You did it! You have identified the need for a new role in your business, created the job description, followed the hiring process and found the ideal candidate to take on this role. Your work is finished.
Where is it? Any new hiring requires personal attention to ensure that they settle into their new role, ideally through a formal process of integration, and new employees in a completely new role require even more consideration.
Ideally, your company should have in place an integration system that can be applied to all roles, with additional integration hardware and role-specific procedures, including your own. new role.
Think of integration as if you were giving birthday cakes to your employees. Each cake is virtually identical, just as the parts of the integration process will be the same from one employee to the other. Yet, the icing on each cake is personalized with the name of each employee, just as the other parts of the integration process will be customized according to the particularities of each employee's role.
Customizing the cake for employees entering new roles takes a little more thought. Here's how to do it.
Onboarding: Cooking the Cake for All Employees
Start with the cake itself: your business should have an integration strategy for all new employees. This does not only make employees more comfortable when they start their work, but makes them more likely to stay in your business. One study found that new employees who were suitably integrated were nearly 70% more likely to be with the organization three years later than those who were not integrated.
A full integration process also makes new employees 50% more productive than they are without an integration process, and 77% of new employees reach their first performance milestones are formally integrated.
Despite all these benefits, nearly a quarter of companies do not have an official integration program. Do not let your business be one of them. Create an integration process that:
- Begins as soon as employees accept the offer of employment. We were all overwhelmed on the first day of work. Sending an employee manual and notes of information before an employee starts in your company gives them time to absorb information according to their own schedule and to minimize the information overload the first day.
- He feels welcomed by the whole team. Introduce the new employee to the entire team, not just HR and their department. If you are a small team, you may be able to facilitate in-person presentations with each employee; you can also present them in a company newsletter or on a company intranet.
- Communicate the values and purpose of your business. How does their role fit into the five-year strategic plan? What are the values of the organization, its purpose and priorities? Each new employee must understand the answers to these questions.
- Informs them about the company culture. This is not just about five-year plans and mission statements. New employees should also be informed of the essential elements of the company's culture. If employees regularly take beer after work on Friday or everyone speaks at the office's social committee, be sure to talk to your new employees.
- makes it clear where they can go to get answers to their questions. Whatever the complexity of your integration process, new employees are likely to have questions. Should they turn to a contact in the human resources department? A friend in their team? Their manager? A business mentor?
With this process of integration in place, your cake is almost done. All you have to do is customize it for your new rental.
Customization for new positions
If you've ever used icing to write on a cake, you know it requires a firm and precise hand. Similarly, there is a need to think about the appropriate customization of the integration of new employees, and especially new employees for new positions.
Start by going back to why your company created this new position. New roles are usually created to solve problems, such as:
- Fill a lack of skills in your organization. If your company offers new services or accepts new types of projects, you may need to hire people with skills that your current staff do not have.
- Reduce constant overwork among current employees. If your current employees are constantly overworked, it makes sense to add more manpower to lighten their workload.
- Take your business in a new strategic direction. Sometimes things change within a company, forcing new staff to take on new positions to correct their mistakes.
Your reason for creating a new position should influence the process of integration. Joining a company to take some of the workload of your colleagues is a very different context than joining in to clean up a huge public relations mess.
New employees need to understand how their role fits in with the overall situation, and new employees for a new position need to understand why their role has been created. Make sure this is part of their integration process and provide them with appropriate materials and resources to help them solve the problem for which they were recruited.
While human resources should direct the basic elements of the integration of a new employee, the manager of the new employee must be closely involved in the process of integration. As a human resource manager, be sure to describe to hiring managers when they need to take over the integration process, and which parts of the process you will be managing. Doing this will keep all parties on track and your new employee will not miss vital information or hear repeated information.
Do not stop there. As the first to be integrated into their new position, the new employee will have valuable feedback to improve the process of integration for the next time you hire for their position.
Six months to one year after the start of your new employee, evaluate your integration. Go to their direct manager to find out how the new recruitment was prepared (or not) by the process of integrating their role. And ask the new recruit:
- Is the work you are doing today part of the role that was explained to you during the recruitment and integration process?
- Were materials provided for orientation clear and easy to understand?
- What important information was missing from your integration process?
The answers to these questions will help you refine your recipe for an even better cake – and a more productive employee – next time.