Visual Branding and Acculturation Onboarding

If you've been keeping up with the buzz in the Human Resources world, you have heard about the concept of HR branding. The idea is that consistency in visual content and messaging build trust. Employees who are exposed to a uniform experience tend to feel that the information being communicated by their employer is reliable.

Because of this, many companies rebrand brochures from benefits vendors with their own logo and mission statement. That way, employees aren't exposed to products from half a dozen different companies during enrollment. Instead, they see the same branding on everything. This helps them associate each aspect of their total compensation package with the employer's commitment to providing well for their workforce.

Self service portals are being designed in the same way. Workers access third party services through a web interface that is customized with their employer's messaging and design features. Some benefits firms even let client companies incorporate a custom greeting into the dedicated help line employees call to have questions answered.

We Have A Custom Solution For You

Emerald Software Group products are always at the cutting edge of HR trends. We've created an agile system that lets you adapt every aspect of our universal onboarding solution. Branding is a very important aspect of acculturation. After all, you are introducing new hires to your organization through the onboarding process.

This means consistency needs to start with the welcome screen and continue through the final training module. Always incorporate your organization's mission statement and values into your design. Do you want to position your company as being an eco-friendly place to work? Thank new hires in the welcome letter for helping reduce paper consumption by filling out their forms online.

Color, fonts, images, and your logo are just the start when it comes to customizing the visual elements of this platform. You can also decide how to structure your menu and the layout of each page to match your organization's specific requirements.

Don't forget that custom text, audio, and video content can be integrated throughout the system to give you even more branding opportunities. Promote your company's unique culture by adding fun and informative elements to each panel. Onboarding doesn't have to be boring!

It Takes a Group Effort to Acculturate an Employee

HR isn't the only department involved in onboarding your new hires. Successful acculturation takes a concerted team effort. Your CEO should record or write a general welcome message that starts the onboarding process off on the right foot. Department managers need to be on top of requisitioning all the items necessary to make the employee feel valued. Each new hire's supervisor and coworkers should also be enlisted to create a welcoming work environment.

With a universal onboarding solution, there are lots of ways to make this happen. For example, you can implement "Meet Your Team" features via integration with Compendium Data Warehouse. Or, you can interface our product with your existing ESS intranet platform. That way, your new hires will be using the same programs as the rest of your workforce rather than being isolated in a separate system.

Promote Friendly Behavior

You also have complete control over BPM workflow and the ability to assign tasks. This means you can tag a new hire's coworkers with assignments that promote the acculturation process. For example, you can send out a department-wide email on the new employee's first Monday. Use this to encourage everyone to stop by and introduce themselves. Then, you can follow up with a reminder on Friday to catch any stragglers.

Or, you could request that several coworkers reach out to make contact with the new hire through your company's online social network. Having a few people post welcome messages or invitations to participate in SIGs can make a big difference in participation levels.

Development and Measurement

For employee development purposes, you can also assign specific mentoring responsibilities to a supervisor or senior coworker. Establish measureable milestones so your mentors can report on the progress of the new hire. This promotes accountability and helps you improve your informal training programs.

In general, asking a new employee's coworkers to evaluate how well the acculturation process is going can provide you with valuable information. You can use surveys to collect this data for analysis. This gives you an extra perspective outside the new hire's self reporting of job satisfaction and immersion in company culture.

The Benefits of Interactive Acculturation Onboarding

During training and development, the more tools you have at your disposal the better. Videos, audio, and other media are easy to integrate with a truly universal onboarding system. Of course, multi-media is just one of the features you can incorporate into our AllegroHR Acculturation Portal. You can also activate live chat. This is an ideal solution for organizations with employees at multiple locations.

Often, in-house HR experts are centralized at corporate headquarters. There may be an on-site HR rep available to handle basic inquiries. However, new hires often have questions that go beyond the knowledge level of an HR generalist. In the past, getting these queries answered correctly might take days of emailing back and forth through a traditional helpdesk.

Now, your freshly hired employees can speak with a benefits specialist or other experienced HR professional at your central location without any hassle. The conversation happens in real time so any clarifications and further questions can be handled in a single conversation. When new hires can get immediate, comprehensive answers to their questions, this builds trust and speeds the acculturation process.

Training Partners

Emerald Software Group's onboarding system provides a perfect interface with training and development programs at companies like ExecuTrain and i3Logic. Your new hires can access these company's excellent training classes through our acculturation portal using a single sign-on. You can choose the best combination of virtual orientation and interactive employee development modules to meet the needs of your workforce.

For example, you could select an ExecuTrain team building workshop. This might be used to introduce your new employees into the existing collaborative process within their department. Or, you could ask i3Logic to create a custom training program that quickly socializes workers who need to be integrated into your organization after an acquisition. Of course, if you already have an acculturation portal or ESS (employee self service) system in place, our software blends seamlessly with these options as well.

The Benefits of Interactive Acculturation Onboarding

During training and development, the more tools you have at your disposal the better. Videos, audio, and other media are easy to integrate with a truly universal onboarding system. Of course, multi-media is just one of the features you can incorporate into our AllegroHR Acculturation Portal. You can also activate live chat. This is an ideal solution for organizations with employees at multiple locations.

Often, in-house HR experts are centralized at corporate headquarters. There may be an on-site HR rep available to handle basic inquiries. However, new hires often have questions that go beyond the knowledge level of an HR generalist. In the past, getting these queries answered correctly might take days of emailing back and forth through a traditional helpdesk.

Now, your freshly hired employees can speak with a benefits specialist or other experienced HR professional at your central location without any hassle. The conversation happens in real time so any clarifications and further questions can be handled in a single conversation. When new hires can get immediate, comprehensive answers to their questions, this builds trust and speeds the acculturation process.

