In this guest blog post, Designli CEO/Co-Founder and friend of the Founder Institute Keith Shields outlines what startups can do to attract the qualified job candidates and how to keep existing employees happy with their jobs.
Imagine your first day at a new office. You show up early, eager, dressed for success, and check-in at the front desk to receive your temporary key card to access your floor. The concierge takes you to your desk. There’s nothing to indicate the workstation is yours, and the attendant has left you sitting in your cubicle. Ten minutes pass, and nobody stops by.
Then, someone who appears to be your manager, arrives in a huff and lets you know that HR would like to see you. You climb the stairs to the HR office and dedicate the next four hours to signing paperwork and listening to somebody drone on about policies, logistics, and other process-based concerns.
You return to your desk and still no tools at your workstation. Your manager stops by to assign you a task, and then leaves. You have a lot of questions, but you don’t even know the names of the people on your team. You follow-up with the manager and he tells you to find Sasha. You don’t know who Sasha is, so you keep asking the manager questions about your project. He seems to be getting angry.
You leave, stressed that you didn’t do your first assignment correctly, and then return the next day only to find out your team had cocktails last night with a few other new hires, and forgot to tell you. This feeling of alienation continues for the next few weeks. There’s no training for your projects, there’s no comradery, and there’s no clear goals for personal growth in mind. You get bored, you get stressed, and you get left out.
So what do you do? Well, if you have the financial means, then you leave for another company with four stars on Glassdoor that supposedly values their employees with an exciting first few days. Or, if you stay, you become unproductive, unhappy, and, eventually, unemployed after being fired.
This was my experience at my first job out of college. I haven’t left yet, begrudgingly, nor have I been fired. But I am unhappy, as productive as I can be working longer hours than most, and about to leave.
Employee onboarding may take a little more time out of your company’s goings-on, but it’s more than worth it to ensure happy, productive employees who feel like a valuable part of the company culture with plenty to contribute and a unique perspective that people will listen to.
Onboarding involves, but is not limited to:
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Getting started before the first day
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Emphasizing team-building and establishing relationships on the first day, and getting to know the team and one’s place in it
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Teaching about the company culture, the brand, and the uniqueness of the employee experience
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Over-communicating and providing necessary resources
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Getting feedback and following-up to ensure that onboarding lasts until the employee truly feels comfortable
Onboarding gives employers the opportunity to display their brand, outline expectations, provide the tools for employees to do the job, and get an employee acclimated and feeling like they’re truly a part of the team. It even saves you money in the long run. Studies have shown that ineffective onboarding can directly lead to huge turnover rates and dissatisfied employees. You only get one first impression, after all.
We’ve compiled a checklist of sorts to ensure that your employee onboarding is effective, impactful, sustainable, and long-lasting. The best process, we believe, is to implement these into a streamlined, standardized set of best practices to make sure that the onboarding process is smooth and easy to do each time.
Start out Strong
The best way to learn about employees is in the interviewing process. Learn about their individual goals and craft their onboarding experience around their unique personality and set of intentions, goals, and desires. Create a general checklist (with the following items on this list), and create space on it for individual experiences. Work on crafting interview questions that will successfully vet employees to make sure they’ll bring something special to the company culture, but also emphasize the company culture during the interview.
It’s important, furthermore, to know exactly what your company is and validate it from the start(-up).
Streamlining and Automating the Onboarding Experience
Emphasize your onboarding experience on all marketing materials. If you can build up a strong reputation for good onboarding, you can recruit more and more people eager to join your company. Set up an email automation system that includes all resources and tools they may need, a company directory with everyone’s names, duties and responsibilities, and biographies for reference, all social events, all informal policies (like “casual Friday” or Thursday cocktails), and descriptions of the various teams and their roles. Send this out to all new hires several times during their first few weeks. If you have a website or an app, make sure you keep it updated.
Before the First Day
Send out all necessary forms and preliminary reading materials to new hires to reduce the amount of time they’ll need to spend on the first day doing paperwork. Set up the employees workstation. You could even take some time to rethink your entire process for dealing with employees using tips from new company trends.
Helping Employees Overcome First-Day Jitters
Reduce and minimize the amount of time spent on paperwork and on reviewing policies and logistics. Instead, focus on offering office tours, introducing them to every member of the team, and give them access to all the tools and resources they’ll need. Assign some required reading (first you’ll need to write it) that lists all the tools they have access to, and who they can ask questions. Get lunch with them the first day! Follow-up with the aforementioned automated emails containing overviews of what you covered and additional materials – believe us, they’ll probably forget most of what they’re told the first day and will need gentle reminders about the benefits and policies of your company.
Mentorship
Another thing you can do the first day is to assign a specific mentor that new employees can shadow during their first week, and who can be a one-stop resource for all their questions. Make sure your mentor is eager and welcoming, and doesn’t get bothered by a lot of questions–your new hires will have a lot! Create an environment of open dialogues so that the employee feels comfortable opening up and telling more about themselves than they could during the interviewing process.
Induct into your Company’s Culture
Explain the company’s brand, mission, vision, and value system to your new employees. Have an open dialogue with them about where they can fit in and how they can contribute or emphasize certain strengths to help the company holistically. Most importantly, get to know them! Learn about their personal strengths (and weaknesses!) and how exactly they can fit into the company. Are they best working alone? Are they an extrovert and love team projects? Do they work better in the evening? Do they want over-communication, and ask a lot of questions? You can better form your company around your employees’ needs and wants from the get-go, ensuring that you build a solid company culture from the ground up.
Company Events
Make sure they’re aware of all company events. Set up a rule of getting cocktails (or just dinners if they don’t drink) with the entire team and new hires during their first week. A little bit of a buzz can go a long way in building lasting relationships and bringing them into the team. Make sure they’re aware of any fun events, like volunteering or corporate softball teams, that are upcoming and that they can enjoy. Make time for team-building activities and exercises.
Personalization and Goal-Setting
Explain the long-term goals of the company, and work with employees to learn what they’d like to learn throughout their tenure at your company. Set up a goal-setting meeting during the first week to learn about (and encourage them to be open about) their weaknesses and areas of potential growth they’d appreciate cultivating. Establish standard training sessions that new hires can go to learn more about the company and about their personal strengths (using StrengthsFinder or other professional development tools to help them learn about themselves).
The Follow-Up
Plan check-in meetings and weekly one-on-one meetings. Work in monthly reviews to check-in and see how they’re doing, fitting in, and what you can do to make them feel more at home. Getting to know them and their feelings early on will contribute to the feeling that they are valuable to the company and to you.
Also, don’t work your employees to the bone. Respect the maxim that “enough is enough,” and don’t expect them to do more work and stay longer hours and get less sleep if they’re paid the same amount and given the same title if they do less (or what’s required in their contract). Be generous with their time – they’ll want to work harder because of it.
