Employee Onboarding 101
The Welcomary philosophy is all about making employee onboarding simple and predictable – it’s as much about directing your new hires down the right path as it is giving them the resources they need to decode and understand the knowledge needed to get to 100% effectiveness in their role, as comfortably and efficiently as they can.
The employee experience matters – and the way we break it down falls into three simple pillars.
Who
No one wants to work with a bunch of strangers. Get to know your team and how they fit into the broader picture.
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We’re all human, and that means we are social creatures! (But even if you’re an AI employee, you would benefit from learning about and connecting with your new co-workers).
It doesn’t matter if you are fully remote or have never met your teammates in person before - these are still the folks you interact with and rely on each and every workday.
So, as an employer, ask yourself this: do I have anything to hide when it comes to sharing the names and contact information of my employees with the rest of the team? How about their titles? Who reports to them or who they report to?
If the answer is “yes,” there may be other cultural issues at play. But if the answer is “no,” take a look on the right for things that you can do.
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1. Directory: A classic. A searchable record of everyone at the company, their role, where they’re based, how to contact them and more. Much easier than it sounds to set up.
2. Organizational Structure: A visual representation of who reports to whom. More than just a pecking order, this provides a new employee with a map for how the company is structured and helps them understand how decisions are made, and processes enacted. Much, MUCH easier than it sounds to set up.
3. Teams & Groups: Your vertical teams (people who report to the same manager) are crucial to organize in some way for new folks to meet and hear from the people they’ll be working most closely with. But just as important are the horizontal teams - cross-functional groups as well as extracurricular organizations that transcend the day-to-day business order.
4. Who are you?: Decades of social media have us accustomed to the profile page. Some of that profile consists of crucial facts about someone, and some of it is that someone in their own words (like a short bio). Especially as distributed teams become the norm, it might be months before you meet a co-worker in person, if you ever do. Why not get a headstart on learning about them?
5. The Buddy System: A lot of new folks may not have desk mates to turn to with questions about the company or job anymore, but the buddy system remains just as powerful in making a hire feel welcome, supported and informed.
As much as technology has facilitated long-distance work, we’re still all people at the bottom of it all. Don’t lose sight of this simple fact, and it will guide the right kind of efforts toward a welcoming culture and environment to all of your hires.
What
Swimming in a sea of alphabet soup is exhausting and doesn’t help anyone. Centralize your knowledge so that everyone has the same reference.
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Some of the best employees get hired away from a completely different industry. Why? They’re just a great fit! They have the right attitude, a very translatable skill set or just gelled very well with their interviewers.
These are some of the most important folks to provide a great first impression to. Not only are they evaluating your company, they’re seeing if your industry on the whole is a good place to take their career. And if it’s a no to number one but a yes to number two, well… your competitors will be making them some rather attractive offers.
What do these new hires need? Knowledge. As a leader or hiring manager, you’ve been speaking this language - these terms, those concepts, that acronym - for years, most likely. It’s like a second language to you… to the point that you may not even remember what it was like to not know these things.
When we slog through these learning curves, it’s usually just a given that it’s pain which everyone goes through… and needs to go through.
NOT TRUE!
It takes a little while to gather up your industry and company knowledge - that’s for sure. It takes a little bit more in turn to clean up that knowledge and make sure it’s understandable and useful to a new teammate.
But that little while is nothing compared to how much faster and more confidently your hire will onboard into their new role.
Of course, this isn’t just for full-time employees who come from a different industry. Folks straight out of school? They need it. Contractors and consultants? Certainly.
Even internal transfers and industry veterans… they may be all set on the industry-speak, but how about that coded language or shorthand that you and your team have painstakingly developed over the years? They’re still going to need that support before they can truly talk the talk and walk the walk.
To the right are steps you can take to build or improve on a solid knowledge base .
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Gather: Ask team leads to delegate or put together themselves a list of terms they use in their day-to-day work. Try to have them prepare these lists in a consistent format, like .CSV, .XLSX or a Google Sheet.
Clean and reconcile: This collection of lists you now have? It’s great, but likely full of duplicates, typos and maybe even some outdated content. Either ask managers or take on the task yourself, depending on the size of your company. Remember, this is ideally all going to live in one place.
Give it a home: The key to making this knowledge as valuable as possible to your organization is to put it in one centralized location. Breaking down some of the silo walls that our teams often live inside will enable shared accountability… if something is off or wrong, everyone is incentivized to track down that knowledge’s owner, and ask them to apply their expertise to fix it. Welcomary has the easiest tool out there for adding, uploading, submitting, reviewing, managing and accessing company knowledge.
Maintain: The toughest, but most important, part! The world lives and breathes and changes over time, and your knowledge base needs to evolve accordingly to keep up with that. For some items, this may not really matter… PTO is probably going to mean “Paid Time Off” for a long time to come. But for the other stuff… once again, focus on delegation. Subject matter experts should be the ones to whom specific pieces of knowledge get attributed, and it makes it easy to periodically request from them that they take a look and tweak or update as necessary. It’s work, but it’s helpful work that impacts the entire team - and that tends to make folks happier to do it.
How
It’s more than just forms! Pave the best way to a fully-onboarded employee with a thoughtful roadmap of to-dos.
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Task managers… they’re everywhere! CRM’s, HR platforms, consumer apps, modern appliances… the list is vast. And it’s one of the few important parts of employee onboarding that most companies do in some way, shape or form.
There are plenty of options for how you assign tasks to your new hires. The real question is, what are you assigning them?
Tax forms, compliance modules and the like - critical stuff, no doubt, but the only “onboarding” you’re doing for them with these items is making sure that you can pay them (and that you won’t get sued).
With the right content and the right sequencing, tasks can be used to connect your new hire to the most important people to meet. They can expose them to resources and immersion that will give them a true sense of the job, even if they’re not quite ready to do it on their own yet. They can bring that fresh employee closer to the culture that makes you so unique, and have them feeling a sense of inclusion far sooner than they might otherwise.
So, however, you manage your new hire’s tasks, make sure they’re making good, informative and productive use of their time. After all, you’re already paying them!
To the right are best practices on what to cover in employee onboarding to-do’s.
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Task with more than just paperwork.
Involve the team, not just HR.
