Building an effective employee onboarding program – Part 2

Welcome on board

Recent research by Gallup found that only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees. That means that there is plenty of room for improvement. We’re not claiming to have all the answers on what makes an awesome onboarding process, but we’ve done some research on what works and what doesn’t and we wanted to share our recommendations with you.

In our last blog post, we wrote about planning your recruitment process and the pre-onboarding stage. In this post, we would like to share what happens at 10Clouds, when an new employee arrives in our office.

• Welcoming your new hire to the business and helping them get set up (Day 1)

a) At 10Clouds, we feel that it’s incredibly important to make every new hire feel welcome. On their first day, they are greeted at reception and the onboarding manager is notified of their arrival. They then have an hour-long induction meeting in which they receive their laptops, get all of their logins and passwords to the major communications platforms and office programs and check that everything is working correctly.

b) They then go on an office tour, where they find out where each team in the office sits, where they will sit themselves, and they are introduced to the rest of their team.

c) Each new hire will then meet with their new direct manager (who they might have spoken to during the recruitment process) and they tell them the basics of how the team works, including regular team meetings, ways of working and more. The manager may also set them some initial tasks.

d) We’re also big fans of team integration, so we would encourage you to take your new employee out for a team lunch at some point during their first week.

2. Immersing your new employee in your organization’s history, mission and culture (First week)

In order for your new hire to truly understand their place within the business, it’s important for them to first of all know the context of your company. It’s good to start off by talking about the history or founding of the business, about its mission, values and culture.

We would advise, that rather than just giving this to your new employee in written form, it’s valuable to have somebody talk them through it. A conversation will really bring the vision and values to life for them and enable them to ask questions if anything is unclear.

At 10Clouds, we divide this section of the onboarding process into four workshops on the following subjects. You might find this structure useful, so we’ll give you a bit more detail:

Who we are and where we are going – led by the CEO

This involves a short introduction to how our company was formed and what our ultimate goals are for the foreseeable future. We discuss the business vision and values. It’s also a chance for our new hires to meet our Co-Founder and CEO.

The culture of the organization – led by the Head of People

Here we discuss the Code of Conduct and culture of the organisation – including ways to communicate effectively with colleagues.

Our audience and company projects – led by a Project Manager

This is a chance to talk about the biggest current projects in the business, and to discuss our ways of working in Agile, as this is something that not every new hire will have previously experienced.

The company OKRs – led by an OKR Champion

We have company OKRs, team OKRs and individual OKRs. This is a chance to discuss how these are created and what constitutes success.

3. Feedback and quiz

It’s important to continuously improve your onboarding process, which is why we would recommend conducting a survey. At 10Clouds, we do two surveys: a quick one on the basic information taken from the first day of onboarding, and a second more detailed one at the end of the first three months – we give a bit more information about this below.

Beyond the first month…

In most cases, an onboarding process lasts longer than the first month. Even though your new hire will have learnt all the basics, such as the tools and platforms used by the business and the way their team operates, they still have a lot to learn.

We would recommend that their line manager or Head of Department meets with them regularly throughout the first three months to check in on how they’re feeling about their job, and whether they require any additional training or support.

At 10Clouds, after the first 3 months, we conduct a self-evaluation and 360 degree feedback session for the new hire, where we aim to find out how they have found their onboarding process and what else we can do to help them achieve success in their role.

Remember to help your team integrate!

Want to join us?

Looking to join a dynamic and friendly team of expert developers in the heart of Poland? Have a look at the roles that we’re currently recruiting for at: https://10clouds.com/careers/