Onboarding



Onboarding

Onboarding refers acclimating a new hire to your organization and immersing them as a new employee. Onboarding is more than just hiring or training; it’s an entire process. A good onboarding system will help you create a bond between the employee and the employer. A bad onboarding system can overload an employee with unnecessary information or leave someone untrained to do their job.

Setting The Table – Before Arrival

One of the key parts of onboarding is setting the table – making sure you are ready for a new employee when that person arrives. When you show up to a restaurant with a reservation, you expect that a table will be ready and waiting for you, and a server will be there to take your order.

Alert your staff when you have a new hire. Alerting the staff can be as simple as sending out an e-mail or making an announcement at an all-staff meeting. Let people know the new hire’s name, what job the new hire will be performing, where the new hire will work, and what day the new hire will arrive. A new hire who is greeted with, “Oh, you must be Tiffany!” will feel more welcomed than a new hire who is treated with a bunch of people saying, “Who?”

Prepare the work space ahead of time. A new hire will feel immediately welcome if their workspace is set up for them. All employees should have a work e-mail and a work phone number, even if it’s shared, set up for them when they arrive. Employees with an office should have a desk and supplies available, with computer login and essential information already set up. Other things such as a mailbox or a name badge show the new hire that you thought about them ahead of time.

Schedule the arrival date. While you want to do your best to accommodate the schedule of the new hire, make sure that the first day is a good one. It can be intimidating to start on a day when everyone is too busy to be friendly because a major grant application is due by midnight, or lonely to start in an office when everyone is at an offsite meeting. Make sure key personnel, such as Human Resources and the Supervisor, are available, and one senior person should be there to make the person feel welcome.

Have a clear work plan for onboarding. Have a clear schedule for a new employee when that person arrives; it will help your organization to look professional. Make sure that the schedule you have set includes plenty of time for the new hire to absorb information, relax, and have time to his or herself.

Seating the New Employee – THE APPETIZER

The first day that your new hire works will set a tone for the relationship between the new hire and the organization.

Meet and greet. Have an early meet and greet – a breakfast is usually nice – to honor a new hire. Keep it casual. Even if all you can afford in your budget is coffee and donuts, it’s worth it to splurge on a meet and greet. Invite the whole staff if it’s appropriate and feasible; invite a department or a selection of people if it’s not. Try and keep the focus of the meet and greet on introducing the new employee to people he or she will work with. Make it more personal than professional when it comes to introductions.

WARNING – Don’t get into too specific details about what everyone does. Try and keep it basic. i.e. “I work in human resources and accounting” is more digestible than “I create our employee evaluations and conduct surveys on human capital, and I also handle A/R, cash receipts, cash logs.”

WARNING – Watch your mouth – not for profanity, but for jargon. Everyone in your organization might know what SAMHSA is, but your new employee might not.

Policies and Benefits. Policies and benefits should be a key factor in day one, especially if any of your benefits can be retroactively applied to the first of the month. Make sure that insurance forms and legal documents such as the I-9 are filled out in a timely fashion.

Logistics. All new hires should receive an office tour on the first day. Make sure that your employees know how to use your copier and fax machine and navigate your phone system to make transfers or put people on hold.

Buy the new hire lunch. You should be able to splurge on an outside lunch, either with a department, with a supervisor, or with another employee. It’s another nice gesture, a chance to get away from the ‘information overload’ at the office, and an opportunity for the new hire to open up.

Keep all work-related training general. No matter what level the new employee will be working at or what department, the work-related conversations should be very general – the kind of conversations you might have with a prospective donor. Limit your description of programs to a handful of sentences, unless the employee wants to know more. Avoid overloading the new hire with a long and contentious history of any of your initiatives – they will find that out later. Focus on macro ideas such as a mission, history, or vision.

RECOMMENDATION – Fundraisers and development professionals are often the best people to do any training on the first day. They are great at creating soundbytes out of projects and speaking passionately about the mission and vision statement.

Always let the employee ask questions. If you are conducting a formal training session with multiple employees or just having one person train another, make sure the new hire can always ask questions.