Training Partners

Emerald Software Group's onboarding system provides a perfect interface with training and development programs at companies like ExecuTrain and i3Logic. Your new hires can access these company's excellent training classes through our acculturation portal using a single sign-on. You can choose the best combination of virtual orientation and interactive employee development modules to meet the needs of your workforce.

For example, you could select an ExecuTrain team building workshop. This might be used to introduce your new employees into the existing collaborative process within their department. Or, you could ask i3Logic to create a custom training program that quickly socializes workers who need to be integrated into your organization after an acquisition. Of course, if you already have an acculturation portal or ESS (employee self service) system in place, our software blends seamlessly with these options as well.

Multi-Lingual Safety Training in Onboarding

In an increasingly diverse workplace, you can't afford not to communicate effectively with your employees. Training and orientation are an important part of the new-hire onboarding process. How can you ensure that your entire workforce gets the most out of this experience? One solution is to use a highly flexible portal like our AllegroHR acculturation product.

Safety is Essential

Ensuring that employees understand each document they sign is important during transactional onboarding. These compliance issues are covered in detail on Jay and Chuck's blogs. However, comprehension is just as critical when it comes to acculturation and your safety training materials. The risks of ignoring language requirements in this area are too great to ignore.

When something gets lost in translation on a job site, a worker may end up seriously injured or worse. As an employer, your exposure may be extensive enough to put your company out of business. This type of catastrophic event is less likely to happen in the first place if you take responsibility for making safety instructions accessible to every employee. If a workplace accident occurs in spite of your best efforts, at least negligence during onboarding won't be the reason.

Regulations and Compliance

OSHA requires that employers present all safety training in a manner that workers can comprehend. For example, if employees are given day-to-day job instructions in Spanish, OSHA requires that their training take place in that language as well. Limited vocabulary must also be considered. This means it's a good idea to keep safety notices and instructions simple and straightforward. The AllegroHR Acculturation Portal is multi-lingual so you can tailor it to suit the needs of your workforce.

You should also note that written language isn't all that's involved here. OSHA's training standards policy statement points out that not all employees are fully literate. Handing a safety manual to someone who can't read or understand it is not adequate. That's another reason an Emerald Software Group acculturation onboarding system is so valuable. You can use it to present videos and podcasts in addition to text-based information. This will ensure that your safety messages come through loud and clear.

Are You Selling Your New-Hires on Onboarding?

Acculturation onboarding, as I've mentioned before, is an art. You can track the percentage of new-hires who are really getting involved by counting how many follow through on the social objectives you set for them. This might include activating a networking profile, joining SIGs, or completing other socialization tasks. That's one way to measure success. But how do you convince new employees to do this stuff in the first place?

If you've got really low levels of participation, there is probably something wrong with your "sales" technique. The way to get employees involved is through suggestion and persuasion. People don't respond well to being told what they must do - even when they are just starting a new job.

You aren't paying employees extra to set up a LinkedIn or other professional profile. They aren't getting a promotion for joining the bowling club or commenting on your company blog. This means taking a hard line approach isn't going to cut it. Presenting new-hires with a long list of extra things they need to do in addition to all the other stuff they are coping with is a turn off.

Tips for Successfully Selling Acculturation

• Take it slow - space out the assignment of socialization tasks over a period of several weeks or even months. You can do this using your BPM (business process management) system to send regular emails or assign new tasks as the new hire completes each previous step.
  
• Make it look like fun. Present the opportunity to get involved as a benefit - not a duty. Getting onboard with such a great team of coworkers should be seen as one of the free perks of working at your company.
  
• Use videos and other multi-media. Can you make a game out of the acculturation process? Great! The less the whole thing seems like "work" and the more it feels like goofing off the better.
  
• Watch your language. Use positive wording during every stage of acculturation. In other words, don't use the word don't (like I just did). Phrase instructions as suggestions and solutions rather than orders. Persuade your employees that this is something they want to do and that you are helping them achieve their own objectives.
  

Now, use your measurement tools to track areas where you have improved participation. Are your numbers going through the roof? Give yourself a pat on the back - you have learned to sell new-hires on your onboarding process.

Supervisor Onboarding: Workplace Harassment Training

Acculturation onboarding covers many aspects of training and orientation. Much of this instruction is designed to provide information and skills necessary for employees to be fully productive. However, there is a subset of acculturation that can actually be mandated by government entities.

In both California and Connecticut, private employers with 50 or more employees are required by law to provide workplace/sexual harassment training for all new supervisors. In Maine, employers with as few as 15 employees must send supervisors through specialized harassment training within 1 year of their hire date. Employers must also keep records of how and when these requirements were fulfilled.

If you hire an employee to serve in any supervisory capacity, he/she should participate in this training as soon as possible. This is the best way to protect your organization from litigation. In California, especially, employers can be held liable for any act of harassment on the part of a supervisor or manager.

Best Practices for Providing Workplace Harassment Training During Onboarding

The type and extent of information that must be covered in these classes varies by state. The level of interactivity may also be specified. For example, Connecticut allows supervisors to go through training online if they have the ability to ask questions in that environment. This means employers in CT could readily automate the process of signing supervisors up for training with a third party agency as part of the onboarding process.

For all employers, ensuring that no newly hired supervisors slip through the cracks is important. Your acculturation platform should definitely:

• Schedule workplace harassment training within the time-frame required by law
• Automatically follow up and verify classes were attended
• Ensure all reports documenting attendance are stored in an accessible format
• Survey the level of knowledge supervisors retain on the topics discussed in training
• Provide further resources for further self-training & remediation as needed