Making a new employee feel welcome is often lost office tours, mission statements and paperwork. By making new employees feel genuinely welcome and appreciated, you can instil loyalty and be confident of a lower staff turnover. You’ll also find that happy, welcome employees will improve your bottom line, being more productive and passionate about their role within your business. There are simple tips workplaces of every size can follow to ensure new employees feel welcome.
Draw up a welcome strategy
Everyone who’ll be directly involved with a new employee needs to have a role in making them feel welcome, including management. By thinking about what things were like on your first day and how other staff could have made you feel more welcome, you can come up with a good plan for welcoming new people.
Once you have this plan, you’ll need to use it whenever someone new comes into the business. Written plans will help your employees remember the importance of first impressions, and reminds them that they have an important part to play in the process.
Welcoming information about current staff
Many new employees are nervous about fitting in, especially as they’ll be meeting a lot of people at once and may not remember names.
Having an information pack with photos and snippets of personal information that employees are comfortable sharing is a lot better than sterile organisation charts. With an information pack, the new employee can have a chance to remember the new names and faces, as well as feeling a lot more involved in the business.
Buddy or mentor systems
Assign another member of staff to spend time with your new employee. This could be showing them how things work, taking them for lunch and offering guidance wherever necessary. One person can be responsible for this, or you can have a number of staff on rotation.
In addition to the mentor or buddy, other employees still need to be encouraged to do things that will make the new person feel comfortable and welcome.
Take a genuine interest in new employees
If you can, try and figure out if your new employee is a visual, auditory or kinetic person. This way, you can interact with them on the level they’re most comfortable with. Auditory people would prefer a verbal compliment, visual people do well with notes, and kinetic workers appreciate a good handshake and eye contact.
If you can’t find this out, or you’re unsure, try all three to make them feel welcome. The more you get to know about them employee, the more you can make them feel welcome and appreciated.
Introduce new employees to your work culture as soon as possible
The best way to make someone feel like a valuable part of the team is to immerse them in your work culture. Asking them for their insight and giving them responsibilities is a very good way to show them that you think of them as part of the team. Make a point of getting them involved in all the fun and social workplace activities. Make a point of asking for their input in meetings and actively listen to what they have to say.