5 Onboarding Lessons from Fortune’s Best Companies to Work For!
Becoming an officially recognized great place to work is a dream come true for employers. It means your employees love you, and more and more people want to be part of your company’s growth. Recruiters don’t have to worry much about sourcing candidates: Your ideal candidate is just waiting for a chance to join the team. Your organizational culture becomes the talk of the town — for all the right reasons — and people are eager to learn more about your company.
Now, what does it take to reach this level? Is it a quirky onboarding program ? Is it fancy phones, free lunches, and foosball tables? Is it your employee training and happiness programs? In this article, we’ll discuss five lessons from Fortune‘s “Best Companies to Work For” that will help you make your company a dream company for your employees.
Lesson No. 1: Design an Immersive Onboarding Experience
In the initial days of onboarding, your new hires are brimming with energy, craving to learn more. Making your new hires feel at home and cultivating a sense of belonging is crucial, starting right from day one of their tenure.
As you welcome new hires to your company, the first thing to do is channel this energy by setting the context for their new job. Do it in a manner that highlights your company’s culture and values. Focus on those key traits that you would want all your workers to carry inherently. For Salesforce, it’s diversity and volunteerism. Find one hack that could be both your value proposition and the secret potion that fuels employee satisfaction. This way, you can sidestep the pitfalls of workplace malaise.
Provide an immersive experience, inspire new hires, and validate their decision to work for you. You can share a video where the CEO or founder talks about the journey of the company and the role each employee plays in its success. This helps the employee form a profound connection with the company.
Check out how onboarding software like Freshteam can help create a great onboarding experience even before day one.
Lesson No. 2: Make Technology Your Best Friend
If you could automate the repetitive portions of your onboarding process that require almost no human interaction, then why not? Show your new hires how technologically savvy your company is. Help them leverage technology to learn about the company and its employees, using tools like org. charts and messaging apps to learn who’s who.
New employees can follow the company’s seasoned top performers to learn their best practices. They can join conversations and engage with the content they like. They get visibility into what each department is doing and what their peers are working on.
Lesson No. 3: Go Paperless!
Instead of swamping new hires with tons of information on their first day, slowly drip key information at the right time via a personalized new-employee welcome-email campaign. Start the campaign seven days before the employee’s start date to help ease those first-day jitters. Get all the paperwork signed digitally, giving the new hire more time to socialize with their teammates on the first day. Use tools and apps to provide device and application access on the first day. This is important, particularly if your company operates remotely and your new hires are struggling to make connections with their distributed teammates.
Lesson No. 4: Get Your New Hires Involved in Creative Ways
Everyone processes and retains information differently. To better teach your new hires critical information, deliver messages through a variety of means. Gamifying the process is a great idea. Zappos does this exceptionally well by hosting a culture science fair, where new hires work in groups to brainstorm ideas and activities based around Zappos’ 10 core values. New hires then get to present their ideas to the entire company! Similarly, Cisco uses gamification to hone the social media skills of its marketing associates. Top companies like Hilton and Salesforce also use gamification to attract and retain talent.
Lesson No. 5: Invest Time and Resources Into New Hires’ Careers
Show genuine interest in your new hires’ careers. This will drive employee happiness and satisfaction, making your employee retention game strong. Have one-on-one meetings with each of your new hires to learn more about their personal goals, and then help them design maps for their career growth.
Scaling up your workforce is a herculean task, but playbooks from companies like Salesforce, Zappos, Hilton, and Cisco can make it easier for you. It is paramount that you do not lose the culture of your company as you scale up. Establishing the right context, using technology to your benefit, setting goals for your employees, and acknowledging their passions are just some of the proven ways that these companies win at both employee onboarding and retention.
Freshteam by Freshworks is all-in-one smart HR software that can help you with recruitment, onboarding, employee management, and time-off approvals. You can set up canned notifications and onboarding checklists, notify stakeholders, and do a lot more with Freshteam to provide a great candidate experience. Try Freshteam onboarding for free for 21 days.
This article by Freshteam is built on the original article that first appeared on the Freshteam blog.
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