You’re Remote Onboarding Now: Recruiting is Their First Contact (Part 4)
I was always confused about the difference between Onboarding and Orientation? There is a difference…and it makes all the difference in your ability to keep those great employees you just hired (or just moved into a new role). A couple definitions:
ONBOARDING
Onboarding is the process of building engagement from the first contact until the employee becomes established within the organization. This includes - integrating the new employee with the company and its culture and getting them the tools and information needed to become a productive member of the team.
Orientation, on the other hand, is a stage of onboarding where new employees are welcomed into the organization, and learn about it and their job responsibilities.
The goal of onboarding is to make the person feel that they want to work in your organization. The goal of orientation is to integrate the new employees into the organization as quickly as possible.
What’s the difference between onboarding in your organization’s office or remotely? – lucky for you, you can use all the ideas here now while you have lots of remote work going on, and in the future when some new staff are in the office and some are remote. To make it easy for you to see the ideas vs the remote methods, we boxed the Methods.
Recruiting - First Contact and Assessment
Recruiting is the process of figuring out whether this person is right for our organization and a particular job and for that person to figure out if our organization and that particular job is right for them.
The First contact starts before we even know it does – people see our organization from the viewpoint of a current employee or customer - be that online, driving by and/or in print, This doesn’t mean you can’t plan for the first contact – the organization’s website, social media, print information and the outside of your building or office, if you have one, are all pretty controllable through your marketing and executive departments. Will the viewpoint of current staff send the message you want a potential new employee to have? Yes, if you:
Use the ideas in Orientation and in Ongoing Coaching, Guidance and Support (in tomorrow’s post) as your way of interacting with all staff.
Help staff learn the impact of their words and actions (online and in-person) on the image of your organization both to clients and potential employees.
Create a super clear (and short) mission statement, vision for the future and values and then help staff learn them and live in them
Let’s assume your current assessment process gives you an accurate reading on who has the skills, interests and aptitudes for a particular job in your organizations’ industry and your specific culture. That’s a great start in onboarding success. We must also be sure we are building engagement in more than just the facts of the tasks:
Be sure your organization culture is being communicated in the processes of the assessments (tests, interviews, etc). An example of the wrong message is an organization with super sophisticated tech for client interactions that requires potential employees to come to the office to fill out a paper-based application. Or one who makes a big deal of their family friendly policies, flex time, etc but then requires potential employees to interview only at 9am on Mondays (don’t laugh, I’ve seen this more than you want to know).
Bet this causes you to think of other things that aren’t very engagement building in your organization’s assessment methods.
Click here to read the full article written for Association Leadership