It’s not enough to find professionals whose skills and experience fit your job requirements. It’s essential to help them join your team as smoothly as possible. It’s crucial to minimize their stress level during their first days in a new office. You should develop an employee onboarding plan and stick to it meticulously each time you hire a new specialist. Below, we’ll talk about the most common mistakes that managers make when welcoming new staff members to their organizations.
Lack of communication
From the onset, you new hires should know about:
- Their duties, KPIs and deadlines.
- Responsibilities of other team members.
- General schedule of your office.
- Agenda of upcoming meetings.
- Communication channels that they can use to ask questions, report about their work and stay in touch with supervisors.
Introduce a schedule for regular communication with your new employee. For instance, you can have a brief chat with them every morning or a face-to-face meeting once per week. This will help you avoid the situation when the newcomer will be chasing you in a panic because they urgently need a consultation.
Time pressure
New team members need time to:
- Get used to the tools and systems that your staff needs for work.
- Get to know their colleagues.
- Read the documents that describe your corporate culture and the general information about your business.
- Explore the rules of your program of benefits and perks.
- Attend human resources-led meetings.
- Become psychologically accustomed to a new ambiance.
It would be great if you have chats where your employees can discuss casual topics. It’s a highly efficient tool for strengthening the team spirit and allowing newcomers to adapt to your company’s workflows.
Poor mentorship
A mentor is a person who has worked for your company for a while, has perfect communication skills and is good at sharing knowledge with others. Each of your new team members should get a personal mentor as soon as you hire them. This person will teach the newcomer not only about their immediate responsibilities but also about the traditions, behavior patterns and not-so-evident rules of your organization.
Low-value tasks
On the one hand, it would be risky to entrust difficult and important tasks to a specialist who has just joined your business. On the other hand, if you ask them to do something boring and meaningless, they will lose motivation. They may get an illusion that you don’t appreciate them.
An ideal task for a new hire is something that enables them to showcase their skills and at the same time improve them. Before they join a project, it’s important to explain its essence, history and goals to them. You should let the new specialist know what other team members do in terms of this project and which tools they use.
Being an empathetic employer, ask your recently hired staffers to provide feedback to you regularly, such as once per week. Let them list the things that they like, dislike and fail to understand or interpret. In exchange, praise them for their achievements and share constructive criticism about the aspects that need to be improved.
