New Employee Onboarding Process: Planning For Day 1 & Potential Missteps

Making Your New Employee Onboarding Process Engaging & Enjoyable

To get started, let’s talk about employee onboarding best practices with the essentials, and the must-do components in your new hire training. Then, we’ll review the big game-changers for ramping up your new employees to make training fun — even if everyone is online. Why should it be a goal to make new hire onboarding fun? Well, why shouldn’t it be?!

Your employees will remember their first day/week for their entire career. You want each and every new employee training experience to make it feel like they’re part of the team, as this will help with both retention and future recruitment.

eBook Release

How To Make Training Awesome: Your New Employee Onboarding Checklist

Learn insider tips to banish the boredom and boost new hire engagement!

How To Make A Fun (And Informative) First Impression

The main parts we’ll outline for the new hire onboarding process (then how to make it enjoyable) include:

• Considering potential missteps for new employee training
• Checking the box for must-haves
• Planning for Day 1 with your new hire’s manager

Now, let’s talk about the things you have to check the box for with your new hire training.

Onboarding Process Steps And Missteps

Imagine being a new hire with all the excitement building up to your first day. Even if you’re joining a team as a remote employee, you’re still pumped about this new job.

But then it’s time to start, and your laptop didn’t arrive, you don’t know if your payroll has been set up, your healthcare benefits didn’t kick in, your Zoom link didn’t work, and you can’t get in touch with your manager, or (the absolute worst-case scenario for HR) all of the above.

While you probably know all of this, it’s the simple things like setting set up payroll, filling out the health benefits and insurance, getting a swag pack with your new company’s t-shirt, starting up your new laptop, and receiving your parking (remember when we all still commuted to an office?) that give your new hire the reassurance that they’ll be provided for by your company.

Checking the box for all these things with a new hire onboarding before Day 1 helps to get an employee ingrained in your company’s culture before their official start date. In Chapter 2 we provide a phased approach for how to create a New Employee Onboarding Checklist with all of these things for you and your team to consider.

Planning With Your New Employee’s Manager

Working in-tandem with your new team member’s direct supervisor is of the utmost importance to make sure you both understand everything that needs to happen for a successful new hire onboarding. What would happen if the manager is off all week on PTO and can’t meet with your new employee? Way to let the air out of the balloon. This new employee would lose all the excitement from being treated like no one cares about them starting.

That’s not a good feeling, and something the entire organization should care about. Not just HR, not just the management team, but every single employee should care about creating a great onboarding experience for their new hires.

As you’re considering what activities can happen in that first day or week or new employee training, consider the following opportunities such as when to do a meet and greet (even virtually) with their team. Who should your new hire meet with and why?

Also, when will their education start so they can learn more about your company’s product or service offering? A goal of new hire training should really be learning about what they will be working on to set them up for success.

Both of these opportunities can sometimes be undervalued when it comes to onboarding a new employee to an organization. Making sure they understand why they’re here, what your product or service does, and how your organization has scaled are all essentials for new hire training.

Managers may prioritize job-specific training, since they approach new hire orientation from a certain point-of-view. And this is where you can really make new hire orientation shine. When meeting with a manager to discuss new hire onboarding, ask them to think about the mission of the whole company and a clear way to communicate this mission and vision to a new employee so they understand more about why they’re here and the role they have to play.

Planning For Day 1 Of New Employee Training

The goal is to keep that excitement going throughout the entire time an employee is part of your company. You only get one chance to make a great first impression.

This new hire onboarding experience has to be memorable enough to share it with others and stay committed to your company. You don’t want their first day to feel like a failure where they didn’t accomplish anything.

At Curricula, we use storytelling as the foundational approach to creating eLearning content with our animated story-based LMS platform which you can use to tell your own employee training stories.

You can’t just give a new hire a giant article, PowerPoint, or binder to read about the company. That’s not engaging and simply not enough to make them feel like they’re joining a mission.

You have one chance to make a great first impression, so make it count. When you’re buying a house and it’s dirty or dark or dusty, that’s a bad first impression, and you’re probably walking away. Everything in your new hire training sets the tone for both the new hire and the existing team.

Breaking The Ice

First introductions are always a little awkward, and the last thing you want to do is have a new employee feel like they’re being judged. As a newbie, acceptance and rejection means everything, so cultivate an onboarding program full of acceptance and comfort.

As a leader, it’s your responsibility to be intentional and involved with new employee training. New employees will remember if they are thrown into meetings unprepared; treat them as the humans they are, with all their wants and needs, as that is a big part of feeling accepted.

Learning the mission, vision, core values, and what your product/service actually does are all part of integrating your new employee into your company culture.

Go beyond the words to create a feeling for your new employees that they’re joining something bigger than themselves during new hire training.

Setting expectations, your job here is to motivate your new employees to get them pumped up for the work that’s ahead of them.

Going through the onboarding experience, there are achievements along the way and we hope you feel like you’re achieving something too simply by reading this eBook.

Conclusion

We wrote the eBook How To Make Training Awesome: Your New Employee Onboarding Checklist, so you can jump around to the parts of this book to find the information you need to be successful with your new employee training. Each chapter ends with key takeaways, and you can also join the webinar to discuss how to incorporate storytelling into your employee training.