Getting started: First-day orientation checklist
Welcoming new team members is a vital part of BackstageIT’s success story. However, while finding the right talent is a challenge in and of itself, providing new employees with the necessary information to help them begin their new professional journey in the extended team is a major responsibility.
Why onboarding new employees is so important?
Numerous statistics support that a bad onboarding experience makes new hires nearly twice as likely to look for other opportunities. More importantly, a positive employee onboarding experience can increase employee retention. This is why we take the onboarding process seriously.
To be more transparent and also to share about our onboarding process with the new potential employees, we’ve created our onboarding checklist, which we found works the best for us:
- Announce the team about the new hire
- Create a welcome email/message
- Offer the welcome package, as well as the tech ware
- Present/explain the most widely used software
- Discuss the company culture (story, values, expectations)
- Set up email, slack, and other apps that will be used
- Explain the day’s schedule
- Give an office tour and explain what everyone is doing
- Sign the remaining documents and give an access card to the office
- Schedule a one-on-one meeting at the end of the day with the HR person and the new employee to ensure the first day went well
After a while, the new employee will naturally become a team member and will no longer be “the new one”. This transition is an indicator of how well the whole onboarding process works, the easier they transition, the better.
It is critical to understand that the onboarding process does not end on the first day. At BackstageIT we conduct regular check-ins and updates with the new and old team members and solicit as much feedback from them as possible about their personal onboarding experience and everyday office life.