All those emotions – positive and negative, excitement and apprehension – get overlooked in favour of dry paperwork and presentations. But this isn’t what people buy into or ultimately settle into. If the point of onboarding is to turn new hires into loyal employees, something more is needed from the HR teams responsible.

Instead of focusing solely on what you want someone to know about your company, consider how you want them to feel about being part of it. Here’s the EWS view on what you can do to make formative emotional connections that bring new joiners truly on board.

1. Make them feel important

It’s a great feeling being chosen for a new job, but it’s even better to know just how much you mean to your new company. There are many simple ways to make a new hire feel valued during onboarding: a welcome email or video from the CEO; an effusive announcement on their first day; even a small gift with their offer letter.

2. Make them feel welcome

Building strong relationships is one of the surest ways to make new hires feel at home (according to one study, over half of employees who have a best friend at work feel a profound connection to their company). Assigning a mentor is a no-brainer, while team lunch or dinner makes personal introductions fun and social.

3. Make them feel prepared

A new job comes with an avalanche of paperwork to fill out and new information to take in. Avoid first-day overload by telling new employees as much as you feasibly can before they start. Send all standard HR paperwork, share logins for tech tools, provide organisational charts, record a video tour of the company. Whatever it takes to help them spend Day 1 feeling informed and excited, not overwhelmed.

4. Make them feel like they belong

We recently blogged about workplace belonging: the idea that employees should feel free to be themselves at work, so that they can contribute the full force of their unique perspective in their role. Start the process before they join by creating a team Whatsapp group for informal introductions or setting up a video call with their mentor ahead of their start date.

5. Make them feel useful

No new hire wants to feel like a spare wheel and there is no Day 1 question more awkward to ask than “Is there anything I can do?” Integrate them straight into their role by briefing their team to provide small but useful tasks. As well as giving them an immediate sense of their value, it’s the best way to get them up to speed on team workflow, communication, expectations, deadline rules etc.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post 5 Ways to Make New Employees Feel Like They’ve Made the Right Choice appeared first on EWS.

The Sunnyvale soothsayers are predicting that 2018 will see many more companies accepting that Diversity & Inclusion are only two points of a triangle. To truly help everyone feel included, accepted and effective in their work, employers also need to focus on creating a culture of belonging.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the reason why belonging features so prominently in the report is the identity of its chief cheerleader, Pat Wadors, who until late last year just happened to be CHRO at LinkedIn. But patronage or not, the trend is a hot one and we wholeheartedly agree that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the months and years ahead.

For our part, we’re finding ourselves fielding more and more requests from recruiters specifically for diverse candidate profiles. In 2018 there is barely an employer in the world for whom Diversity & Inclusion isn’t on the radar. But there are still plenty for whom it’s effectively a tick-box exercise. And herein lies the problem.

We’re all well-versed in the platitudes around diversity multiplying perspectives, fuelling creativity and liberating your work culture from uniformity and conformity. In spite of the ubiquity of such sentiments, many employers still look solely at quotas as their measure of success. The lived experience of their employees takes a back seat.

But what if that lived experience is what actually determines how successful you are as a diverse and inclusive employer? What if, regardless of background, people can only give all of themself to their job if they feel they can bring all of themself to work in the first place?

That, in a nutshell, is what belonging is all about.

It’s the idea that we can comfortably and naturally be who we are in the workplace, safe in the knowledge that we will be accepted and valued implicitly. The LinkedIn report uses a neat analogy for the belonging’s interconnection with Diversity & Inclusion:

• Diversity is being invited to the party
• Inclusion is being asked to dance
• Belonging is dancing like no one’s watching

In practice, that means things like feeling able to freely express opinions, having a genuine voice in team meetings and seeing accomplishments recognised.

Crucially, belonging has to be baked into your way of working, not sprinkled over it from on high by another internal comms diversity campaign.

It isn’t about having a culture that accepts everyone (something that demands implicit permission to be part of it). It’s about having a culture shaped by everyone. Only then will those well-worn words of your equal opportunities policy bear fruit, as each employee applies the full force of their unique perspective to their work, rather than holding their tongue for fear of not fitting in.

For us, that’s a hugely appealing and motivating prospect. Here’s to the era of Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging.

Those in the know, share. If you think your network would find inspiration in this post, we’ve made it really easy for you to tell them using the LinkedIn Share button below.

The post Belonging in the workplace appeared first on EWS.