Onboarding Ideas, Thoughts, and Tips 

This week we are delighted to be welcoming Emma Yackso as our newest member of the Consulting Team. I'll let Emma introduce herself in her own blog, but suffice it to say we are glad she is here.  As we prepped for her arrival we did an update of our onboarding process and tweaked a few things. I firmly believe an employee's first week sets the stage for what they can expect about your culture. Here are things to keep in mind: 

Preparation: The week before, I sent Emma a picture of her calendar for her first two weeks and chatted first day arrival, dress code thoughts, and gave her a run-down of the first day. This way new employees have some information to manage any emotions they might have about first day jitters. I scheduled the email to arrive about 5 days before their first day. 

Building Connections: The first day, if I can manage it, I always take new employees out to lunch - the goal is social and not work with a focus on learning tidbits about them as humans. Leaders can learn a lot about a person in a non-working lunch and this can be used to personalize their experience. If I can't make the first day work, it is certainly in the first week. 

Relationships: In the first week, everyone on our team books a social meet-and-greet—again, the focus is on building a foundation of a relationship. This works with our 9-person team. For larger organizations, I suggest a good sample of that person's world in their department and adjacent internal work teams. The goal is to start with a foundation so there is a place to return to. 

Tools and Access: We have a 24-card onboarding tool built into our Project Management System that gives links, pictures, tasks, and deadlines. We assume it will take a new employee about 2 weeks to work through it. This way, they can be busy when we aren't training, shadowing, or meeting. It's an easy way to make sure someone knows you value their time. You can see below we are letting new employees know who their point of contact is, how long we think the task will take, and what priority we are placing on finishing the task. The board also has preparing for the employee tasks for the two weeks before their arrival. 

Mentorship: Week two starts content mentoring - every member of the team is assigned an area to focus on and provide guidance and explanation - this helps spread out the work of onboarding and creates a deeper connection - so the lead of our Equity Prime Team will introduce Emma to our journey and where we will be headed next and our Marketing Lead will explain our philosophy and approach to blogging and sharing information and how we approach things. This is in keeping with our values of collaborative work and spreads onboarding across the company. 

Overall, my goal for the first two weeks is to alleviate nerves, build relationships, and fill up their time. I'm sure for our next hire we will come up with additional things to add.