Let your new hire soak it in. Give a new hire time at the end of the day to fill out important paperwork, reflect on what you’ve told them, watch another person in action, or head out early for the day. Training from 9:00 – 5:00 will exhaust someone.

THE MAIN COURSE – The Next Step

If you’ve done a good job on the first day, your employees know their way around the office, can match some faces with some names, and know the basics about the organization – its structure, its history, its vision, its goals, its mission, a brief list of some of the programs you do.

This phase can take one or more days depending on the nature of the training.

Allow some time off in the morning. Think of your morning routine – you like to come in, turn on your computer, check your voice-mails, check your e-mail. A new hire will want to do the same; transition into the working day. Try not to schedule the training to start immediately when the new hire arrives.

Talk about mental health. Some people who come to work with for you will be consumers or family members; they will be advocates who have held other jobs before. Others might be people who have worked in general health or public health; some are just looking for a job. It’s important that your staff understands basic concepts related to mental health. This training can be formal or informal, a Q&A or an elaborate powerpoint. You may want to talk about specific conditions or you may just talk about general attitudes. Your goal isn’t to make someone a clinical psychologist, but you do want every member of your organization to be able to have a conversation about mental health.

RECOMMENDATION – Prepare a glossary of commonly used terms with easy to understand definitions.

Major projects and tasks. Identify the major projects or tasks that your new hire will be working on and give a sampling of these.

FOR TASKS - Train the new hire on the most basic tasks needed to complete their goals. A fundraiser might need to learn how to operate the database; an accountant might need training on the accounting system; a receptionist might need training on the phone. Depending on the number of tasks and the intensity of the training, this may take 3-4 days. Remember to keep time off in the morning and at night.

FOR PROJECTS – For workers who will spend more time with projects than specific tasks, introduce them to existing programs. This is a good time to get into the history, the funding stream, the implementation, and challenges and questions. Keep the focus on projects and programs that the new hire will be primarily responsible for, and not just any project and program in the organization.

NOTICE – You will not be able to train everyone for every imaginable situation. Keep the focus on the basics and identify a mentor within a group who is accessible for help.

Speed date the other departments. Your new hire will probably work with people across all departments, and that person should have a general idea of the work of other departments. Keep it brief and space it out. The intricacies of policy are not relevant – yet – to a marketing professional; information technology isn’t incredibly exciting to a case manager. Frame these conversations in the terms of (a) things that need to be immediately known and (b) how the new hire would need the other department. For example, “We’ve been working really hard on setting up a grassroots network in the advocacy department. If one of your clients as a case manager asks you how to get involved, you can send him to our department.”

The money. (Primarily for supervisors and managers). One of the most important people that a new supervisor and manager will need to meet is the Finance Director or CFO. Anyone who manages a budget will need to understand how the finances work, how much money they have, and how to run it.

Free afternoons. Whenever possible, give a new hire at least an hour at the end of the day to fully analyze all of the information that he or she learned. Remember what it’s like to have meetings all day long and never get a chance to learn. A good rule is 60/40 – never let scheduled training take up more than 60 percent of an employee’s time after the first day.

DESSERT – STEP THREE

Once your new hire has been trained on the general organization, logistics, policies, benefits, mental health, and their specific projects and tasks, they are all set to do the basic functions of their job. However, onboarding is more than just training: it’s acclimating someone wholly to the workforce. Sometimes the temptation is to get the training done immediately, but that’s not always a good idea.

Back off a little bit. The tendency when bringing a new employee on is frequently to get them ready and set as soon as possible.

Have a designated representative check in with the employee. About one week after hire, give the new hire time to ask questions that they don’t understand or raise issues with a designated representative. If you’re big enough to have HR, great.

SNACKING – PART FOUR

The snacking part of onboarding will last for the next few months. As the new hire becomes more accustomed to the organization, it’s good for that person to travel around. Do you have a residential facility at another site? Let a new hire visit it for half a day to understand the work you do. Have a new hire sit in on a technical assistance call, or go out with volunteers to feed the homeless. Have the new hire attend a meeting with a fundraiser, if possible, to understand how to pitch the goods.

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