Employee Acculturation - Working Together For A Cause

As an employer, you know that building your workforce into a cohesive team is the key to maximum productivity. However, this isn’t something that just happens naturally without any effort on your part. Practicing employee alignment by matching individuals with jobs that match their skill set is important. Slotting new hires into departments where their personality is a good fit for their immediate peers is another way to facilitate acculturation.

The Broad View

Your company also has to have a vision that acknowledges the value of connection between people - not just cooperation between coworkers. One way to accomplish this is by becoming more involved in the local community. Don’t just pass the hat for a charity and pledge to match the amount raised.
For a refreshing approach that really gets people involved, promote volunteerism. Give workers a day off with pay if they are willing to donate this time to working for a local non-profit organization. Here are a few ideas for places employees might volunteer:

• Soup kitchen or food pantry
• Habitat for Humanity
• Animal shelter
• Roadside cleanup
• Walk for a Cure
• Big Brothers & Sisters or HOPE tutoring
• Nursing home visitation or Meals on Wheels

There are, of course, many more options depending on your location. Choose one or two causes that your company will support. Consider taking a poll and letting employees be involved in the selection process. If possible, pick an organization that has no religious affiliation so all your workers can feel comfortable volunteering there.

Get Your New Hires On Board with This Concept

During the onboarding process, introduce employees to the ways your company is connected with the community. You don’t have to pressure them to get involved. Just add a page in your acculturation module that includes photos of company volunteers working together as a team.
Include links to more information along with statistics on the number of hours donated. Include an overview of the difference this makes in the community. That way, when the next volunteer opportunity arises, your new hires will already be excited about participating.

Tweeting Your Way Through Employee Onboarding

Twitter is a tool that does a very good job at the one thing it is designed for - pointing people toward other resources. If you expect tweeting to take the place of a corporate blog, website, email, or professional networking forum, you will most likely be disappointed. However, many employers are finding this application very useful as a way to communicate briefly, effectively, and continually with their workforce.

That type of constant contact is especially useful during a new hire’s acculturation onboarding experience. It gives HR staff, trainers, and department managers a way to stay in touch with employees and ensure they have the information they need to thrive. Here are just a couple of the ways you might use Twitter as an onboarding, orientation, and integration instrument:

Training and Orientation

Colleges are starting to use Twitter as a classroom tool; you can apply the same principles in employee learning environments. Send tweeted reminders about orientation class times, locations, or a brief description of what new hires will be learning in their next training session.

Having trouble getting new employees to follow your tweets? Tell them you will be sending out relevant test questions about their training materials via Twitter throughout the week of orientation. Let them know there will be a small prize awarded to the first 3 people to reply with the correct answer to each tweeted question.

Ongoing Acculturation Tweeting

Once people get hooked on following your Twitter feed, keep it interesting. Mix serious policy announcements with helpful advice, inspirational quotes, or links to other useful resources. These don’t all have to be directly related to work. They can be health & wellness news, money saving tips, or info about local cultural events employees can attend at low cost. If you have a company blog, invite employees to come read your latest posts and join in the conversation in the comments section.

Think Twice, Tweet Once

Before you start tweeting, you need to have a good grasp of what a sensible technology policy looks like. Your employees must sign an acknowledgement of your company’s social networking agreement as part of their new hire package. With our universal onboarding applications, this doesn’t add more paperwork. Employees can electronically sign this acknowledgment along with all your other digital forms.

HR Branding and Onboarding

The Human Resources department is the most critical player in a new hire’s initial perception of his/her work environment. During onboarding, HR has the opportunity to solidify the image the company presents as an employer.

If you don’t develop and communicate a strong HR brand, you are leaving this process up to chance. At best your organization may come across as simply having a disorganized approach to employee relations. At worst, your HR department will be viewed as incompetent or uncaring.

Take charge and brand yourself instead. How do you want to be perceived as an employer? Organized, competent, employee centered, eco-responsible, teamwork focused, quality oriented, you can choose which qualities to highlight.

Here are some ways to promote your Human Resources brand during onboarding:

Technology

Use current technology to brand your HR department as efficient and effective. New employees notice whether your onboarding strategy involves streamlined electronic processes or messy, repetitive paper forms.

Employers who fail to upgrade their HR technology are sending a message to employees that the company’s human capital infrastructure is not worth investing in. Ironically, organizations actually save a significant amount of money by switching to a universal onboarding system - it makes no sense to continue using outdated methods.

Visuals & Message Content

People respond to images on a gut level. That means they will come to associate your company with whatever written messages are distributed under the corporate logo. This means you have the ability to mold the perception of your HR brand every time you communicate with employees. This includes the job offer letter, your company welcome page, and each training and acculturation module in your onboarding program.

