In a previous post, I talked a bit about what managers can do before an employee starts to help ensure their success. Now let’s focus on what you can do after they start work to improve onboarding. The first 100 days are an important time and they can slip by before you know it. Best to be prepared.

If you followed our advice for pre-hire onboarding, you’ll have already chosen a mentor for your new hire. Now’s the time to make the formal introduction and make sure you’ve chosen well. Check in with each party after a day or so to make sure they feel comfortable with each other. There’s nothing worse than a mentoring partnership that falls flat.

Get input from the new employee as you go over her 100-day goals with her. This list should include both gimme and stretch goals. Take the time to go over each of these goals in detail. Gimme goals help build confidence and give the new hire a feeling of accomplishment. They can certainly be important, but they’re not overly difficult. Stretch goals are the opposite. They really push the hire to excel. You can both learn a lot about each other by how the new employee handles these goals. Make sure the list includes some goals in each category as well as some in the middle.

Keep the lines of communication open during this time – and always. This is when your communication patterns start getting set so it’s really smart to be open and available to your new hire now. Graciously accept and ask for feedback.

The formal announcement, however that is usually done in your office, shouldn’t be taken lightly. Whether it’s in email or a company newsletter or in person, be sure to highlight important and relevant work experience. A word of caution about humor here. Oftentimes, people will use humor as a way to break the ice in announcing a new employee. That can work, but it can also fall flat and it’s the employee who loses. It’s probably better to let the new person’s sense of humor shine on his own. What he really needs is an accurate picture of his accomplishments to be shared with his new team.

Integrate the new hire with the team by setting up meetings and ice-breakers. Information about who “this new person is” should be shared prior to arrival, now’s the time to put the name to the face via personal introductions. The new hire’s mentor can handle introductions companywide and lunch during the first week. The manager should handle introductions within the department. Don’t forget to check-in with these people during the first 100 days to see how things are working out. You want to know as soon as possible if signs of trouble pop up.

If your company has a formal new employee orientation, make sure your new hire is signed up.

It’s not difficult to improve onboarding during the first 100 days for your new hire. Just keep in mind these things:

• Make sure you’ve chosen the right mentor for your new employee.
• Go over the new hire’s 100-day goals.
• Keep lines of communication open by asking for feedback.
• Formally announce the new hire, focusing on past relevant experience.
• Integrate the new employee with the team.

A few simple ways to improve onboarding.

Starting a new job is a high stakes time – for the new person as well as the employer. Everyone wants things to go well and usually they do. But what can you do, as an employer/manager, to improve onboarding and make sure your new hire is a success?

It’s never too early to begin assimilating someone. Once a new hire has accepted the position, you can start work on getting that person up-to-speed even if they won’t be in the office for a couple of weeks. How deep you go here depends on the level of the hire you’re making. It’s pretty reasonable to expect that senior people will invest quite a bit of their own time to start off right; it’s less realistic to expect that of an assistant. But you can make positive steps for any level new hire. And it’s smart to talk about this with the employee in both the interview and during the hire conversations. Setting expectations here is key.

So, what information should you share before the start date? Begin by giving the new hire information about the company and its benefits. This is important stuff most people won’t have time to sink into once they’re on board. Provide benefits information, company history, company structure, vision, and goals, any relevant press articles. Give them a good sense of the environment they’ll be walking into on Day 1.

Be sure you share the unwritten rules. For example, if no one at your company ever arrives after 9 am, tell your new person that. Think about things like dress codes, email etiquette, meeting protocol, communication methods. If you know the senior VP never answers email on Friday and that if you really need something answered you wait to send until Monday morning, make sure your new hire knows that, too. These are the things that it can take a new employee the longest time to figure out –  in part because they’re often arbitrary – but where missteps really come home to roost.

Then, move to the more specific. This includes department staff introductions, direct report meetings (I’d suggest setting a few of these up before Day 1), specific job description, department goals and metrics, department yearly plans. By the time the person walks into the office, she should be well-versed in strategy of the company and the department.

Pick out a mentor for your new employee and provide that person with as much information about the new hire as possible. In this situation, a mentor is someone who helps the new person by answering her questions – large and small – and makes sure they have someone to eat with on that first day at lunch. Small touches like this mean a lot during your first 100 days.

Lastly, make sure the office setup is ready for the employee on Day 1. This could take some perseverance and planning on the manager’s part, but, again, it makes a huge impression on the newcomer if they have to sit in the cafe their entire first week.

Starting an employee off on the right foot is not brain surgery. A few simple things can improve onboarding and their chances for success:

• Start early.
• Share company history, vision, goals.
• Share benefits information.
• Provide insight on unwritten company rules.
• Make staff introductions.
• Provide department goals and metrics.
• Pick out a mentor.
• Make sure office setup is handled.

I’ve been thinking about what companies focus on improving workplace communication and what companies don’t. It’s probably true that most – if not all – CEOs would say they value good communication and want their employees to be well-informed about company strategies. What they do about it is another matter.

