Best Practices for Inclusive Onboarding
Building an inclusive hiring strategy is a crucial step in creating a more diverse, welcoming, and productive work environment. But, if you want to empower your new recruits to perform at their best and ensure they’ll stick around to be part of your organization for the long haul, it’s just as paramount that you integrate equity and inclusion in your onboarding processes.
We recommend the following steps to leaders, DEI professionals, and Human Resource employees who are tasked with onboarding for new hires.
1. Prepare Your Team
The addition of new employees may change the dynamics of workplace teams, departments, and depending on the size of your company, perhaps even the entire organization. Be open in communicating with existing team members about how the new hire will contribute to the organization. Set clear expectations about who they will work with and report to, what their responsibilities are, whether they’ll be taking on anyone else’s work, and what that handoff process will look like.
Pay special attention to this initial step if your office operates on a remote or hybrid model, as new employees can easily fall through the cracks without getting to know their coworkers or becoming a part of the larger culture. To guard against that pitfall, identify potential mentors and/or sponsors within your company who may be able to provide initial support to new recruits. Also, if you have them, be sure to connect new employees with leaders from employee resource groups (ERGs) and/or business resource groups (BRGs) so they can learn more about the groups that are available and begin taking part.
