Your company intranet or social network tool (Yammer, SharePoint, etc.) can support the process greatly, according to an article on the business2community.com website. What should you do?
From intranet and social media to lunch
- Establish a group for onboarding (and off boarding). It can be a community, team or group, depending on the system. Key staff need to receive notifications when a newcomer is coming onboard. A person from HR or hiring manager can then post a notice or request – and all the right people get notified, particularly your colleagues in IT, office management, security, internal communication so that when the new employee starts, everything can be prepared.
- When creating the group, engage people from various functional departments. HR can lead the initiative, but others need to take part.
- Utilize your intranet with your functional or project teams. It'll make capturing and sharing knowledge more easy, so every new colleague can check it and get up to full speed quickly. Also, when a person leaves your company, you won't lose all their knowledge.
- Take the time to announce a new employee is starting in advance, and let the workers know who will come and in what role. Take them out to lunch on the first day together as well.
-jk-