The recession has only complicated the situation as businesses focus intently on what they need to do to get and retain customers. It’s easy to see how keeping people informed about company initiatives, new projects, shifts in strategies could fall by the wayside. But if you play that scenario out, it’s pretty clear that today’s slacker communicators are tomorrow’s failed businesses.

The fact is that people make companies successful. And making sure your people know how your company plans to get through challenging times is the only sure way they can help you do it.

Here are a five things to keep in mind about improving workplace communication:

1. More is better. This is good news. It means that you don’t have to spend much time at all thinking about blowing it with the frequency of your interaction with your employees. People want to know what’s going on and they generally want to help. Give them that opportunity and tell them as much as you can, as frequently as you can.

2. Vary your medium. We have a zillion ways to interact with people today – face to face meetings, video conferencing, YouTube, blogging, email, Twitter. Use that to your advantage and chose different mediums based on your message.

3. Honest talk breeds engagement. You know how this works – the more open you are with people, the more open they are in return. And that’s something you can use to build a great company.

4. Don’t fret about your image. This one takes a bit of a leap of faith, but it’s also sound advice. CEOs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Steve Hannah of the Onion, Jason Fried of 37 Signals have all proven that if you talk honestly and with conviction, you will be rewarded with a stellar and more authentic image than if you’d spent a lot of time and money planning it.

5. Talk to your people as the grown-ups they are. As much as you can, check the legal filters at the door. Sure, there may be a time or two when you’ll get bitten by something leaking out when you didn’t want it to, but resist the temptation to let that affect what you say and talk to your people as the adults they are. As a reward, you’ll attract better, smarter people and build a better, smarter company.

And if you’re a CEO who thinks that you have more important things to do than to make sure that everyone – EVERYONE – in your company knows you current strategies and market positioning, I suggest it might be time to think again.

Photo by Pinkmoose.

It’s been just over six months since we launched JomoWire and began talking with you about feedback in the workplace.  On several occasions, and particularly when conversing with people who defend the performance review as an effective feedback tool, I’ve been known to predict that the performance review will be dead by 2020.

I would be delighted to be wrong — about the date.  There is a movement afloat that encourages a more rapid death.  Just listen to Samuel Culbert, Professor of Management at UCLA Anderson School of Management, in last month’s Wall Street Journal “Yes, Everyone Really Does Hate Performance Reviews”.  Samuel’s research is consistent with ours — everyone does them, yet almost everyone hates them.  He continues, “Don’t get me wrong: Reviewing performance is good; it should happen every day. But employees need evaluations they can believe, not the fraudulent ones they receive. They need evaluations that are dictated by need, not a date on the calendar. They need evaluations that make them strive to improve, not pretend they are perfect.”  Yup.

And then yesterday’s New York Times article “Time to Review Workplace Reviews” which argues that annual reviews not only create a high level of stress for workers, but end up making everybody — bosses and subordinates — less effective at their jobs, eliminating any hope for learning or striving to improve.

Gary Namie, Director of The Workplace Bullying Institute, says, ‘Throw it out, because it becomes a very biased, error-prone and abuse-prone system.  It should be replaced by daily ongoing contact with managers who know the work and who can become coaches.”  We would add peers, customers and partners to that list.

If you have a case for keeping the annual performance review alive, then we want to hear about it.  If not, perhaps you’ll be the hero who questions the why and gets rid of it once and for all in your organization.

Check out Samuel’s book “Get Rid of the Performance Review”, and JomoWire for ways to move beyond the annual performance review.

One of the greatest challenges for managers who’ve recently made new hires is to stay engaged enough with the employee to tell them as soon as possible when something goes off-track. It’s totally understandable that a manager would rather a) give a new employee “the benefit of the doubt” and b) stick their head in the sand and just get some work done. After all, they’ve just spent all this time interviewing and then training a new employee. It’s so much easier to let it just ride for a while, and hope for the best. Isn’t it?

The short answer is No. The first 100 days are incredibly important for a new employee. Reputations get made. Styles get ingrained. Relationships form. Work habits develop. And if a new employee is running roughshod over cultural norms within your workplace, it can spell disaster for that worker. And then the manager will have to spend all that time interviewing and training someone new.

The clear answer is to keep up transparent communication with the new worker. Along the lines of: If you see something, say something. No matter how big or small. It doesn’t have to be a heavy performance discussion. Managers can use humor, or be self-deprecating. Honesty works, too. It just needs to be clear that the manager has the employee’s best interest at heart. And expects them to succeed. The more frequently this is done, the easier it is and the better the new employee takes the feedback.

It probably is worth mentioning that managers shouldn’t only give feedback for negative traits during this important time. If the new employee is kicking some ass, managers should be the first to point that out!

New employees are also a good source of feedback for managers. Here’s someone without any history who can give managers fresh views about what’s working and what’s not in the department. Savvy managers will take advantage of that and keep lines of two-way communication open.

So, remember these tips for transparent communication with your new hire:

1. Give feedback often  – for both positive and negative things.
2. Don’t overlook cultural gaffes; they are often the most damaging over time.
3. Fight the urge to “give the benefit of the doubt” and respect your new hire enough to tell them straight when something they’ve done seems “off.”
4. Open the door to two-way feedback from your new employee. You might learn something important.