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Friday Faves is our weekly blog series highlighting a few select pieces from the REG team’s reading lists. You can catch up on past Friday Faves on the archive. 

How to set your new employee up for success

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Jakkii says: Recently, I’ve had a few people share stories with me about starting at a new job in the midst of a pandemic, and how challenging it can be when either everyone or large parts of your team – and, indeed, your entire workplace – are working from home. Who do you go to for which things? Where do you find the information you need? What’s the best method for asking quick questions? And how do you get to know your team and, even harder, build relationships with key people across the business?

It’s easy to overlook the additional challenges of getting off to a good start when you’re not all co-located, and particularly when teams and/or companies haven’t explicitly designed an onboarding experience that accounts for remote and hybrid working. And, even when they have, they’re not necessarily simple challenges to solve. How do you fill in the gaps of casual interaction, of being immersed in the conversations and goings on around you that can offer us more intel than we often realise? How do we ensure our people are equipped to build relationships remotely, and in touch with the right people? And, of course, there are larger questions about whether the organisation’s culture itself is fit-for-purpose when teams are distributed and dispersed.

While there are many things to consider, not all of these are in our direct control. But as leaders, we do have direct influence over the experience of our new hires, and this article has a 5-step approach that anyone can implement to help ensure their new employee gets off to a good start and is able to hit the ground running.

The 5 steps are:

1. Match the new hire with a peer buddy;

2. help the new hire build a social network;

3. set up employee onboarding check-ins once a month for the new hire’s first six months;

4. encourage open dialogue; and

5. meet your new hires on their first day.

How straightforward is that! If anything on there is surprising or revolutionary, well, your organisation might not be as prepared as it can be for supporting both leaders and new employees. But even if it all seems very familiar, I encourage you to make extra sure you’re doing these things with your new employees when you’re not all working together in the office.

There’s plenty more you can do, as well, like being very clear as a team about how you work together with clear guidelines and agreed expectations, especially being explicit about when you’re available, how best to reach one another, and expected response times. But sometimes just having a simple action plan like this one that anyone can implement – and actually implementing and following through with it – is enough to make a significant difference in your new employee’s experience of work and the time it takes them to get up to speed.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Do you use something like this already? Anything you’d add? Or, if you try this with your next hire, I’d love to hear how it goes for you. Let me know in the comments or on social media.

Read: https://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/heres-how-google-knows-in-less-than-5-minutes-if-a-new-employee-will-get-off-to-perfect-start.html

Friday Fives

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Hybrid workplace

• How to foster human connection in a hybrid workforce

• The ‘hybrid office’ could be great. It could also be hell.

• What great mentorship looks like in a hybrid workplace

• Your home life is about to get more complicated. How to manage a hybrid schedule

• 5 principles to guide decision-making when building a hybrid workplace

Remote work and the digital workplace

• How to set up a remote employee for success on day one

• Why companies must be critical of workplace surveillance practices

• Remote work made digital nomads possible. The pandemic made them essential

• Defining the knowledge-centric digital workplace

• Intelligent video lands in the digital workplace

Communication, collaboration, engagement, and culture

• What your company is still getting wrong about an inclusive company culture

• Workplace culture: why now is the time to rethink your office

• Investing in company culture: the key to a successful organization

• Synchronous or asynchronous? That is the collaboration question

• How to expose a company’s toxic culture in a job interview

Community management, moderation and misinformation

• Facebook is too big to moderate

• How to take community building to the next level: a case study with Motor Culture Australia

• UK online safety bill ‘a recipe for censorship’, say campaigners

• Youtube is making the covid vaccine-hesitancy problem way worse, while ‘Disinformation Dozen’ test Facebook’s, Twitter’s ability to curb vaccine hoaxes

• Spotify’s next dilemma: grappling with hate speech

Bonus: QAnon channels delete their own YouTube videos to evade punishment

Privacy and data

• The child safety problem on platforms is worse than we knew

• There’s a better way to protect yourself from hackers and identity thieves

• German regulator bans Facebook from using WhatsApp data

• After update, only 4 percent of iOS users in U.S. let apps track them

• WhatsApp will turn your account into a useless zombie if you don’t accept its new privacy policy

Big Tech

• Tesla is casting a spotlight on the government’s struggle to keep up with self-driving cars

• Google plans to double AI ethics research staff

• Facebook is pretending it cares how its platform affects the world

• She broke her NDA to speak out against Pinterest. Now she’s helping others come forward

• Opinion: The meltdown at Basecamp shows even small tech firms are sociopathic

Social media

• How did we get so stuck on here?

• Everything is becoming paywalled content—even you

• Why following more female athletes could help young girls have a more positive social media experience, while gender expression on Instagram is a sign of progress says trans and gender-diverse community

• The strange, soothing world of Instagram’s computer-generated interiors

• Reddit announces new creative strategy agency to help brands maximize their on-platform campaigns

Bonus: Open for a surprise: The endearing results of Twitter’s new image crop

Extras

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This is interesting: The weird science of the placebo effect keeps getting more interesting

Things that make you go hmmm: Politician’s Zoom background can’t hide fact that he’s actually driving

Space: Perseverance: meet the driver who navigates the Mars rover

Podcast: Eat Sleep Work Repeat: No opting out – the realities of politics in the workplace

Friday playlist: Your favourite coffeehouse

Sydney Business Insights – The Future, This Week Podcast

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This week: Basecamp banning employees having political and societal discussions at work points to new challenges for leaders deciding what their business stands for.

Sandra Peter (Sydney Business Insights) and Kai Riemer (Digital Disruption Research Group) meet once a week to put their own spin on news that is impacting the future of business in The Future, This Week.

The stories this week

09:56 – A tech company bans employees from talking politics at work

Listen: https://sbi.sydney.edu.au/politics-at-work-on-the-future-this-week/