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.