Culture, Retention, And The Importance Of A Great Induction

An Induction Process To Retain Your New Hires
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Summary: A great induction is critical in order to ensure your new starters not only understand the culture they are entering but feel like an integral part of it.

How To Ensure A Positive Onboarding Experience For Your New Hires

Having recently expanded the Breakline team, I've learned that a proper employee induction and company culture is very important. People place a greater value on things they contribute to, so you need to maximize this truth to evoke a sense of pride and ownership in your new recruit. You need to treat the induction as if you welcomed someone into your home, as this will be your best opportunity to ensure they truly feel part of your business. So many companies fail to make the most of this opportunity, leading to disjointed experiences that can sap early motivation and seed the wrong kind of behaviors. Induction is a golden opportunity to make a great and lasting first impression.

Let’s consider the welcome letter you send them. This is usually the first touchpoint a new joiner has as part of your business. What kind of letter do you currently send? How personal is it? How would you feel if you received it? Would it inspire you? Does it represent your company’s personality and culture? Now, consider what you want the welcome letter to achieve. Do you want it to motivate, to offer assurance they’ve made the right decision accepting your offer, to prepare them for their first day? Why not offer real insight into the business and provide some friendly tips that relate to their role or their team?

So many businesses feel a stronger pull to the conventional here and end up issuing vanilla, impersonal letters that do the bare minimum, leaving new joiners to resort to trial and error methods in order to fit in. What a wasted opportunity to make a positive impact and set your new recruit up for success from day one. Each positive impact you make during the induction process builds up and gets stored within your new hire. It makes them feel genuinely valued, which in turn leads to motivation. When you’re wowed by something, you tend to share that experience with others.

You tell your friends and loved ones how your expectations were exceeded and how you were unexpectedly delighted at work! This is a rare phenomenon in today’s working environment and will reinforce accountability, advocacy, and loyalty. Why wouldn’t you want to consciously strengthen those feelings? In order to maximize the power of your induction, you should also consider integrating the following 5 steps into your process.

1. Make Introductions

You need to let your new recruit know who everyone is around them and where they fit in the bigger picture of the business. This will help them understand the importance of their role in the grand scheme of things and help with accountability.

2. Tell Your Story

Telling the history of your company will help any new recruit commit the company mission, vision, and other important key themes to memory. Stories are the most powerful way of ensuring understanding. If you take any religion as an example, it’s the stories within that are remembered and retold. Stories are how ideas and values have been passed on to each new generation for centuries.

3. Explain Your Rules

Your values act as the framework for all the decision-making in your business, which in turn will allow for greater, more immediate autonomy and empowerment for any new joiner. To ensure your values are fully understood have other team members share stories of how they have used them to overcome challenges or help customers. Then ask your new joiner to commit to your values.

4. Show Faith

Enable your new member to experience live scenarios as soon as possible. The work of Edgar Dale, particularly his cone of experience, is a great reference for the way we learn, but ultimately it shows the best way of learning comes from doing.

5. Offer The Chance To Leave

Sometimes people make mistakes and take on roles they soon realize they are not cut out for. Try to identify this early and even consider offering some form of pay if they decide to leave before the end of the induction process. If they stay, they will be more committed to their new career; if they leave, you’ll spend a small sum to avoid a potential disaster in your business.

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There are many creative ways to hire and induct new people into your business, but hopefully, the methods explored here will spark further ideas for your own processes. Like most things in life, you’ll only ever get what you put into recruitment. Whether you’re hiring new employees, introducing new partners, working with new suppliers or onboarding new clients, the introduction of new people to your business will always have an impact on your culture, which will in turn impact performance. It’s up to you how positive or negative you make this impact.