The Perfect First Day Checklist for New Hires

Nearly 50% of employees know in the first 10 days whether they will be looking for a new job in the next 18 months. Think about that for just a moment. How critical are those first 10 days? Well, they're very critical to about half of your staff. So, let's make sure we set people up for success with the perfect first day. I'm going to walk you through today the agenda that you can follow to to help create an awesome first day for your new teammate, along with a checklist of things that you can do to make it exciting and fun for everyone involved. So let's go ahead and dive right in to help you create ways to engage, retain, and grow your number one asset, your people.

Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go.

All right, so first up, it's important to make note that the first day is not about filling out new hire paperwork. It is not about sitting down in front of the handbook and reading the handbook. The first day is an emotional event. We want to make sure that we capture that emotion in a positive way and set our teammate up in a way that helps them to not only get in tune with what our vision is, but what our history, our mission, our core values. We really want to set them up in a way that helps to create long-term impact, not just on the first day, but beyond in our employment relationship. So, I'm going to walk you through a checklist that we can go through to create an awesome first day for a new teammate. So first off, we want to provide— I'm going to link this checklist in the comments as well. So if you're listening to this on Spotify, make sure you come check out the YouTube channel where you can get the link in the comments. So you can also check out the video where you can see my smiling face talking to you about this awesome first day checklist that I literally just executed yesterday. Awesome first day with one of our new teammates, Miss Becca. So excited to welcome her to the team. And so I thought it'd be appropriate to share this with y'all. And you can steal some things and hopefully share some things in the comments that work really well for your company. So first off, you want to have the personalized welcome. So we want to have the welcome kit. We want to have the swag. We want to have the company t-shirt, the branded stuff. Welcome them with some things that are relevant to them. One thing we add in there is I'll put a handwritten welcome note to them to make sure they feel at home when they come in. You can also print out a copy of things like your core values, other relevant material. You know, one idea I really like that we've started to steal from Disney Disney. I took their Disney leadership course a few years ago, and they have symbols and icons for all of their core values and the behaviors that they want to encourage. And so they give folks kind of a manual explaining where these icons came from. And I love that. It was just a way to tie some things back to your core values, which I'm going to talk more about here in just a moment. If you're a big decorating company and you like to decorate the workspaces, this is your time to do it, right? Put a welcome sign featuring the, you know, if you got a mascot, if you've got other symbols that are relevant, include maybe a small plant or fun desk accessories if you're not as much into that. But again, just create a welcoming workspace and make sure that it's ready for the new teammate. And you do want to reach out to your team ahead of time. One of the things that we do is we send out a team, a team email where we copy everyone and give them the opportunity to welcome the individual before they come on board. We'll also put their name up on whiteboards and say welcome and try to put as much sort of Easter eggs throughout the office where we can to welcome that new teammate and create that personalized welcome environment. And then finally, if you don't have one of the other things we're going to talk about in a moment, either a team lunch or team happy hour scheduled for later in the day, set up a welcome breakfast or coffee, even if it's virtual, just a good opportunity to get to know each other, maybe set up some icebreaker questions ahead of time to just give folks the opportunity to open up and get to know each other a little bit better. So, The personalized welcome is the first thing, right? We want them to feel welcome as soon as they walk in the door and know that we were prepared for them to be there, which is most critical. So next up, let's talk about smooth onboarding. So the first day is just a part of an overall onboarding process that should last 30, 60, 90 days. And so we want to have a structured, clear onboarding schedule that talks about training, that talks about the different outcomes that we're expecting for a teammate, key meetings with different departments. You know, scheduling breaks. And so we want to have a schedule for the day and an outline for what the schedule is going to be for the first week and 30 days as well. We've got to make sure all the technology is set up. There's nothing worse or more bush league. I remember my first job at a Fortune 500, the first day that I showed up, I went to go sit down at my desk. They didn't have my computer ready. They weren't really expecting me. You know, we spent all day scurrying around just trying to get my stuff and they kind of passing me from one person to another just to like, you know, burn eggs and have me busy for a while. Make sure they know you're ready, have the technology set up, have the schedule ready, and have a role overview. So for us, you know, if you start to watch some of our other videos, you'll see when we talk about our pre-hire checklist and our pre-hire planning, right from the interview all the way through to the 12 months in the job, We want the outcomes and the details of the job to be the same. So when we're interviewing you and we're talking to you about, hey, here are the expectations for the role, the goalposts don't move on the second week unless there's some real material changes in the business. But that shouldn't happen that quickly, right? Not without buy-in from the teammates. Ensure they have a clear understanding of their role, responsibilities, immediate goals, and those are aligned with— how those align with your core values and your company goals. So we want to give them a role overview, pull that up into the high level., we also want to set them up with a one-to-ones with their manager, get those on the schedule day one, make sure they understand what the one-to-one cadence is, what the goal setting looks like, and just