Guess who's coming to work
Imagine meeting someone new and the two of you hit it off well. You find that you both have similar interests and they invite you over for dinner. Leading up to the dinner, your new friend goes on and on about how great their friends and family are. They are excited about what you are able to add to the mix and certain that all of you will get along well. The candidate experience is not much different. Yes, when you are hired to do a job, you are being paid for your contributions. However, think about how work is discussed in America. While inappropriate, it's quite common for companies and teams to refer to themselves as a family or friends. We often oversell camaraderie in business relationships. Sure, some of your colleagues will hold important roles in your life, but not all. At the core, we are all human and deserve to be treated with common decency and respect. When invited into a space, our expectations are high because the person who invited us in has positive intentions and we trust the picture they have painted of their work friends and family. It's a risk we all take, because we want to expand our network and contribute our talent to the new group we're being introduced to. Hiring can be instrumental in making positive cultural shifts. Let's look at ways to achieve the positive outcome hoped for.
Prepare a space for your guest. Consider this the new hire phase. When someone joins your team, the first few months are critical. It's important that you have already prepared a space for them by addressing concerns raised by your existing team. At minimum you should have a plan in place and perhaps you have already reviewed your plan with your new hire, so they are aware of the existing challenges in the current environment and how they can contribute to making it better. This is an opportunity to highlight that these challenges exist and that there is already momentum in addressing them. These initial conversations create transparency and sets the tone for what is and isn't accepted as a part of the company culture. It's also important to note that being intentional about hiring people that can contribute a new perspective based on their life and work experience is instrumental in shifting your company culture.
Have a plan and set the stage for a great time at dinner or in this case, work. During the acclimation phase of those first few months, it's critical to surround your new hire with your culture champions. Those people that reflect all of the best attributes of the company culture currently and where the culture is headed, will serve as guides for your new hire while also being able to buffer some aspects of the culture that are not complimentary. Having a plan for the new hire provides a guide to navigate the first few months of their experience. You wouldn't invite someone to dinner without having a menu prepared and a general idea of the flow for the evening. The collaboration between your culture champions and your new hire's fresh perspective will spark meaningful discussion about a current process or initiative. These conversations provide context for your new hire so they are not suggesting solutions that are already underway or far beyond the scope of an existing project. Context helps a new hire provide meaningful feedback, making their suggestions more effective and realistic for the current state of the business.
Check-in with your new hire along the way to make sure things are going as planned. These conversations should go beyond the general 'how are you doing?' ask the specific questions that your are truly curious about. When you are in the early days of a new role, you are bombarded with new information. Always bring yourself back to how that once felt for you. Asking general questions will always result in receiving general answers. Mentoring, whether formal or informal, is a great way to provide a built in follow-up for your new hire. The more familiar a new hire becomes with a few people within the business, the more candid their responses will be. This provides a unique opportunity to settle any initial concerns or acknowledge new information that you may have otherwise missed. Stay interviews are a useful and underutilized resource for most companies. Start them early and have them often. There has never been a job market that would benefit from stay interviews more than today's.
As you wrap up your dinner party or the onboarding phase, it's important to affirm your employee by recapping their journey up until this point. Highlight how their work has been a value add for your team and the business overall. Align on what comes next as it relates to projects and initiatives that they can play a key role in making successful. Your new hire is now equipped to be a host for the next new hire. The recency of their onboarding experience will be helpful in the transition of the next new hire. By engaging them in the process of helping someone even newer become acclimated to the company culture, you are creating more brand ambassadors and mentors. As you have more people demonstrating the behaviors of your ideal company culture, bad behavior becomes much more visible and easier to contain. You have created momentum for the change you set out to create and that will ultimately accelerate the cultural changes the business needs.
This approach is effective whether you are the new hire or are welcoming one. As a new hire, it's important to ask for the support you need to be successful. While you may not initially know the exact support you need, you now have an idea of the minimum expectations required to support a successful transition into your new role. Ensuring that new hires have the proper resources and support will help them get up to speed quicker so they are able to make meaningful contributions to the company or organization. It's also important to just treat people well when welcoming them into a new environment.
*Written over the course of a few days, while navigating being a new hire again.