Ensure that your messages are:

Honest
Accurate
Timely
Positive
Easy to understand
HR does have to use “legal speak” a lot. This means you must make an effort to communicate in layperson’s terms finding a balance between a professional and personal voice. Add interest with video and audio to capture your new hires’ attention more fully.

Two-Way Communication

Feedback is the key to improving HR processes. Always include a forum for new hires to communicate with HR about their experience during onboarding. This could take the form of a survey page, an email helpdesk address, or an HR blog where employees can leave comments.

Onboarding: Getting Your Employees “LinkedIn”

LinkedIn has built quite a reputation in the business community as the place to be for professional networking. This forum offers enormous potential for you to connect and share ideas with other individuals in similar industries/specialties.

As an employer, it also provides an opportunity for you to build your brand presence among a sizeable pool of potential job candidates. In the struggle to attract top talent, you need to make the most of your company’s LinkedIn profile.

Promoting Participation
One way to achieve this is by ensuring your employees present a polished, united front as members of your LinkedIn group. You can accomplish this during the onboarding process if you approach it the right way. This involves making it easy for the employee to participate.

You should also present joining LinkedIn as an opportunity to become part of the team. For example, you can encourage new hires to browse the profiles of other employees at your company to find individuals with similar educational backgrounds or interests.

Step By Step
Set up LinkedIn profiles for new hires in advance of their first day of work. Populate basic fields such as name, company email address, and position. Also, add them to your company group so your logo will be displayed on their profile.

Keep the information private by clicking on the “edit my profile” link, then on the “Customize Your URL” button. Select the None/off option below the Public Profile heading. Then, the profile won’t be findable on the web until you have the new employee’s permission to publish it.

During the onboarding process, offer employees the opportunity to make their company LinkedIn profile public. Include tips or a template on how to get the most out of this professional networking tool by highlighting their skills and expertise. Provide a copy of their ID badge photo for use on the profile if they wish to display an image of themselves.

Integrating This Process
You can actually requisition the creation of a new hire’s LinkedIn profile using the Staff Service Request function in our suite of products. That way, you could assign responsibility for completing this task to HR or IT and ensure that it gets done.

Set up the new employee’s LinkedIn account using the same password as the one automatically issued to him/her for filling out new hire documents. Then, simply add a page in your onboarding system that allows the employee to accept or reject the opportunity to activate the LinkedIn account (along with step by step instructions on how to do so). That way, the employee has all the information necessary to log in and make changes to the profile immediately.

When does your New Hire Onboarding process End?

In any industry, onboarding has two basic components. There is the transactional aspect which I’ve talked about in detail in the past. At its most basic level, this involves:

• Gathering relevant new hire information and managing the flow of this data
• Ensuring all documents are completed fully and correctly in compliance with law
• Providing the employee with electronic access and any other items required for work

It’s pretty clear when HR has finished this step; the 3 requirements above have been fulfilled. Technically, this process could be completed within the first few hours of employment - especially if you are using employee onboarding software that streamlines each task.

Acculturation: The Softer Side of Onboarding
Acculturation involves orientating and aligning a new hire with your company’s vision and objectives. Because this process is unique for each company, it can be difficult to define. This also makes it hard to tell when this “warm and fuzzy” aspect of onboarding is complete. In that case, is it OK to just skip this step? Not if you care about retention, morale, and productivity. Integrating each employee into your team is vital.

Like the transactional side of onboarding, acculturation works best when it begins during the recruitment phase. If you have successfully branded your company, potential candidates already view you as an employer of choice. For example you might be known as a business that treats employees fairly, places a priority on environmentally conscious practices, and offers a superior product/service to its client base.

The first day of work offers an opportunity to reinforce this feeling of connection. You can intersperse acculturation modules with transactional onboarding tasks in the same software interface. For example, don’t miss an opportunity to include positive messaging in your welcome letter and policy agreements.

Add an invitation to join the company’s LinkedIn group and connect with other employees. Offer a tips section that highlights some of the “quirky” ways things work at your company. That way, new hires can prepare to adapt to your workplace culture. Point employees to your internal HR blog or a helpdesk where they can ask questions and give feedback. Keep touching base over the next few weeks (or months) as acculturation progresses.

Measuring Success
How do you know you’ve successfully brought employees onboard as a part of your team? Here’s a good sign that the acculturation process is complete: Your recently hired employees reach out to welcome the next wave of new hires and make them feel like part of the family!

The Science of HR: full steam ahead for HR transactional automation

The Art and the Science of HR describes the two parts of the HR skill set. The Art of HR describes dynamic aspects of HR that involve problem solving, people handling, conflict management, and many other "Artful" skills. The Science of HR describes the transactional items and rules that can be easily understood, predicted, and often automated. I will use the Art and Science theme for my blogs until I get all aspects covered.

