Get to Know Your Employee

The relationship a new employee has with their manager and team is crucial to establishing a sense of belonging in the organization. With that sense of belonging, trust is built, and this enables employees to freely seek information positioning them to succeed in the organization.

• "Getting to Know You" Questionnaire: IT can play a role in developing an onboarding process that helps new employees feel more welcomed, connected, and secure through a set of questions that are all about the new hires themselves. Learning such information will help establish social connections at work and build trust and confidence as the new hires settle in.
• Employee Lunch

Conduct Assessments

• Communications Style Assessment: This assessment helps identify whether a user is an energizer, systemizer, associator, or innovator. It then provides strategies for interacting with those individuals.

Take Surveys

• Pulse Surveys Introduction: A pulse survey is a brief and regular set of questions sent to employees. As the term "pulse" suggests, it is carried out to continuously gain employees' views on subjects such as job-related roles, communication and relationships, and the overall work environment.

Introduce the Team

Coordinated introduction and orientation for the individual within the team accelerates the integration of the individual and the ability to execute. Maintaining transparency and using analysis tools early in the orientation process can build trust.

• Share team communication profiles/assessment grid (e.g., Deloitte Business chemistry matrix, StrengthsFinder)
• "Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats (SWOT) Analysis"
• "How Do You Incorporate SWOT Analysis into Your Team's Regular Meetings and Activities?"

Encourage Engagement

• 1:1 manager/employee daily check-ins
• Buddy Program
  • "Creating a Buddy System in the Workplace"
• Peer Mentorship
  • An organizational peer can enhance the onboarding process. They can encourage a new hire to feel like part of the team. In a world where many information technology positions are remote, managers need to be more intentional in helping staff members feel included. When most of the team worked on-site, it was easier for new team members to form organic relationships with those they sat next to or interacted with around the office. A peer mentorship program can give a staff member a person they can engage casually with, ask questions about office etiquette, and get answers to questions they might not want to ask their supervisor.
  • The Power of Peer Mentoring in the Workplace (now and post COVID-19), from Academy to Innovate HR, describes benefits and guidelines to consider when starting a peer mentoring program, and it includes differences between types of mentoring and how to start a sustainable program.

Support Content/Collaboration

• Glossary (including definitions and commonly used acronyms/words): System documentation can greatly impact the ability for the team to accomplish a scoped goal. A number of different systems are available for such organization. One method is to use a tree-based system with an individual system at the root of each document. The root document provides support information links to other documents or tools. This helps the individual be fully integrated into the team early and also allows for building trust through transparency. Google Sheets and Microsoft Box, for example, are great options for this type of structure.
• Commonly used online resources/bookmarks (including tools):
  • Visio or Lucid Charts: These can be used for documenting how items or data are connected. Lucid charts are especially appropriate for cross collaboration between users in the cloud.
  • Monday.com: This tool can be used for project management, but it can also be used to simplify how documentation is mapped out and how things are ordered.
  • Root/Leaf documentation method: Simply organizing documentation in this method and setting that expectation can help a team work together and know where information is. This can be especially useful for processes and troubleshooting that isn't practiced on a regular basis or in an environment where turnover in staff is a concern.
    • Quick Reference Sheet Template

Once the individual has been oriented to the team, the individual will need to be introduced to the organization to ensure their value is realized more broadly. Organizational charts can expedite an individual's integration into a team and larger organization. Some of these tools are built into existing messaging platforms.

Orienting individuals to the available organizational benefits is important not just personally but can also be a great asset to the team and organization. Travel benefits (parking/transportation subsidies) can increase the likelihood of coming to campus for in-person events for hybrid employees. It can also lessen the stress and costs for coming to campus, and having more people come to the office can help build better organizational culture.

Consider following the approaches listed below when building programs for orienting new employees:

• Helping employees understand how their work aligns with organizational goals and mission(presentation):
  • There are a number of ways to accomplish this goal. Key ways include:
    • Ensuring leadership knowledge is passed a long on a regular cadence
    • Management reinforcing these goals through individual development and annual performance reviews
    • Aligning organizational goals with culture
• Continuous improvement by learning from other team's successful onboarding experiences (best practice playbook):
  • Cross-functional collaboration can help in understanding how other teams organize and function in a hybrid environment. There are a few ways to expose and leverage existing processes in an organization:
    • Transparency in documentation and processes
    • Deliberate cross-team collaboration, inviting other team members or managers to team meetings on a consistent basis
    • Mentorship programs in which leadership can mentor those on other teams formally and informally
• Training managers on working with remote/hybrid teams:
  • Continuous improvement and training are critical for managers who have historically only managed on-site teams and are taking on new responsibilities. This can be especially true for managers who are not as familiar with collaboration tools and processes. Education should focus on results-driven management versus a clock-in/clock-out focus for hybrid employees. Whether the training is online or in another format, the core parts of the program should include the following:
    • Showing how to set up a hybrid work model
    • Maximizing the advantages of remote and in-office work
    • Creating a fair and inclusive hybrid work environment
    • Determining how to analyze, plan, manage, and evaluate a hybrid work model
    • Defining the right success factors for hybrid work
    • Showcasing examples of how companies have transitioned back to the office post-COVID
• New-hire announcements/introductions to the organization:
  • It's important to introduce a new hire to the team and the larger organization. Many organizations utilize standard email formats for new hires, but now more than ever other opportunities are available to introduce candidates. These include messaging platforms such as WebEx, Zoom, and MS Teams. Some organizations have channels dedicated to onboarding, while others have an all-staff channel where introductions are appropriate. Structuring and curating these experiences are paramount for the individual, the team, and especially at the organizational level. It's important to make sure to include these key pieces of information in any announcement.
    • Full name
    • Start date
    • Job role
    • Department
    • Direct supervisor (if not yourself)
    • Key roles and responsibilities
    • Academic background, including school and other community affiliations that may be appropriate
    • Professional background
    • Picture (encourage new hire to upload and share)

Sources

• "The 6 C's Of Employee Onboarding — A Framework For HR And People Operations"
• "New Hire Integration: Start Here When Onboarding a New Employee"
• "What is a 'Pulse Survey'?"
• "Top 25 Questions to Ask in Your New Hire Questionnaire"
• "21 New Employee Survey Questions You'll Be Glad You Asked"
• "How to Create a Documentation Structure that Works for the Whole Team"