Imagine you’re standing in the rope line, waiting for a while but still excited about the prospects of getting in to a club so exclusive that few of your friends and classmates have ever been able to get in. Then the moment arrives. The bouncer points his finger at you. “Come with me,” he says, plucking you out of the line, escorting you past a bunch of other people and into the club.
The music is thumping. A few heads turn to look at you. One or two even say “hello”. Most ignore you. Should you go to the bar and order a drink? Hit the dance floor? Find a table? Decisions, decisions.
At the bar you try your smoothest move to get the bar tender’s attention, but he ignores you. The patrons around you laugh. “You’re not doing it right,” says another club goer, then walks away.
Maybe the dance floor will be a better place to start.
You quickly realize that the type of dancing – while it seems to be working for the folks on the dance floor – is like no dance you’ve ever seen. You give it a whirl, but your moves turn out more like Elaine’s spazz dance from Seinfeld. Being out of sync with everyone else means you’re stepping on toes and knocking people’s drinks out of their hands all night.
It’s not fun. But you come back the next night. And every night for months.
Eventually you start to get the hang of it, though it would have been nice if someone had taught you the secret to ordering drinks on that first night. It would have been much less embarrassing and much more fun for everyone if someone had practiced a few of this club’s proprietary dance steps with you from the beginning.
This scenario plays out every day in companies across the country and around the world. Your organization is a bit like an exclusive club. You carefully craft your recruitment and hiring process. You spend countless hours interviewing and meeting to decide which candidate to pull out of the “rope line” and invite into your club.
And then what?
The big questions that too many organizations don’t answer adequately are:
- How do we effectively orient new employees to the organization during the first days and weeks?
- How do we effectively integrate new employees into their roles and the organization’s culture over their first weeks and months?
Michelle Baker of Phase(Two)Learning helps HR professionals and hiring managers answer these questions with a new ebook entitled: Onboarding Tools for Hiring Managers: Tips, Tools & Rules to Set Your New Employees Up for Success. If you’re a hiring manager or responsible for the onboarding of new staff, I strongly recommend taking a look at this short book for two reasons:
- It helps answer the above questions in a short, succinct and easy-to-digest format, and
- It provides space for you to reflect on key points and to identify where your orientation and onboarding processes may have holes.
Onboarding Tools for Hiring Managers: Tips, Tools & Rules to Set Your New Employees Up for Success is part book, part workbook and (for the time being) completely free. So there’s nothing to lose.
If you want to squeeze every last bit of value out of your employees, then you need to begin on Day 1 with high quality, engaging and meaningful orientation and onboarding processes.
Have you found an orientation or onboarding strategy that’s particularly meaningful? I’d love to hear about it in the comments section below.
Know someone responsible for orientation or onboarding? Pass this link along!
