Often, small businesses will spend so much of their onboarding time teaching new employees how to complete particular tasks they forget to show those employees the other parts of the company. Lacking the bigger picture, these employees tend to be misinformed and disengaged in their work.
An unacquainted employee can cause significant issues for your business, impacting your profitability, customer retention, and employee engagement.
This guide will cover strategies for acquainting your new employees with every dimension of your small business. These tips will help you familiarize your new employees with the ins and outs of your small business in the most effective, educational, and engaging way possible.
Throughout this article, you’ll notice a recurring theme: To acquaint your employees successfully with your small business, you can’t go in blind. You need a clear, thought-out plan. Thus, before you implement each tip, consider how you’ll implement it and where it will fit into your existing training and onboarding processes.
Make a Clear Schedule
You’ve probably heard this question from new hires before: “What time should I show up for the first day of work?”
Instead of giving them a vague answer, set clear expectations ahead of time for when your new employees should show up to each training activity, what they will be doing, who they’ll be talking with, and why. To save time, Gingr recommends automating and sharing these expectations via a software solution that “allows you to create employee schedules and to-do lists and allows staff members to log their hours and track tips” all in one place. As a result, you will be able to:
- Prepare new hires (with relevant questions and prework) for each meeting.
- Easily keep up-to-date on new employees’ learning progress.
- Provide direction if new hires are unsure what to do next.
- Ensure you represent and discuss every part of your business.
Break apart training periods into small, bite-sized blocks when you make this schedule. No one wants to spend eight straight hours in a single training session. Instead, separate more information-dense sessions with lighter conversations across departments, an office tour, heads-down work time, and a lunch break.
Create a Welcoming Environment
When new hires feel welcome, they will be more invested in your business’s success, and it will be easier (and more fun) to acquaint them with your various processes, tools, clients, and departments.
However, a welcoming environment doesn’t just happen automatically. Rather, you need to dedicate time and energy to developing a positive workplace culture where new hires feel comfortable bringing their whole selves to the office.
To build this type of environment, do the following:
- Share a friendly, personalized welcome message with each new employee.
- Introduce them to their coworkers and key stakeholders.
- Prepare them for what the first few days will look like. (See above!)
- Build a mentor or coaching program. (See below!)
- Take them out to lunch on their first day.
If you’ve done your welcoming job right, your employees won’t just know more about your business; they’ll also want to keep learning. As time goes on and new hires become experts in your business, give them a chance to help refine your company culture and be a part of welcoming future employees to your business.
Establish a Formal Coaching Program
A coaching or mentoring program is an easy way to show new employees your business and the people who make it what it is. Especially since it can be difficult for a new employee to jump into a group of experienced workers seamlessly, a mentor can help them learn the ropes and fit in socially. When building your coaching program, follow industry best practices:
- Create an application process for coaches.
- Train and support your coaches.
- Build a coaching schedule.
- Match your coaches based on interests and skillsets.
- Incentivize coaches with additional benefits or stipends.
But a coaching program isn’t only for acquainting new employees with your small business. It can also give professional employees opportunities to grow leadership and management skills. As they support your new employees, they’ll likely also learn new or relearn forgotten elements of your business. In the long term, a mentor program will help new employees feel confident in the work they’re doing, help them feel like they belong, and support employee retention.
Take Employees Through the Customer’s Experience
One unconventional approach to acquainting new employees with your business is to give them the customer experience from the customer’s perspective.
Put new hires in the customer’s position and take them through a “day in the life” of a customer. Especially for businesses with hyper-specific niches, this process can help show employees a side of your business they wouldn’t otherwise see.
For example, dog daycare or dog grooming business might have new employees practice making reservations in the customer-facing portal, accessing a dog’s behavior report card, and sending follow-up questions.
As a result, new employees will be able to quickly connect their training to the practical value they’re building for clients. In fact, by going through this process, new hires may catch sticky points that your real customers face, helping you improve your client and customer experience.
Share a Thorough Handbook
Here’s a short quiz:
Question: Where should you store your business’s various processes, guidelines, and policies?
- Handwritten on a handful of restaurant napkins.
- Typed in a digital employee handbook.
- Who needs policies? Not us!
The correct answer is B. Love them or hate them; handbooks serve two essential purposes for your business:
- They offer an easily-accessible learning resource for new employees to reference.
- They set clear expectations and rules for business operations.
Your handbook can be the guiding light for your new employees when you first bring them into the business. Moreover, when handbooks are digital, they can be easily shared ahead of the first day of work so that your employee doesn’t feel like they’re stepping in blind.
Complete Paperwork Ahead of Time
We can all agree: Paperwork can take up a lot of time. Filling out the paperwork can take up much of an employee’s first day, a critical moment in their exposure to your business, and time that should be spent in training, showing them around your business, and introducing them to your team.
Instead, ask employees over email to complete their paperwork weeks before their first day on the job. Before their first day, you should collect the following completed paperwork:
- Direct deposit information
- Form W-4
- Form I-9
- Background check release
- Benefits enrollment forms
- Reasonable accommodation request
- Handbook/office policies acknowledgment
When you have all their paperwork logged ahead of time, you can spend the first day setting a positive tone and showing them around the business. As a result, your employees will leave their first day of work with a positive impression of your business’s values and excitement for the job they’ve taken on.
Make Hands-On Training the Norm
When all of the training is a lecture, it can be difficult for employees to grasp the concreteness of what you’re talking about and what they’ll be doing.
Leverage your employee coaches to show their mentees around the facilities and various departments, positions, and tools your business uses. Using industry-specific software gives employees time to play around under the hood and familiarize themselves with the back-end processes.
Ideally, this software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and support (rather than hinder) day-to-day tasks. For instance, if you’re a dog boarding facility, you might use an all-in-one kennel software that’s easy for new employees to learn and provides notifications and reminders that guide them through processes for scheduling, payment processing, and notetaking, and reporting to clients.
Throughout the hands-on training, have new hires take notes and ask questions. Often, this process will spur thoughtful questions about your business that wouldn’t have otherwise come up.
Wrapping-Up: Feedback and Revision
Acquainting new employees with your business isn’t a one-time thing. Your business will inevitably change, and you’ll likely need to update your planned activities for acquainting employees with your business from one hiring cycle to the next.
We recommend going to the source for the most practical training recommendations: your previous trainees. Make it a regular part of your training to collect feedback and surveys from your new hires on the strengths and weaknesses of the onboarding process. Ask:
- What did you learn about the business?
- What other parts of the business would you like to learn more about?
- What was your favorite part of this training?
- What would you change about this part of your training?
That being said, as your business changes, employees can often remain stuck in their ways. Thus, it’s essential to continue to also (re)acquaint your tenured employees with your business as it currently exists—not how it was five years (or even five months) ago!
