INDUCTING YOUR NEW STAFF (PT 2)

In this edition I will continue to look at how to ensure you induct your new recruit successfully.

What Should Be Included As Part Of A Simple Induction?

Create a short first morning induction plan which can be run-through by you or a member of staff who has been properly prepared. This is easy and quick to write and helps to bed the person in. It should include the following:

Welcoming the new employee, offering them a drink to break the ice and showing them where the office facilities are - things such as toilets, the kitchen area and anything else which they will need.

Formal introductions to each existing member of the team, in the course of which you should explain - in outline the roles of both the new employee and the existing team members.

There is written information which has to be made available to new employees, which should be (briefly) run through:

• Health and Safety information which relates to your particular environment
• Details of your Disciplinary Procedures
• Details of your Grievance Procedures
• Details of your Appeals Procedure

These are all statutory requirements in the UK. Once they are in writing they can form part of your staff handbook and this can be added to as new processes are formalised within the business. Over time the handbook will form the bulk of the induction literature.

After the formal introductions etc, the employee can be taken to their desk or office and shown how any systems and IT works and given any passwords or login instructions they might need to carry out their role.

Next, it is useful then for their role to be explained in detail by someone who is trusted within the organisation and who complies with the company processes, so that the new employee can be shown how your organisation carries out its tasks, reports-back and so forth. In virtually all cases, there will either be documentation in existence that will help the new member of staff get up to speed on the project or work that they are being employed for, or there will be someone who can sit down with the new employee and show them what to do in practice. Either way, it is crucial that the new employee is carefully looked-after at this point - they must never be allowed to feel they've been thrown in the deep end and left to sink or swim.

What Is Your Specific Role In The Induction?

Ideally the information detailed below should be presented by you to the new employee so that they feel that they can approach you in the future. This will help ensure issues can be picked up early and addressed rather than allowed to fester with the new employee feeling they have nobody to raise the problem with.

(However, time is not always permitting and many larger organisations have an HR department that will take on some of these tasks.)

A 60 to 90 minute conversation with you, ideally on day one of their employment, should include:

• A personal welcome from you.
• Running through the expectations of the role. This can be taken from the job and behaviour specification that you created at the start of the hiring process.
• Talking about your career with the organisation and why you joined and have stayed.
• Reinforcing the options available to the new employee if they perform ahead of expectations.

You should be friendly and authoritative and let them know that you have an open door policy so that if they have concerns or issues they should feel free to come and discuss them with you. You need to make sure they know they are important to you and your business, that you want to ensure that their move was the right one and that you want to help them develop their career.

Do bear in mind that the best time to ask a new employee for referrals of other people to work with your business is during the induction and the first couple of days of employment. Assuming the employee has been looked after well they will be thinking highly of the business, be keen to impress and will have very few concerns. Consequently, they will be most likely to provide names of people who could work well within your business.

Other areas which can be included by you or managed by HR include:

• Detail the salary and the individual aspects of the package such as pension contributions and how they work, medical cover and any of the other benefits that were provided in the offer.
• Run through the key points in the contract so that they clearly understand what is required - issues such as discipline through to booking holidays etc.

If HR are involved they can also discuss the Disciplinary, Grievance and Appeals procedure.

In Summary:

Having spent time and money ensuring that you recruit the right member of staff, it is important that sufficient time and effort is put in to ensure that they feel welcome, wanted and expected, especially in the first few days of employment. This attentiveness to their needs, coupled with ensuring that they know what is expected of them, will produce great dividends down the line in terms of productivity, morale and future loyalty.

Next Time:

In future articles we will look at different aspects of the induction process in greater detail. During the next couple of editions, however, I will be introducing a couple of guest writers who I have worked closely with for many years and who are renowned in their fields. They will be providing articles within their specialisations so the full breadth of the recruitment process is comprehensively covered.

The first of these will be an article introducing psychometric testing by Sean Hutton, who will explain why it should be seriously considered as part of the recruitment process.