Physical Environment
Your new employee most likely starts working from home. Which means he lacks an element of ‘fresh start at a new place'… Is there any chance that you would supply them with a company-style items? What if a courier would knock their door on the first day and ask to sign for a parcel? A pen, a coffe mug, slippers or a T-shirt — whatever feels right for your company.
Virtual Environment
Help your newby realise the new universe of technical solutions you are using to do the job.
Today it is cruicial that by the first working hour of a new employee all their accounts are set up. Otherwise, there is nothing to do. I hope that is obvious. Update your procedures and security policies to make that happen.
E-mail and calendar are seldom enough these days. Numerous online collaboration and project management tools, task trackers, CRMs, intranets and whatever you have. They are fantastic and help us communicate, however, may seem as a mess for a newbie. Prepare a clear visualisation of what systems you use for which cases and give them time to navigate through all of them.
Personal bonding
A welcome message in the general newsfeed is a must. That’s how the company gets to know about a new member. But how does he or she find about new colleagues?
Visualise, visualise, visualise — organisational charts, profile photos (real ones, no avatars) in internal systems, flowcharts…
So many tools as we’ve already noticed — they help to chat, organise, control… And which one of them help us feel connected, inspired and motivated? An inbox full of unread messages? Or never stopping chat-like communication on a 134th WhatsApp group? We use TeamCheck as a virtual office to check-in in the beginning of the day, move through breaks and concentrated hours of work and say bye to a team by closing the date with emotional feedback and some afterthoughts. For a new memeber of your team it’s a perfect way to ‘spy' around and check who is doing what, how open they are about their ups and downs during the day… It becomes even better when a new arrival tries it out by listing his first tasks together with the manager for the first couple of days and… gets thumbs up from the new peers.
Maria Novoselok HR