Three Tips for Creating an Awesome Corporate Induction

Don’t de-motivate, isolate or overwhelm an enthusiastic, hard-working and ambitious employee as soon as they walk through the door. Create an induction that reflects what your organisation is all about and makes your new starters tell their family and friends how great their new job is.

Your new employee’s induction can make or break their experience at your organisation (6Q Blog, 2017). Research shows that your employee induction can affect engagement, staff turnover and absenteeism levels, and the employer brand (Mind Tools, 2017). So why not make sure your induction is a good one?!

Have a think about your first day at a new job in the past. How did you feel? Did you feel welcome and equipped with everything you needed to get started? What made the experience good or bad for you? Thinking back on your own experiences can be useful in designing your own organisation’s induction (and making sure it is a good one!).

I have spent majority of my working career being involved in employee induction’s and I have taken note of the good, the bad and the ugly. The main thing I have noticed is the importance of making your new employees feel welcome. When you put yourself in the shoes of a new employee you can imagine, or know from your own experience, that there are feelings of uncertainty, excitement and the unknown as you enter a new workplace.

Whilst we may think that our new employees require a mass of information on their first day this can become overwhelming and sometimes a coffee with their new team can be a great starting point. From my perspective the most important part of an induction is the employee feeling welcome and that their first day has been organised adequately. I have seen inductions way too often where an employee’s new supervisor doesn’t show up to meet them after their corporate induction and the negative impact of this can be long-lasting (and quite embarrassing for the organisation’s image).

I have put together the top three tips for an effective induction. The first one, which we believe is very important, is making them feel welcome!

1. Make them feel welcome

When your new employee starts, an easy trap to fall into is getting them up-to-speed with work processes rather than encouraging them to feel welcome. Here are a few things you can do to make your employee feel welcome:

a. Walk them around the office and introduce them to their new team-mates. This is a great way for them to begin to create connections across the organisation. 

b. Take your new employee out for a team lunch. This is a great way to celebrate them becoming a part of the team and provides a casual environment for them to get to know their new team-mates.

A great way to incorporate this into an online corporate induction is to provide your inductee with quests that require them to do things outside of the online environment. See the screenshot below for an example of this.



2. Organisational values

Values provide your new employee with insight into how you do things at your organisation and what is expected. It is important to be honest with them about the current state of what it is actually like working at your organisation and what they can expect.

Imagine you attend a corporate induction that is focused around how collaborative the organisation is and its focus on “one team” rather than individuals or silos. You become excited to collaborate with others and have an expectation that your new team is helpful and supports each other when required. When the induction is over and you actually start to experience the workplace as it is, you notice that no one talks to each other, everyone is competitive with each other and you would not describe the organisation as living out the value of a one-team approach. This can create disappointment and provides your new staff with false expectations.

a. To figure out your organisational values think about what your staff spend their time on and what they speak about (JD, 2011).

b. Represent your organisational values in an engaging way. You can do this by using staff testimonials, video/audio messages from leaders or by having the supervisor talk to the new-starter about the values in action aligned to their role statement.



3. Create an induction checklist

Have a think about all of the things that would be useful for your new starter to know in their first 2 weeks. Try not to think too broadly to begin with. On their first day the first questions they have are not likely to be something like “who are the stakeholders that I will be meeting with in a month’s time”. Yes, this is an important question but your employee is likely to want to know where their desk is, where they put their lunch and how to find the toilet.

This can be created via a document or module that can cover things like:

- Emergency exits
- Where the toilets are
- Who is in their team
- Their role description
- Who they will be working with directly



This may seem like an obvious thing to provide your new starter but this is not always the case in all organisations. In a previous job we had a very bright trainee join our team. After a couple of weeks we asked for his honest feedback on how he felt about his induction. We were lucky enough to have someone who was completely honest and comfortable with providing us with feedback on exactly how he felt (golden!). He felt like he was missing the information on the ‘everyday’ sort of things. Yes, he attended an induction but the information was overwhelming and not relevant to his situation. This was a huge insight for us and allowed us to realise the impact of providing your inductee with these ‘simple yet important’ details from the very beginning. It provides them with the necessary information and confidence to grow and become comfortable in the organisation. After that feedback, we improved the induction using the the tips provided in this blog and it was better received by other new employees who felt they were set up for success as the induction made them feel comfortable in their new job.

This is another great point to cover. Ask for feedback from your inductees! It is difficult to understand what the experience is like unless you ask the people who are actually going through it. We suggest conducting interviews with people who are within their probation to get the truest reflection. There are limitless possibilities for how you can structure and design your induction and for such an important moment in your employee life-cycle it’s worth getting it right! You want your employees to enter your organisation excited and passionate about your company and you don’t want to lose this from a bad induction.

We would love to hear how you run your induction and what has worked and not worked for you in the past. The induction process is so crucial to giving your new starters the best head-start possible and we are continually interested in the best ways of achieving this. We hope you enjoyed this blog and look forward to sharing our induction inspirations into the future. 

A little bit about the author... 

"I am Hannah and I am passionate about how we can create effective and fun learning experiences. I believe that if you create enjoyment and social connection through learning, learning outcomes can sky rocket! The world is changing and becoming more and more digital by the day. We need to harness this and see what's possible!".

                                                           References

JD (2011). Organisational Values. Actions are Louder Than Words. Retrieved from: http://sourcesofinsight.com/organizational-values/#comments

Mind Tools (2017). Successful Inductions. Retrieved from: https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_99.htm

6Q Blog (2017). 10 Ways to Improve your Employee Induction Process. Retrieved from: https://inside.6q.io/10-ways-to-improve-your-employee-induction-process/