopefully be a long-term and mutually beneficial partnership is a critical first step in your employee’s career with your organization. Plan it with care so it’s a smooth and comfortable experience and watch -you, your employee and your company flourish!
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by Raghu Nandhan | Jun 14, 2019 | Blog, Employee Engagement
We all know about brand ambassadors or at least we’ve all heard about “influencers” on social media who are being paid to endorse or promote anything let it be a product or service. What about employer brand ambassadors? Are you aware of this term? This is a largely unused marketing opportunity just waiting to be tapped into.
Before we get into our list of top tips for converting your employees into brand ambassadors for your recruitment marketing efforts, a quick dive into the idea behind the title, Brand Ambassador. Great commercials, strong PR, vivid social media strategy all warrant effort when building your company’s brand. But you would definitely agree that an army of loyal employees living and breathing your brand are best PRs. You know the type – folks with enthusiasm bursting from their veins–talking about your products and services with their friends at every place possible.
Here are tips and strategies you can use to motivate your staffers to be positively vocal about your brand:
Encourage to use social media:
No one wants to feel like their employer is watching over their shoulder, waiting to catch them sharing something on social media that shouldn’t be shared. You need to create a culture within your company that is supportive of employee engagement on social media.
Organize employee events:
Events and company outings are a great way to treat employees to activities they might not experience otherwise. Unconventional team-building give employees the opportunity to get outside of their comfort zone, get to know each other and get invested in the company culture. And it’s quite obvious, fun work-sponsored events are incredibly the best to be posted on social media platforms like Instagram.
- Communicate: Once you have a handle on your reputation, it’s time to start recruiting those brand ambassadors. Do you have a product launch coming up? Be sure everyone knows all there is to know about the updates being released, or the newest feature set of your whizz-bang, world-changing widget. That way they’ll be ready to toot their own horns about the part they played in bringing it to fruition.
- Allow Them To Be The Hero: There’s nothing more frustrating to a frontline employee than when an executive swoops in and does EXACTLY what they would have done, but their hands were tied. Executives chalk this up to a common sense that apparently they think they have, but I’ve met many who question whether anyone they’ve hired to service their customers could possibly be that astute. Give your employees a few opportunities (at least) to do what you would do in such circumstances. Can you imagine what would happen if you could replicate that level of prudence and critical thinking?
- Encourage participation: One way to maintain a sustainable, meaningful employee advocacy program is on incentives. Perks or swag can certainly keep people interested. Try weekly or monthly contests or giveaways. These types of activities keep your employees engaged, informed, interested and motivated too. So make your contests fun and compelling.
- Make it easy to share: Create a weekly email that includes all shareable content (news, blog articles, photos, videos, etc.) that employees can share. This will ensure your employees are sharing the news that is timely and accurate. Encourage employees to follow, like and share the company’s social media updates.
- Identify Ambition and Ability: Social media is still a bit of a frontier field; its exact boundaries are undefined and professional progression within the industry has yet to calcify into anything resembling the predictable paths of more traditional careers. Its connoisseurs are not necessarily degrees holders, because degrees are often obsolete before graduation, due to the fast-changing nature of the industry.
Often times, the top experts in social media are not the ones who went out of their way to pursue that career, but rather those who sort of just discovered a talent and stumbled into it. For all you know, your business might be housing a social media megastar in the making. All that’s needed is to identify ambition and encourage engagement.
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