Surprising Topics to Include in Employee Orientations

Shawnee Love   •  
April 4, 2011

Bad customer service and bad answers are not the fault of your new employee.  It is your responsibility as a leader/manager to ensure your employees can do a great job. As we all know, doing a great job is more than duties and tasks, it involves communication, attitudes, behaviours, actions, interpersonal relationships, skills, and so on.   If you have read the article by Sean Silverthorne on “The 4 Things You Must Teach New Hires– Now” you get an overview of what I consider to be the 4 most important things to cover in an orientation for new hires. Business Orientation, Expectations Alignment, Political Connection, and Cultural Adaptation enable work to be done and they get new hires comfortable with the organization and assimilated quickly.  In plain language, here’s my take on each of these 4 topics and why they are important to a new hire:

Business  Orientation–  Includes  such critical pieces as your vision, mission and values which help your employees understand what you are trying to accomplish, where you are going, and how you will get there.  Values also help employees make decisions in the absence of leaders who do it for them, so  if you don’t want to micromanage, the quickest way to get your new employees up and running is to do a great job of explaining the vision, mission and values.  Orientation to the business also includes such key details as who your customers are (both internal and external), who your suppliers are, and perhaps even more vital is who your competitors are.  I rank competitor information first, because your employees become your eyes and ears when outside of work and you want them sensitized so they can be your spies and ambassadors.  Business orientation also explains how work really gets done.  An added benefit of ensuring you teach vision, mission, values, customers, suppliers, competitors, etc. to new hires, is that in preparing your teaching content, you will pay special attention to those aspects  yourself  and  thereby get tuned in to problems, barriers and inefficiencies which you can then resolve (which makes for better business in itself).

Expectations Alignment– If you do a good job of helping your new employees understand  where you are going and how you will get there, it is also important to explain how your employees will know when they have arrived. Define success in their role, team, department and company and then outline SMART goals and milestones so they can track their own progress.  It is extremely unlikely that your employees will be able to succeed if you don’t tell them what is expected of them.

Political Connection– One of the things that makes long term employees more effective than newbies is that long term employees know who to go to when they need information or want something done.  The quicker your new hires learn this information, the quicker they can be effective too.  I learned long ago to always be nice to the janitor because they hold all the keys.  Who do you need to be nice to in your company and why?  Tell your new hires.

Cultural Adaptation– I worked at a company once where no one showed up for meetings  on time.  Of course, as a new employee, I was the first to a meeting and when no one was there 10 minutes later, I left assuming it was a joke on the new guy.  I was called to task that afternoon for why I skipped such an important meeting!  That gaff could have been avoided if my manager had remembered to tell me that meetings ran on PST + 15 mins.  The kiss of death for newbies is assuming words mean the same and standard business activities are done the same as their last place.  We all know the story of “Assume”  and  how  it  makes an @SS out of you and me.  That story is particularly applicable with new hires.  Take the time to define jargon (give new hires a company jargon glossary) and ensure that you explain the idiosyncrasies of typical activities in your company such as when you start, finish, go for breaks and lunch, attend and participate in meetings, hand in projects, etc.

With all of this being said, you still have to teach your employees the basic things like what their job is, how to do it, health & safety, etc., but I bet you figured that part out already.