Employee orientation and integration programs

If you get your new hire orientation activities right, you will reap great rewards. The more time, effort, and resources you invest in orientation and onboarding, the more cohesive your organization will become.

A negative onboarding experience doubles the chance of new hires looking for new opportunities in the near future. And given the fact that new employee orientation is the beating heart of the onboarding process, following the very best practices will make a significant difference to your organization.

Here are the key benefits of having a solid new hire orientation process from both an employer and employee perspective:. At each stage of the journey, you should consider how your activities or actions will impact on these key areas or concepts of orientation.

To help guide your efforts in the right direction, here is a rundown of new employee best practices. From internal processes and cultural expectations to health and safety information, technical information, and beyond, you must take the time to include all essential information through the orientation process.

We will cover this in a little more detail with the new employee orientation checklist. Your orientation process is a chance to share your cultural values and put them into perspective.

Make sure you run through your cultural activities and information in detail while offering examples of how you achieve your values in a practical sense. You should use visuals for this part of the process, if possible.

Videos and image-centric handbooks often work well. Remember, the aim here is to make your new employee feel valued, so make sure you know everything you need to about them before orientation and tailor your efforts accordingly. For example, if your new hire has a hearing impairment, find out whether they will require visual aids or an interpreter before their orientation date.

The point here is, be as accommodating and personal as humanly possible—a failure to do so could result in inflated staff turnover rates. During your orientation, you should ensure, if possible, that senior members of staff are involved in the process. During the process, you should ask your new hire questions and allow them to share their views or opinions where appropriate. You should also ensure that your new hire orientation initiatives are engaging and interesting, which means using inspiring language, visuals, or even an interesting theme if you feel it will enhance the process.

In the frenzy to complete the paperwork and attend to all of the details of onboarding a new employee, many employers overlook the need to emphasize their overarching mission, core values and culture in the orientation process. Taking time to communicate these softer messages is essential to aligning new employees with the employer's business goals. Where feasible, direct contact with the employer's owners or founders can help to reinforce the organization's culture.

When direct contact is not feasible, a written welcome or introduction from the owner, founder or executive officer can be helpful. In some successful organizations, the cost of employee benefits can approach up to 70 percent of the employee's wages or salary.

While it is important to tell new hires all of the employer's rules or policies that may result in discipline or discharge, employers also need to "sell" all of the benefits that the employer provides employees. Informing employees about all of these benefits can help the employment relationship begin on a positive note.

Plenty of laws regulate the workplace, and diligent employers want to create a paper trail that their employees were informed about the employer's policies and commitment to compliance with such laws.

Some of the policies to be discussed in orientation include:. Employees also need to be informed about the procedures for reporting violations of these policies, such as how to report alleged violations of the no harassment policy and safety rules. In addition, employees should be told in writing that the employer's policies require that all employees comply with the laws applicable to the employer's business and their work-related conduct.

Introduction to other employees and to the employer's facilities. Practically speaking, employers should go to great lengths in the orientation process to introduce new employees to all of the employees and supervisors with whom the new employee may need to interact in the course of performing their jobs.

New employees need to know the role played by all of these other employees, how they relate to each other and how to connect with them. In addition to learning the people in the new workplace, new employees need to have a thorough education about the employer's facilities. New employees grab sticky notes, and write their name and a headline describing them as a professional as well as an interesting fact about themselves. After some executive talks to finish the first day, the new team is given backpacks and laptops that are already set-up with the communication tools the new employees need.

The Zapier team knows onboarding is a critical time for both new staff members and the company hiring them—an important process to get right!

Their team is fully distributed and have systems in place to ensure a new employee feels welcome, valued, and starts learning the company culture and the expectations you have for them. Then individual departments run their own playbooks. As outined in Brian Cooksey's blog post , Zapier puts in a lot of effort to make onboarding and shares their process for the engineering department. A typical first day at Zapier Engineering focuses on:. Once we assign a workflow, we know new hires will have access to the information they need when they need it, which makes for a smooth onboarding process without a lot of heavy lifting.

How Zapier's people team runs their process See how Zapier is leveraging Sapling as their global people operations platform to create consistency in the employee experience for a fully distributed team. Square was able to build a strong workplace culture and increase employee engagement by creating a personalized onboarding experience. The HR team also hit impressive milestones, growing from 60 to 1, in under four years.

Members of the executive team would also grab a cup of coffee and hold casual 1-on-1s with new team members at local coffee spots. For example, they start their employees later on the first day of work. On their first day of work, new hires are also met with shirts, books, and stickers to make them feel like a part of the team.

Still Moving Fast to Break Things. Facebook, with almost 13, employees , uses a six week boot camp where new hires learn their role and the company culture at the same time.

Instead of having the usual onboarding talks and presentations, the philosophy of the training program is to give the new team members the tools they need for practical work. Within 45 minutes on day one on the floor, new employees are underway on their first projects, thanks to the intensive preparation undergone before they start.

This shows that the company trusts in new hires and leaves them autonomy to create their own work early. Quora user, Joshua Chaisson provided an overview of their sharp onboarding recent Quora discussion. Bootcamp for engineers is an intensive program designed to immerse new hires into the companies code base, give people the chance to push code to over a billion users in their first week, get a comprehensive overview on the entire engineering organization and ultimately help them to select the best team for them to join long term.

At Google, now nearly , people, they've found that team-level employee onboarding is more effective than taking a centralized approach. Even though slightly different onboarding processes are happening within various teams, part of the Google approach is to use data and experiments to improve the process continually. Onboarding that helps put a name to the face. Eventbrite has been able to maintain its brand character and integrity even as it has scaled internationally because of their exceptional onboarding.

One of the expressed goals of their onboarding program is to connect new hires to everyone within their organization. At Eventbrite, the HR team puts up new hire profiles around their office so that everyone onsite can quickly learn the names and faces of new employees and make them feel welcome. Additionally, every quarter, the HR team also hosts a new-hire social for those who joined within the last three months so that they could make connections with other new team members.

Because of this, new hires quickly feel like a part of Eventbrite and invested in the company culture. Common Themes in These Onboarding Programs. Here are some tips to get started:. Do you want to scale your onboarding program, improve your new hire experience, or save time for your HR team and hiring managers? What would you like your onboarding workflow to look like, and how could the right technology enable that?