Your employee induction process is often what makes or breaks an employee’s experience at a company. A great induction or onboarding experience helps your new employee to settle in, and avoid workplace issues in the future. Things you should include in your induction include:
- Create an induction checklist so you don’t miss anything while training your new employee. This also helps when scheduling in time for your new employee to meet with the people who will be training them. You should include things like office layout, introductions to new employees, performance standards, roles and responsibilities, office opening and closing times and role requirements around this, safety procedures, organisational chart etc.
- Make them feel welcome. Do something special to celebrate their arrival. A team morning tea or lunch is a great example! A welcome card, a desk ready and waiting with their IT all set up and stationery stocked, balloons at the desk.
- Have a job description and ensure they have access to everything they will need. This way the employee will know what it is that is expected from them and have no roadblocks in completing their duties. Ensure you include reporting lines, key tasks and role responsibilities. You can also include KPI here to.
- Encourage current staff to interact with the new employee. Let them know where the good places are to eat, ask them about their weekend and begin to build a coworker bond. This will help the new employee to feel more relaxed in the workplace and to feel comfortable asking any questions.
- Give them all of the policies and procedures they need to know from an HR perspective but also an operational one. What is your policy on booking leave (bonus points if you have it documented!) and explain the policy. Have documented processes for the tasks that they need to complete. It can be very overwhelming during an employees first few weeks to try and learn and take notes on everything that they need to do. Having these already documented allows the employee to check that they understand the instruction, make any additional notes and then move on. It becomes an incredible reference point for them.
- Schedule a follow-up. Make sure you sit with your new employee and find out how they are going. What is going well and if there are any roadblocks that they may have come across.
Don’t forget that inductions are not just for when new people begin with your business but also when someone moves between positions.
When was the last time you reviewed your onboarding process? What do you do to make your employees feel welcome?