Today's HR department is a busy place. Recruiting, hiring, benefits, litigation avoidance, legal compliance, performance reviews, learning management, succession planning, employee retention, employee advocacy, corporate cheerleaders, mentoring programs, just to name a few! Also the demand on HR services is increasing. HR is expected to deliver more transactions that are more complex are required at a lower cost! Increased demands are coming from managers, employees and shareholders who want more services provided to them. Employees want self service, self selection available. Managers want employee data at their fingertips, and want automated processes. Shareholders want HR to align the workforce with the corporate strategies and goals. That is a lot to accomplish for any department! HR transactional automation can deliver on all of these goals.

High impact HR Science projects:

• New Hire Onboarding
  
  • Automate and go paperless
    
• Benefits enrollment process
  
  • New or update your benefits
    
• Employee item Requisitioning:
  
  • new cube, new computer, replace laptop, blackberry, etc
    
• Employee Lifecycle event changes:
  
  • Marriage, baby, raises, off boarding, etc.
    

Some of the benefits of HR automation:

• Compliance
  
  • get it done right the first time
    
• Cost reduction
  
  • time to complete, reduced errors, shipping, paper
    
• Error reduction
  
  • both compliance and reduce cost
    
• New Hire satisfaction
  
  • First impressions, quick paperwork, automated verified processes
    
• Green initiatives
  
  • paperwork reduction, shipping reduction
    
• Communication
  
  • automated communication really makes a huge impact on quality
    

Other transactional HR automation areas:

• Employee self-service automation
  
• Manager self-service automation
  
• Job Application/Recruiting process automation
  
• Benefits selection automation
  
• 360 Review automation
  
• Learning Management automation
  

 

Emerald Case Study: Large REIT automates transactions and delivers a great ROI, and employee satisfaction results.

Our client wanted to focus on transactional HR automation in the New Hire process. We began by automating the existing paperwork with online panels and PDF forms generated to their document management system. We also sent the data to begin the HRMS processes and approvals. This alone paid for the project, but we also automated the offer letter process, the new & existing employee item requisitioning, intern onboarding, and more. This gave us more success to allow automation of employee changes for salary, job changes, and terminations. These HR transactional projects had a great impact on cost savings and new hire satisfaction. HR got low cost, compliant, error free automation, and the employee got high speed HR! The ROI was impressive.

Summary

Processes abound in HR, and here is where automation projects can revolutionize the impact of HR for all these customers. HR transactional automation provides the basic foundation for increased efficiency and can act as a key driver for HR success. HR organizations should recognize that technology can help them deliver best practices via automations and integrations that reduce the complexity and increase the delivery of HR services. Automating HR Science frees resources for HR to focus on projects related to the Art of HR. This will be the topic of my next blog. "The Art of HR: People, participation and huge paybacks for HR"

 

 

 

The Art and Science of HR

Most people think of HR as the paper work generating hiring machine, or the benefits coach and supplier, or perhaps the big brother forcing rules or watching out for lawsuits. HR does have a lot of difficult tasks that must be repeated in every HR department. Recruiting, New Hire paperwork, Benefits enrollment, Employee changes are types of activities in what I call the Science of HR. These HR activities are well understood and can be repeatedly processed. Significant ROI can be found for HR projects here. Automated employee onboarding is a great example.

HR is also expected to employ savvy people skills and softer talents. Recruiting, employee retention, training programs, employee advocacy, and succession planning are just a few of the skills that define the Art of HR. These challenges require more internal experience, creativity, and less process to make successful. Corporate social networking is one trend in this area.

In the next several weeks, I will dive deeper into both aspects. The Science of HR is more automation friendly, and can provide a huge win for HR. The Art of HR requires more domain expertise, planning and strategy. Projects here are more difficult, but if handled well, can shift HR into a more pivotal corporate role.

How is this happening? Web 2.0 is providing a great opportunity for new HR projects and roles. New paradigm tools being developed help HR go way beyond traditional roles, into things that drive and automate HR science but an also allow HR to deliver powerful people driven HR solutions that are generating great results.

Main topics:

• The Science of HR: full steam ahead for HR transactional automation
  
• The Art of HR: People, participation and huge paybacks for HR
  

A deeper look:

• HR Science: Recruiting and Web 2.0 for the automated HR
  
• HR Science: Onboarding and the Science of transactional HR automation
  
• HR Art: Onboarding and the Art of acculturation: getting a great start with your new company, job and team day 1
  
• HR Science: HR-XML: Vendors dream of easy cross platform communication
  
• HR Art: Onboarding and the Art of acculturation: getting a great start with your new company, job and team day 1
  
• HR Art: Advanced artwork in employee retention, assessment, training, and team building through Acculturation and web 2.0

http://www.emeraldsoftwaregroup.com/onboarding/

mailto:jeff.hayden@emeraldsoftwaregroup.com