The Right Way to Welcome a New Employee

Everyone remembers their first day on the job: confused, overwhelmed, possibly hyperventilating over the sheer number of new faces you're expected to remember. Quite often, an employee's first day sets the stage for the kind of experience they're going to have within their place of employment. The same goes for any employee that joins your company.

As a business owner, you can't see what's ahead with every new hire or know in advance how well they're going to integrate into your system. The most you can do is ensure their first few days on the job go as smoothly as possible, without any additional, unnecessary stress. The first step in achieving this goal lies in forming a company structure that values all employees, whether they've been there a week or ten years. Think for a moment about how you treat your employees; do they see solid evidence that you value and support them, or is it mostly lip service? If your existing employees understand the importance you place on their work, they're more likely to pass that feeling of appreciation onto the new staff.

When it comes to implementing a procedure to make the integration process seamless, gather a group of trusted employees to thoroughly examine your current process and determine what you want to achieve. Or, more to the point, figure out what you don't want to accomplish, such as making the new hire even more confused than when they first walked in. I'm sure most of us have had such an experience-showing up on our first day to discover no one has the time or inclination to show us where anything is, where we're supposed to go or even who we're expected to report to. If you've had such an experience, it may actually be easier for you now to determine how not to approach the situation.

Obviously, you don't intend to scare off your new hires. You invest money in training them, and when they don't stick around that's money wasted. At the same time, it's easy to overlook gaping holes in your integration process that only serve to confuse any new employee-holes that keep you from making any meaningful connection with them and make them wonder why they ever decided to work for you.

So how do you close the holes? Consider doing what universities do for freshmen students: start the orientation process shortly before they're actually scheduled to work. You can even send them material covering your benefits package ahead of time for them to look over and give a small brochure covering key areas and people in the office. You can also make a connection through various means of communication: have your senior team meet with the new hires for lunch, meet them individually at the workplace, and assign an employee who's been with the company for a while to show them the ropes. Make sure the new hire understands that they're a welcome addition to the team, not a nuisance.

The first few days are when the employee is most impressionable, so you want to make sure the impression they have of your company is favorable. The choice is yours; you can either make the integration process as seamless and painless as possible, or you can risk the chance of scaring off potentially hard-working employees. In time you may discover your retention rate has skyrocketed, in which case you can congratulate yourself on a job well done.