Successfully Integrate New Members into Your Team

Connecting during Onboarding

Precisely because work is part of the human experience and new employment is filled with emotion, new team members must build connections with those that can support them in their role. This helps them understand the expectations associated with their work and enculturates them into the organization. ?In addition, building friendships is part of what makes work enjoyable. ?It’s hard to leave a workplace where our friends are - and easy to walk away from an environment in which we feel lonely and isolated.

Building strong social connections during onboarding can result in higher commitment, better retention, and decreased time to productivity. ?The relationship between effective socialization of new hires and their work engagement is strong, and it’s vital for leaders to be mindful of this when planning and carrying out onboarding.

Plan for new team members to make connections with those who are important to their job performance - coworkers on their team, others who have access to resources or expertise they will need, and internal customers who will assess their work products. ?Your new team member must build ties and credibility, and experience early success that is so vital to their morale. ?The clock is also ticking for them to make an impression on stakeholders that proves they can positively contribute to the team.

The use of mentors can be a valuable part of the connection process. ?Mentors provide a model for behavior and answer routine questions that arise. ?Mentors can help explain issues in a different way to aid in understanding, and they offer a valuable ear to help make the transition into the new role more comfortable. ?Sometimes new staff are reluctant to tell you they still aren’t understanding an issue or process, which might be because of how you’ve communicated it. ?Mentoring is also a valuable opportunity for more experienced staff to build their coaching skills, which is a natural prerequisite for a future leadership role.

New hires need to connect with others who may help them indirectly in their work, or may share common interests and experiences. ?Internal interest-based committees can be one place to start, but often this is done through informal introductions and the opportunity for people to engage in casual conversations. ?Get to know some basics about your new team members and be perceptive enough to gauge who they may find social conversations enjoyable with. ?No one wants to talk work all day every day. ?Having those with whom we share interests and socialize makes good days even better and tough days more tolerable.

Don’t just assume that connections will organically grow - germinate them through planned interactions for your new hire. ?You’ll reap the benefits of an engaged and productive new team member. ?Onboarding is a very interactive process. ?People can’t be onboarded sitting in front of a computer screen taking eLearning courses. ?New hires need real living, breathing guides who can empathize with, and respond to, their emotions during the crucial first few weeks of the process. ?They also need someone who will monitor their progress beyond that to make sure their first-year experience is positive and productive.

·????????Do you make connecting with others a conscious part of the onboarding process for your people?

·????????Do you connect people with others who can support them in their roles at work, or that they may find it enjoyable to socialize with?

·????????Do you make use of mentoring as a tool during the onboarding process?

Enculturation of New Staff

How do you describe your company and team cultures to new hires and applicants? ?Culture isn’t an easy thing to capture and describe, but the clearer it’s defined for the people, the better they can regulate their own - and others’ - behavior to meet its expectations. ?Companies that have a sharply defined and communicated culture, one that’s actively maintained through daily activity and not just dusted off at annual review time, focus their resources and effort more effectively to thrive in their markets. ?They know who they are, what they stand for, what they are good at, and what priorities exist. ?Because they have clear identity and purpose, they can also better match culture to applicant preferences to ensure there’s fundamental alignment between them.

Onboarding is a crucial time to delve deeper into culture to help new staff better understand and align with its expectations. ?This part of onboarding is often overlooked or delegated to HR, where an idealized cultural overview is sometimes communicated rather than today’s reality. ?Don’t just assume that new hires will magically “get it” with culture, picking up on the nuances of values and norms themselves without guidance.

The irony of cultural norms is that they are often deductive and identified by what they are not, rather than what they are. ?Violations of norms are often the most visible demonstration of their existence in the first place. ?This is a painful way to experience culture. ?Leaders can help their new people avoid this pain by explaining culture within the team and organization and the norms that support them. ?Set the tone early and define your expectations. ?Culture is indeed brilliantly described as the worst performance or behavior that you’ll accept. ?Outline what describes acceptable performance and behavior in your eyes, and you’ll help the team and your new hire greatly.

So what aspects of culture should be described? ?Productivity, priorities, pace, and process are important. ?New hires need to know what work products, in terms of volume and quality, they’re expected to provide. ?Certain roles require more exacting work than others, where the tolerance for mistakes may be very low. ?New hires need to know that so they can focus their attention on producing the standard expected. ?Likewise, while completing one “perfect” work product may be admirable, producing only one is unacceptable when five products of a certain quality were expected. ?This is where pace comes in—an understanding of the speed at which work activity should occur.

