Psychologically safe orientation strategies

Preparation for orientation is essential so you can share with the employee what they can expect from the experience and give them an opportunity to ask questions or make requests. It’s not unusual for the planned orientation process to be interrupted by work demands. Embed in your plan an opportunity to revisit orientation in 2 to 3 weeks’ time to make up for any part of the process that was missed or overlooked.

You may want to provide a link to Starting a new job for any new hire. This provides them with strategies to deal with stress and to support their own success. You could also copy and modify the content with any job-specific information you want to include. 

On this page, we share strategies and actions you can implement to ensure your orientation process:

• Fosters connection between the employee and their co-workers, leader and the organization. 
• Provides clear expectations of what the employee’s role is and how their performance success will be measured. 
• Gathers information about how they like to receive constructive feedback and ways they like to be recognized for their work. 
• Supports the employee’s continued growth within the company by asking questions to help the organization understand the employee’s goals, and shares resources and opportunities that can help them continue to evolve. 
• Includes support and orientation for those who are not new to the organization but whose position, role or job has changed substantially.

Foster connection

Many employees starting at a new organization, or with a new department or team, may be nervous about meeting new people and creating new work relationships. Here are some strategies and actions you can take to help make these new connections easier.

With the organization

• Create a portal or put together a digital document where new employees can: 
  • Access key links and relevant documentation, such as policies and resources.
  • Understand common jargon and acronyms used in the organization.
  • Know what they can expect from their first day, to help them feel excited them about their new role. 
  • Learn about the current organizational culture and expectations in terms of how people interact. If yours is a psychologically safe organization, you may want to orient new employees to the culture using a free resource like Being a mindful employee.
• Prior to their arrival, have the employee fill out an “About Me” document that asks questions like: 
  • What are your passions, hobbies or favourite activities outside of work? 
    • This can help you understand who the person is behind the employee, and provides follow-up talking points.
• What are your favourite snacks? 
  • You can have some waiting at their workspace or in the staff break area for when they arrive, or send some in a welcome basket to their home. 
• What shows have you binge-watched lately? 
  • This can help generate conversation and provide a topic you can follow up on later.
• What are your go-to coping strategies when stressed?
  • You can tap into these activities to support the employee if they feel overwhelmed at work. 
• What are your go-to hot beverages? 
  • Now co-workers can swap café recommendations or know what to order if they’re planning on treating the employee. 
• New employees will interact and collaborate with various individuals outside of their team. These could be members of other departments, divisions, or locations, as well as regular vendors and clients. Find opportunities to personally introduce the employee to these individuals and take time to share the experience and skills that you value from each individual. 
• Share an enthusiastic and energetic welcome video or presentation with the employee. Make sure it includes the direction, core values, and key objectives to excite the employee about the impact they’ll be making by working in this organization. 
• Also, take time to be specific about the impact that their job role will have on their team, their department, the organization and society. 

With their supervisor

• The employee’s supervisor should reach out to them prior to their first day to introduce themselves and welcome the employee to their team. 
• Treat the employee to a one-on-one coffee chat on their first day if possible. If they’re local to one another, they can meet at a café. If the employee is working virtually or remotely in a different city, consider sending them a gift card to their local café and enjoying a virtual coffee together. 

Additional tips for the supervisor, manager or leader:

• Use straightforward language, avoid jargon and acronyms, and speak at a comfortable pace. 
• Help them understand how people typically interact within the organization.
• Share what you see as the organization's actual (versus written) culture and values.
• Encourage questions and make sure they know who to approach for help or resources.
• Describe a typical day, week or month for their role.
• Clarify your expectations and help them prioritize by understanding what is most important. See Ensure clarity about expectations for more tips.
• Regularly provide visual and written instructions, especially in the first few months. 
• Help them grasp the overall purpose behind certain tasks and remain flexible in adapting approaches. 
• Ensure they have the necessary equipment, tools and resources to do their job well.
• Provide clear and positive feedback when the employee asks questions, shares their opinion, or faces challenges.

With co-workers

• Have the team put together a welcome card, send an email or video welcoming the employee to the team prior to their arrival, or have it waiting for them when they arrive at their workspace, even if that is at their home. 
• Within the first few weeks, have different team members join the employee for coffee chats in-person or virtually. 
  • You could assign each team member to teach something to the new employee. This not only helps accelerate the employee’s learning, it provides a way for the two to connect. 
  • Prepare this before the employee’s first day by adding the chats to their calendar, so when they open their calendar for the first time, the events are already set up for them. The first week in a new organization can feel like a whirlwind of events. By spacing out these chats, it won’t feel like the opportunity to meet team members and connect with them ends after that first week and it can help prevent employees who might be introverts from becoming overwhelmed by too much social interaction. 

