New employee orientation: A critical part of management

Learning to bring new workers into your organization can have long-term benefits for all parties involved.

When it comes to bringing new employees onto a team, an abrupt or under-managed approach may end up leaving recent hires with plenty of questions and few answers. These fresh prospects are here to help your company succeed, but they can get off to a poor start synchronizing their goals with yours if they don’t take on the initiative with strong onboarding and orientation classes.
To make this important type of training go smoothly, the solution may be more training! If you take the time to learn the best practices associated with orientation and onboarding, you could improve interactions between new employees and the company in general. If you’re hoping to turn fresh recruits into long-term contributors, orientation is an important area to focus on. Starting out on the right foot, with enough information and a strong feeling of connection, could set a team member up for success.
Recognize the stages of employees’ careers
Relationships between companies and their workers evolve over time. Customer Think recently delved into this concept. The source noted that onboarding and orientation are different, and each is important as employers guide their workers through the stages of time with the company. Onboarding is more technical, with the worker being added to the internal systems and set up as a part of the team. Orientation is where the training and familiarization with company culture goes on.
In this latter step, companies ensure the new workers have strong relationships with departmental peers and the managers. When you’re working with new employees, your orientation pitch to them should make it clear where they fit into their organizational structure. Every role exists for a reason, and it’s incumbent on you to let new hires know what they’re expected to accomplish.
Personalize and learn
Good employee orientation programs may go well beyond simple education. Harvard Business School’s Carmen Nobel specified that when company representatives just talk about the business, they may gloss over the fact that each employee has unique needs and interests – ones that could be harnessed to help the organization. When leaders encourage individuality during the orientation process, the results can be impressive.
Nobel noted that during a study of onboarding tactics, researchers directly compared worker-focused and company-centric approaches to orientation. In the former, an employer tried an approach that combined direct encouragement of new worker individuality with team-building exercises and communication between the various new hires. The latter method relied on learning about the organization’s company culture and reputation, with exercises focused on those concepts. Seven months later, turnover was 47.2 percent higher in the company-centric group. People who were made to feel their individual strengths were important were more likely to stay.
Re-orient “boomerang” employees
In an era when changing professions is relatively easy, it’s not uncommon for employees to return to a company. Business Journals contributor Michael Henckel recently offered a reminder that even when a worker has history with an employer, it’s a good idea to send him or her back through onboarding. Policies change all the time, and adding someone back to the workforce without a primer on the relevant information could lead to issues. This is especially true when someone has spent a considerable amount of time outside of the company ecosystem.
The perfect welcome
Becoming adept at welcoming new workers to your company can pay off over time as incoming generations of employees get off to a good start and go on to productive careers. Training on the important elements of onboarding and orientation is one of the many workplace education topics MasteryTCN​ offers and is designed to turn you into a more effective leader or human resources professional.
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