There are a lot of ways where you can make onboarding of new employees an exciting time of welcome and recognition for them.
It doesn’t have to be a very expensive process. By making a committed attempt to acknowledge each new employee and celebrate their coming on board, you’ll be going a long way to engaging new employees and encouraging them to stay and be loyal to the people and organization.
Think about how you can make your employee welcome even more meaningful by integrating employee recognition practices and programs.
Send a Thank-You Letter
Common etiquette suggests a job candidate should send the interviewers a thank you note expressing appreciation for the opportunity of being interviewed for the potential job.
Why not turn the tables on this practice and have one interviewer tasked with sending a thank-you letter to the potential job candidate? Thank them for considering their company and wishing them well in hopefully being accepted.
Accompany Your Offer Letter with a Welcome Package
In our lives we’ve probably had a job interview and then received a letter in the mail shortly thereafter. If it was an official offer of the job you then had to send back your letter of acceptance. But wouldn’t it be nice if along with the job offer letter you received a small branded token of appreciation for considering working with the company?
Now, once the candidate has signed or acknowledged the official offering, then you can follow up by sending a complete welcome package with more branded items that everyone receives when hired like a branded coffee mug or water bottle, a T-shirt, a jacket, notebook and pen, pins, or cap, and the employee handbook.
First Day eCard or Printed Card from Team/Colleagues/Manager
Provide cuing notifications to the new hire’s fellow employees, team members and immediate supervisor and managers just ahead of their official start date. Use your online social recognition program to send the employee a welcoming eCard with remarks from each employee to brighten their first day on the job.
And if you don’t have an online recognition program to do this go out and shop for a meaningful printed card, you can then pass it around to get peers to write a short message and add their signatures. Remind everyone to not just sign the card. Comments from each person mean so much more.
Set Expectation to Give Recognition
Sometimes we get so hung up about giving tangible things to employees we forget to tell employees that recognition should focus more on giving to others than about receiving.
Why not orient new employees to your recognition programs such as using your social recognition platform and selecting an appropriate eCard. Suggest they send an eCard to someone in the company who has helped them or made them feel especially welcomed.
Point out that when employees go above and beyond in their work show them how they can nominate someone to receive an award where they might merit receiving points to bank and redeem for gifts or a level based monetary value reward.
And if none of these options are available, give them a branded pen and a nice Thank-You card to send to the employee that made a difference to them. Provide instructions on how to write an effective message of thanks or recognition. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone so teach them while you have their attention.
What can you do to better welcome and recognize new employees when they start work with your company?
Recognition Reflection: How do you currently recognize new employees when they begin working at your organization?
Roy is no longer writing new content for this site (he has retired!), but you can subscribe to Engage2Excel’s blog as Engage2Excel will be taking Roy’s place writing about similar topics on employee recognition and retention, leadership and strategy.
Hi Roy,
It’s such a great pleasure getting linked to this and directly benefiting from your expertise. In our organisation, after employment interview is concluded and employment letter sent to successful candidate, we wait on his resumption date for his formal induction to the organisation. This takes the form of going with him the various departments and familiarizing him with work internal environment.
But here, very superior way of onboarding new employees is presented.From this perspective, the new employee will not only perceive a very receptive workmates and boss, but the socio-psychological impact of that experience, from the first day, will propel him toward productive efforts at organisational goals achievement.
Thanks for sharing.