The New Corner Office: Make a new hire feel welcome

What to do on a virtual colleague’s first day

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the New Corner Office,
the podcast where we share strategies for thriving in the
new world of work, where location and hours are more
flexible than in the past. Today's tip is about how
to make a new person on your team feel welcome,
even if you're all working from home. In this era

(00:26):
of social distancing, whole organizations went virtual quite quickly. This
was disorienting for everyone, but imagine how disorienting it was
for people who started new jobs in late February or
early March. A few places do on boarding well in
normal times. These COVID era new hires had to figure
out workflows and office cultures from afar your trouble shooting

(00:49):
on your new laptop. Before you even know who does
tech support. You might not know if everyone was meeting
without you. Hopefully, as we near the two month mark,
people have figured it out. But as the economy slowly
opens back up, organizations will start hiring again as more
offices make use of virtual teams. In the future, plenty

(01:10):
of folks will have to figure out how to make
new hires feel welcome when you can't necessarily take them
out to lunch on day one. Fortunately, there are a
few simple ways to do that. Aaron Stewart is the
co founder of the recruitment platform job dot com. Even
before social distancing, job dot com had experimented with virtual work.
Stewart recently shared some practical suggestions with me for what

(01:32):
you should do on a new employe's first day. First,
he says, have a virtual meet and greet. Everyone who
works closely with the new person should get on and
introduce themselves. They should say what they do, a bit
of background to help establish any common interests, and maybe
what they can help with. Depending on your culture, this
meet and greek could be more goofy or more formal,

(01:55):
but it definitely needs to happen so your new hire
can start learning people's names and faces. Second, Stuart says,
as part of this gathering, the new hire should be
added to any invites for calls or meetings they'll need
to be part of in the next week. Forcing people
to think about this keeps them from forgetting to add
the new person for a meeting coming up on Friday. Sadly,

(02:16):
humans aren't always the best at remembering people who aren't
right in front of them, which is the case when
we're all working from home. This mass inviting keeps a
team from getting to Friday, getting on the call, and
then thinking, hey, we forgot about Beth. Finally, if you're
the manager, you need to call the new person. Maybe
call her more than once. You can check in to

(02:38):
see how she's doing, But the main purpose of these
calls is that you want her to reach out if
she's got questions about anything. That's a lot better than
her sitting there suffering in silence. But a new hire
might not know the culture and whether it's okay to
just call show her it is okay by doing it.
Of course, you should definitely includ the new hire in

(03:00):
any social occasions. You can break the ice by introducing
something cool about her that people might like to know.
But the first three steps are key for getting her
folded into the workflow, which is your top priority. If
you have ways for making new virtual hires feel welcome,
I'd love to hear about them. You can write me
at Laura at Laura Vanderkam dot com. In the meantime,

(03:24):
this is Laura, thanks for listening, and here's the succeeding
in the New Corner Office. The New Corner Office is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts, visit
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get your favorite shows.