New people also need to understand what the priorities of their role are. ?This is a basic aspect of performance management, as all team members should know what their most important activities are at any given time. ?Lastly, they need to know process. ?While the teaching of process itself isn’t a cultural matter, understanding whether the processes exist or not, where to find them, and why they exist help signal what the cultural priorities are. ?Organizations create and implement process around those operations they want to control outcomes for; so just as what gets measured gets done, what is structured gets monitored. ?This signals what’s important to the organization.

Explaining norms around communication is important too. ?Is the communication culture formal or informal? ?Is it open and transparent, or is information shared more on a “need-to-know” basis? ?Are there preferences for formal memos and presentations or informal emails/discussions? Are group meetings structured and require preparation and information sent out in advance, or do they act as informal forums for idea-sharing and brainstorming? ?Which stakeholders require more formal communication, and which are informal in their style? ?Do team members need to use certain structures or “chains of command” for communication, conflict, and problem resolution?

It takes time to recover from serious cultural missteps, which can badly damage credibility. This is why new hires need your guidance to effectively navigate through culture as they establish themselves in the role. ?This will ultimately impact their productivity and engagement on the job. It requires a proactive approach from you, as you bear the primary responsibility for enculturation of your new people. ?It isn’t an HR function and can’t be accomplished in a two-hour orientation presentation on day one. ?It’s going to take your time and engagement personally, as you are the one who builds and maintains culture on your team.

·????????Do you describe the working culture and supporting norms within the organization and your team to your new hires?

·????????Do you discuss norms around important areas like productivity, pace, process, priorities, and communication to help new hires integrate well into the culture?

·????????Within the first two weeks of work do you have a clear and direct conversation with your new hires about your expectations for performance and behavior?

Initial Career Development and Support

This is the aspect of onboarding we think about most commonly when new staff join. This support includes early training provided to new hires to familiarize them with systems, structures, and processes, as well as provide skill-based training specific to their jobs. ?As a leader, you need to actively engage in this process, but you can do so without being the primary deliverer of training. You are ultimately responsible for effective early career development and support, but there are always other resources available to you for initial training.

Using mentoring, job shadowing, meetings with stakeholders, eLearning, formal classroom/webinar training, and other resources allows you to insert yourself into the process of early career development and support where you can have the most impact. ?It also shares the burden of day-to-day training and development in the early weeks of your new hire’s career.

Match the format of training and development properly to the subject and you’ll also find that your new hire learns more effectively. Simple procedures and technical functions might be appropriately taught via eLearning, but interpersonal skills - such as leadership, sales, and customer service - and those requiring simulation and practice are better taught interactively. Adults learn best where they can both take in and apply knowledge quickly, and a lecture-based environment alone isn’t very useful in that respect. ?Build in practice opportunities throughout the training process and you’ll reinforce staff motivation when they see themselves successfully performing new skills.

To provide appropriate initial support, get to know your new hire early. ?This includes, during the first week, a conversation that helps define expectations around learning and growth. ?These may include questions like: What attracted you to the company and the role? ?What do you hope most to learn? ?What strengths do you believe you have? ?What areas of professional growth would you like to work on? ?What concerns you most about settling into your new role? ?What is the best way I can support your learning and growth, particularly during the first ninety days on the job? Do you have any long-term goals for career growth that we’ve not already discussed?

Asking good questions and listening are important leadership traits that are particularly useful here. ?Your new team member wants to know that you’re interested in their thoughts and feelings right from the very start and that you’ll support their early career development and performance. Helping people quickly learn their roles and develop their skills fuels the motivation that personal growth builds and sustains.

New hires often complain about feeling overwhelmed by onboarding. ?It’s natural for emotions to run higher during a time of significant change. ?This is often compounded when onboarding programs pack masses of learning into a tight window of time to quickly force productivity out of new people. ?In practice, the opposite often occurs, as information overload causes additional stress for learners. ?Reduced opportunities to retain information and practice new skills also occur. ?This approach is short-sighted, and pacing training—allowing for simulation, practice, and time to clarify information—is unlikely to increase overall time-to-productivity. ?It’s also liable to result in higher sustained performance levels. ?Provide information in a logical, planned way and give what is necessary to do the job and place it in proper perspective within the organization. ?Don’t swamp new team members with information that’s irrelevant to their roles, or peripheral at best.

·????????Do you use the variety of resources—such as eLearning, classroom training, mentors, job shadowing, and stakeholder meetings—to deliver early training/support for your new hire?

·????????Do you get to know your new hire as quickly as you can, including their own view on their strengths, areas for growth, and aspirations for learning and their careers?

·????????Do you pace the delivery of training or flood your new hires with as much information as possible to try to quickly make them productive in the role?

*The above contains excerpts from the book “The Leadership Core: Competencies for Successfully Leading Others”

www.willschirmerofficial.com

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