How Smart Companies Help New Employees Succeed By Jeff Haden

A Recruiter works hard to find, interview, and hire the right employees. They have great skills, great experience, and great attitude.

So once they're hired... turn them loose, is usually what happens

Not so fast. Knowing how to do a job is certainly important, but approaching a job with the right perspective and right mindset means everything.

Never assume the conversations you had during the interview process were enough. They aren't. Here are four things to do on the very first day to make sure every new employee gets off to a great start:

1. Thoroughly describe how your business creates value. 

New employees need to learn how to do their jobs, but first they need to thoroughly understand your company's underlying value proposition and competitive advantage.

No matter what your business, one or two things truly drive results: Maybe it's quality. Maybe it's service. Maybe you're the low-cost provider. Maybe it's the personal connection you make with each individual customer, and the true sense of community you've worked hard to create.

Other aspects are important, but one or two are absolutely make-or-break.

Start there and then go farther. Explain how their job directly creates value. Explain how their job directly helps your business create and sustain a competitive advantage.

As a new employee I certainly need to know what to do but more importantly, I need to know why I do it.

Always start with why. Then you can move on to what.

2. Map out the employee's internal and external customers. 

The new employee may have direct reports. She has external customers, even if she never meets them, and she definitely has internal customers. No job exists in a vacuum; understanding the needs of every constituent helps define the job and the way it should be done.

Take time to explain how the employee will create value for your business whileserving all their internal and external customers. Achieving that balance is often tricky--don't assume new employees will eventually figure it out on their own.

Besides, they shouldn't have to figure it out on their own.

3. Set immediate, concrete goals--and start giving feedback.

Successful businesses execute. Your business executes. Set that productivity tone by ensuring every new employee completes at least one specific job-related task on their first day.

Why? Not only do you establish that output is all-important, your new employees go home feeling a sense of personal achievement. A whole day or days spent in orientation is boring and unfulfilling and makes the eventual transition to "work" harder.

Focus on training but make every day a blend of training and accomplishment. Your eventual goal is to train comprehensively by breaking large processes down into manageable chunks.

That way new employees can immediately see how their role directly connects to creating value for your company, and you get great opportunities to provide immediate, constructive feedback--which helps new employees do an even better job of creating value for your company.

4. Explain exactly why you hired them.

Every employee is hired for one or two specific reasons, but often those reasons get lost in all the fluff of the interview process. (Be honest: It's nice to find a well-rounded employee, but most of the time you really need an employee who is a superstar at doing X.)

Sit down with new employees and share the primary reason you hired them. It's a great opportunity to praise their skills and experience, and praise their attitude and work ethic. What new employee doesn't like that? More importantly you reinforce the connection between their skills, experience, attitude, and work ethic and the actual job you hired them to perform.

Don't let new employees lose sight of what makes them different. They have qualities and attributes other candidates didn't. Explain what those qualities are and how they helped you make your hiring decision.

How To Create Fantastic Company Culture By Richard Branson

When recently looking at images of the impressive new Facebook offices designed by Frank Gehry, I was struck by the accompanying comments of Mark Zuckerberg. “Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together. We want our space to feel like a work in progress. When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.” 

That statement, along with its realization in physical form, is fitting with the vision of the company. It wouldn’t necessarily work for other organisations, but you’re left in no doubt as to the thinking behind the design. Many other businesses would do well to follow this example of creating workspaces to complement and enhance their brand’s ethos. The same goes for embedding a strong company culture.

What works for one company culture may be unsuitable for another. The key is working out what’s best for the team and creating something unique in order to be able to deliver even better performance.

Embedding a company culture that’s unique to your business is something I’ll enjoy raising with Sheryl Sandberg during next week’s live Virgin Disruptors debate. Much like Virgin, Facebook have been making headlines as a result of some rather different employee wellness policies.  

Although many would argue that what Tony Hsiesh and Zappos are building in downtown Las Vegas is even more adventurous than free fertility treatment and unlimited annual leave. “We want Zappos to function more like a city and less like a top-down bureaucratic organization,” explains Tony. “Look at companies that existed 50 years ago in the Fortune 500 – most don’t exist today. Companies tend to die and cities don’t.”

This is another genuinely unique take on the idea of company culture. There has never been a one-size-fits-all solution to making sure your staff are happy and healthy, but that doesn’t stop people trying to apply tired and ineffective motivational tactics or perks. Offering something that will set you apart from the competition can be your greatest asset, especially for new companies trying to break into competitive markets.

I saw a great example of this in action at our new Virgin Hotels Chicago this week. We have one hotel so far, but we’ve managed to embed a company culture from the start which has enabled us to attract a fantastic team to run it. The hotel industry doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to how staff are treated, so by innovating in this area we have been able to make the next Virgin Hotels a place where everyone would want to work.

Fun and healthy activities such as yoga and a company softball league have proven popular, but they only work alongside more meaningful offerings. You can’t open a business in the most culturally diverse city in America and not see that fact reflected in either your workforce or policies. Our partnership with Voxy – the English language learning platform - means that those staff who don’t have English as their first language can improve their abilities. All these things not only benefit the individuals in their private lives, they boost the company’s performance as well.

There’s no right or wrong way to go about creating a company culture, as long as you keep the staff that it’s designed for in mind every step of the way. What do you think helps to create fantastic company culture, and improve workplace wellbeing?