Pre- and onboarding

In the pre-boarding phase, it is important to maintain the new employee's motivation for the new job and the organisation. For example, you can invite future colleagues to lunch and/or give them a tour of the workplace, even if the new employee has not yet started.
The pre-boarding should also include an introduction to your organisation. Send interesting learning materials that introduce your department or centre, such as strategy and good stories that you are proud of.

Pre-boarding creates a sense of security and can help new employees more quickly feel a sense of belonging to the workplace, which helps to give new employees a good start, allow them to settle into the new job more quickly and work effectively - and not least, it can help to retain new employees in the longer term.

Onboarding is much more than welcoming an employee on their first day of work or the checklist of practical things that need to be in place.
Onboarding should be a structured process, and you should have a concrete onboarding strategy that can be used each time a new employee is hired. This is both to make it easy for the organisation and colleagues, but also to help new employees on board in the best possible way. Ideally, this should be few and simple measures that are observed, rather than extensive processes that neither managers nor colleagues have the time or energy for on a daily basis.

It is important that the new employee feels they are the focal point of the process. Therefore, onboarding must be adapted to the employee and it must be clear that the focus is on them.

It is a management responsibility  to share the onboarding strategy with the new employee's colleagues and actively involve them in the strategy, while employees need to be prepared to integrate new colleagues and help ensure they become part of your culture and communities. That is why everyone needs to contribute to making the onboarding process the best it can be.

A good tool is to set up mentoring schemes in which colleagues are given a role in the onboarding process, such as social mentor and professional mentor. The social mentor should ensure that the new colleague becomes part of the the social community and thus feels more secure at work. The professional mentor must ensure that the employee has someone to spar with, gets to grips with concrete work tasks and professional networks.