Entry and stay interviews  

Organizations naturally aim to keep their employees for various reasons: to sidestep the expenses associated recruiting and hiring, prevent declines in productivity, minimize lengthy turnaround times, and avoid investing time and money in retraining. Retaining employees becomes even more crucial when it involves the organization's standout performers.

Instead of relying solely on exit interviews when employees are already leaving, starting a conversation earlier can help identify potential problems and missed opportunities. Adam Grant, a professor of organizational psychology, recommends these types of interviews and says that when managers conduct them, they build stronger, more productive relationships with employees.

Entry interviews can help understand why employees joined the organization, and stay interviews can provide insights on how to retain them.

The intent of entry and stay interviews is to better understand employees' needs for meaning, growth, and engagement. These stay interviews offer a chance to discover:

• Why individuals enjoy working in the organization
• What they believe is lacking or missing from their work, role, team, or the organization
• Expectations for promotion and development

Potential Entry interview questions:

• What about our organization made you interested in joining?
• What specific aspects of the organization's mission or values align with your own personal or professional goals?
• Can you share any positive impressions you had about the organization's culture or work environment before joining?
• Were there any specific qualities or attributes about the organization that set it apart from other potential employers and influenced your decision to apply?
• How did you learn about the organization?
• Were there any specific job responsibilities or projects mentioned in the job description that particularly appealed to you?
• How did the recruitment process, including interactions with the hiring team, contribute to your positive view of the organization?
• What are your goals over the next 5 years?

Potential Stay interview questions:

• What do you like most about your job?
• What would you most like to see change?
• What could improve in your work environment?
• Are we helping you grow professionally?
• Do you feel like you are on track to successfully reaching your career goals?
• Do you feel comfortable setting boundaries between work and personal life?
• Do your job duties and responsibilities match your original expectations? 
• Can you share some examples of what would keep you at our organization long-term?
• Which organizational values or norms are most important to you? 
• Can you share reasons why you might leave an organization? 
• What problems or gaps do you foresee with this organization?
• What do you see as the difference between stated and actual organization values?
• How could your employer support you in whatever is most important to you outside of work?
• What aspects of your role contribute most to your sense of engagement and fulfillment at work?
• Are there any specific organizational strategies that could enhance your overall employee satisfaction?

Ensure clarity about expectations

• Clearly state the work objectives, tasks, skills, or quotas that need to be reached to be considered successful. 
• Let the employee know the maximum amount of time before they can expect to receive their first job review, and what they can expect from the process, including who will conduct it, where it might be held and what will happen. 
• Ask questions to get an idea of how you can support their success in this new role. Some examples might be:
  • Describe your idea of a great leader. What about a difficult leader?
    • This can help leaders gain an understanding of how they can best support and motivate their new employee, as well as actions or leadership styles to avoid. 
• What do you find most stressful in a work environment, and how do you cope with that stress?    
  • Leaders can’t avoid every employee’s stress triggers at work, but by making ourselves aware, we can be prepared and know how to best support them if or when it happens.
• What do you need from your leader or the organization to be successful?
  • Give them space to share their ideas and solutions, and make note of the role you can take. 
• How do you like to receive feedback at work? 
  • Feedback is part of employee development and when it’s delivered in a supportive way, it helps cultivate trust between the employee and their leader. You could use the Feedback preferences form | PDF to help.
• How do you like to be recognized or rewarded at work? 
  • It’s important to ensure we’re recognizing the employee’s work outcomes as well as their efforts. Knowing how they like to receive recognition makes it feel more genuine when we share it with them. You could use the Recognition preferences form | PDF to help.

Follow up

Supervisors and/or managers should reconnect with the employee on the anniversary of their first week, first month, and first year. They may wish to ask some of the questions suggested for the stay interviews or make it something more casual.

These conversations can help a leader understand how the orientation process is supporting the employee and where the process can continue to be improved. 

It’s also an opportunity for the employee and their leaders to set goals for that first year and create a plan to work towards achieving them. 

The leader and employee should have agreed upon a date for a formal review of their performance to date. Some organizations make that at 3 months or 6 months after being hired. This process could become the structure of an annual review going forward.