that overall expectations of how we manage and set expectations and performance management as well. That's number 2 for set up a smooth onboarding. We want a personalized welcome, smooth onboarding, and then we want an engaging start. So what this means is somebody from the executive level. For us, we're a small business. I'm the CEO. I sit down with every new hire on their first day. I walk through the company mission, our vision, our values. I share stories of when people recognize our values. I walk through the history, what's changed, why it changed, and then where we're going and what could change along that path. But here's the most important part, right? When I'm sharing that vision, when I'm talking about where we're going to be in 3 to 5 years, I want to make sure I'm sharing what's important to this individual. What does that mean for you and your career? Why does company growth mean growth for you? And how does that align with some of the things you told me during the interview process that will help you to achieve your career goals? And I think it's really important. One thing we've learned over the last couple of years is that we used to have a 10-year vision and we would share that. And it's very blurry for everybody, right? And nobody thinks in 10-year terms anymore. So it's very important that you're sharing more of that 3 to 5-year vision because that's somewhere where they could say, hey, look, maybe I will be here for 5 years. 10 years is like, ugh, I mean, what are the chances of somebody staying in a job for 10 years? Pretty slim, right? So make sure that you're giving them something that they can see clearly when it comes to the vision and where they fit in that vision. Then next up, as part of that, you know, you want to give them a tour of the physical and virtual space. So where are the things? Where are the bathrooms? Where's the coffee? Where are the snacks? You know, where are the supplies if I need them? Make yourself at home. Make sure they know where to make themselves at home. If there are anything they shouldn't be making themselves at home with, give them a tour of the physical and virtual space if it makes sense as well. So that's one piece. So kind of step 3, the engaging start, get that executive level presence involved. And then next up is social integration. So this could not be more important. When we talk about onboarding, we're talking about documentation we need to complete. We're talking about integration into our team, and we're talking about socialization into our team as well, in addition to the training and performance management we need to do. But socialization is critical and a great way to start it out on day 1 because it's fun for everybody. So we have some icebreaker activities that we do with the whole team. We went to a team lunch yesterday, had great conversation. Everybody got the opportunity to let their hair down, get together, you know, chat with one another, but also get to meet the new teammate, learn more about her. And this is a great opportunity on day one also to set the expectation with everybody on the team of who should be reaching out to set one-to-one meetings, just to get to know you meetings. We always encourage everybody in the company to set 15 minutes with the new hire, just a simple get to know you conversation. Of, you know, what we do, how we do it, you know, where are you from, how many kids you have, all that fun stuff. Great opportunities, especially for those people that maybe don't get to work together as often. We really want to set the expectation on that first day that we're a full team, regardless of if our departments work hand in hand every single day. We are still a team working for a common goal with a common vision. And then finally, so past this, once we move this, we want to start to look at what does the continuous support model look like? Past day one. So we recommend a buddy system, and this is basically assigning a mentor. I have a hard and fast rule that every employee should have a person inside the company that they can, they can express their concerns to in a confidential manner. And it's somebody that cannot fire them, right? Somebody that has no influence over their pay, somebody that has no influence over their performance management, somebody that they can just, you know, ask the stupid question. Share the frustration, and it's not going to pop back up later in a performance review. Everybody deserves it. So make sure when you're thinking about it, their, their mentor, their buddy shouldn't be their supervisor. Find somebody else who they can talk to that cannot fire them. And then finally, you also get those regular check-ins. You know, you're going to have those management one-to-one check-ins, but also yourself. If they don't report directly to you or they report to one of your leaders, schedule time on your calendar to follow up. Check in, make sure that they're feeling comfortable, see how you can serve them, see how you can be an active participant in their development and growth and create that open feedback loop that we need with our teammates. So those are the big buckets that we're looking at. We want to make sure we set up a personalized welcome for our new hire. We want to make sure we've got a smooth onboarding schedule and workflow and we're sharing what that's going to look like with them. We want to make sure we have an engaging start by getting them wrapped up into our mission, vision, and values right from day one. We want to start to socially integrate that teammate into our team. And then we want to set up what the continuous support mechanisms are going to look like. And if you can do all that, you're going to set somebody up for a wonderful first day, and you're going to take advantage of that emotional opportunity to create positive emotions around the organization, which are going to drive up your employee retention, engagement, and all the things that we're trying to do with a fantastic onboarding program. So, if you add some things to this from your first day, what does your perfect first day look like? Share it in the comments, share it with us on LinkedIn as you reply to some of these posts. We appreciate you. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Matt Beatty. Make sure you click that subscribe button. If you're listening on Spotify, please, please, please hit 5 stars on your player of choice. It's the least you can do. We crank out a ton of free content. If you listen this far, then clearly you're enjoying it. So just take that 2 seconds to press the button. It would help us tremendously. Thanks so much. Have an awesome day.