Photo credit
Thanks to the great resignation, there are a lot of exit interviews happening these days, but there are also lot of new hire onboarding sessions happening too. When it comes to creating a great work experience for new employees, those first interactions on the job have a powerful and lasting impact. Making sure your newbies feel welcomed, appreciated and informed is essential to an effective entry. Overlooking these crucial steps in our era of record-low unemployment can be costly: According to SHRM, the cost of replacing an employee is between 100 and 300% of the employee’s salary.
Yet, according to Gallup, only 12% of employees feel their company does a good job with onboarding new team members. That creates a great opportunity to have a major impact when you deliberately build inspiring onboarding programs that include all members of the new team, not just their manager and HR.
When you think about traditional onboarding, you think about formal programs designed and delivered by the HR team. But with the hybrid world of work, those “welcome to our family” programs have been scaled back and are sometimes little more than informal conversations and interactions.
94% of HR professionals who responded to a Principles survey that was referenced in HBR said new hires who joined during the pandemic have only interacted with company employees virtually. Not surprisingly, 31% indicated that new hires were struggling to connect with colleagues.
We know from Gallup that one of the greatest predictors of employee engagement is having a best friend at work. Of course, you don’t need to befriend every one of your team’s new hires, but creating a warm, open and connective experience with your new coworkers from your first interaction will go a long way to building a solid relationship and creating and positive experience. If you’re working from home, it can be tempting to relegate onboarding to the HR department, who will surely inundate newbies with an avalanche of rules and processes and forms.
But everyone on the team should play a role in helping new members have a positive, smooth entry. You can be a valuable resource by not only providing the lay of the land but also—even more valuably for them (and for you—by establishing a strong connection and building trust). To do that, make fewer statements and ask more questions. In fact, in a fascinating call-center study conducted by behavioral scientist Francesca Gino and her colleagues, the most effective onboarding programs are focused on authentic individual identity, rather than on the organizational identity. This shift led to greater customer satisfaction and more than 33% greater retention within six months on the job.
This is your opportunity to demonstrate your personal brand attribute of curious and show your new colleague that you’re genuinely interested in them as a person, not just in their ability to complete tasks. What’s more, when you help them uncover their personal brand and find ways to integrate it into what they do, you set them on a path of self-discovery, giving them permission to integrate their best talents into what they do and how they do it. This is essential now because the virtual or hybrid world of work comes with a major humanity deficit.
To show your new colleague that you care about them, consider weaving some of these questions into your interactions, or using them to shape an individualized “welcome aboard” session:
- What’s your superpower?
- What’s your favorite way to work—alone or groups? With music or in silence?
- What’s your biggest pet peeve?
- What’s your productive time of day?
- How can I help you be your best here?
- What are you the go-to person for?
- What can I do to make your integration into our team simple and fun?
- How can I be of service to you?
- What do you want to know about the team/company that no one has shared with you?
- What’s your greatest passion outside of work?
- What did you like best about your last job?
Of course, onboarding conversations are not job interviews. Don’t make it feel like an interrogation or a gameshow where they need to answer as many questions as they can in a specific amount of time. After a response from your new colleague, ask the next logical question to continue the discussion and go deeper so you can form a more solid and meaningful connection.
Effective onboarding is everyone’s job, especially in today’s environment. Asking personal branding questions is a great way to establish a solid relationship with your team’s newest addition.
William Arruda is a keynote speaker, author, co-founder of CareerBlast.TV and creator of the LinkedIn Profile Type Indicator (LPTI) which measures your LinkedIn profile likability and credibility.