• In this review, the leader can share whether the employee is meeting the work objectives, tasks, skills, or quotas shared when they were hired. Describe any that will be put in place going forward.
•  This is also a great opportunity to ask the employee:
  • For feedback on what their overall experience was like with the orientation process, and ways the organization can continue to improve it. 
  • Their overall experience with working relationships with coworkers, other employees, clients or others. 
  • Their current level of stress or concern about meeting their job expectations.
  • What they need from their leader to be successful in their job role. 
  • What their long-term career goals are, and what continuing education or development opportunities they might need to meet them. 

Provide opportunities for growth 

• Create a list of training resources or topics that have supported the success of other employees when they were in a similar role.  Let the new employee know if and how any of these are available to them. This can include free or paid courses, books or websites. The training programs should be spread out throughout the year so new employees have a chance to apply what they’ve learned from one course before taking a new one. 
• Meet key individuals. Host a social event where people from key departments come together and give a short description of what their department does, how they collaborate with other departments, and how their department impacts the organization’s objectives. They can share their employee journey within the company and give new employees opportunities to ask each speaker questions about their role, how they got there, challenges they’ve overcome, and any advice they have. 
• Assign a mentor for each new employee. The mentor can be anyone who is familiar with the organization and would be able to help the employee adjust to the stressors of their job. It would be ideal if the mentor could also support the employees’ growth and development.
• Support access to learning opportunities. If your organization has its own learning management program, or one is available to all employees from an outside source, be sure to host a learning session where new employees are shown how to access the platform, register for courses, and get the most out of the training available to them. 
• Create a cohort. If you have several employees starting new positions at the same time, consider dividing them into cohorts that aren’t specific to department or role. This can be an opportunity for them to foster workplace relationships, community, and support. Consider bringing these cohorts together for a session where you assign a leader to each group and have them hold regular sessions where cohort members can share something that happened that week that felt like a victory. Finally, have each cohort member and the leader take turns sharing a challenge or error and give the other members 5 minutes to share ideas to help them overcome the challenge or resolve the error. This exercise can prevent employees from feeling isolated, help them build strong connections, and reduce any fear that comes with voicing challenges and errors. 

Role changes within the organization

Orientation should also occur when an employee is staying within the same organization but there are substantial changes to their role. Job changes can happen because the individual has been promoted or is making a lateral move, or because the organization is going through structural adjustments like a merger that may lead to the employee moving to a new team, department, or role.

Recognize that these changes and adjustments don’t always occur because the new employee wanted them to. They could be entering this new role feeling uncertain, unprepared, frustrated, or sad to be leaving their old team. 

You may want to share the Career review resource with those who are not sure  whether they want this new role or if they should be looking for something different.

These ideas could help the employee feel supported and set up for success:

• Have the relevant supervisor, manager or leader put together a list of the objectives, tasks, skills, or quotas the employee needs to reach in their new role to be considered successful. 
• Meet with the employee to review the questions below and any of the questions offered in the stay interview before the end of their first week, and then schedule a follow-up meeting within the first 3 months in their new role. They may have answered these questions in their old role, but their answers are likely to have changed. 
  • What do you need from your leader to be successful in this new role?
  • What are you going to do differently to support your success in this new role? 
  • How do you like to receive feedback at work?
    • You could use the Feedback preferences form | PDF to help.
  • How do you like to be recognized at work?
    • You could use the Recognition preferences form | PDF to help.
• Create opportunities for the employee to foster connection with: 
  Their new co-workers, colleagues, or direct reports by setting up coffee chats so they can get to know one another and build strong work relationships. 
  
  • Colleagues they may be collaborating with from different departments, so they can better understand the flow of their work. 
  • Key clients or customers the employee might be responsible for in their new role. 
• Recognize that the first few weeks in this new role will be a transition period for the employee. In addition to learning new things or adjusting to new expectations, they may also be supporting their old team with the task they were once responsible for. Encourage them to protect time to meet with their previous team if necessary. 

Additional resources

• Develop a comprehensive onboarding plan. Organizations can take these ideas and actions from McLean & Company to create a comprehensive onboarding plan for new hires.
• Helping employees manage change. Any organizational change may have an unsettling impact on employees. You can help, through thoughtful planning, effective communication, and engaging employees in exploring how changes can be handled in a psychologically safe way.
• Building trust for leaders. Learn how to show your employees you’re trustworthy by exploring these core competencies and behaviours.
• Employees' role in psychological health and safety. Free online learning program for employees to learn how to contribute to a mentally healthy workplace. This orientation to psychological health and safety in the workplace is for all employees.