That Not-So-Awkward First Day

Your awesome new employee shows up bright and early for her first day at your company.  She’s excited and maybe a little nervous. After all, that first week can be like the first day of high school. Where does she go? Where does she sit? How will she make friends? What if she tries to have lunch at the wrong table and she ends up sitting with the Plastics?

There are a couple of easy, inclusive ways you can help ease those awkward first week jitters:

Buddy up: Here, new employees are asked about their favorite things before they start. Then, they’re paired up with a sidekick-someone with similar interests who can show them the ropes their first few weeks. This includes everything from showing them around the office and introducing them to teams they might not work with, to how to work the coffee machines and printers, to bringing them into a Nerf gun war.

Get personal: Within the first week of being here, new employees answer some questions about themselves, and their responses go out by email blast to the entire company. These “Confessions”, as we call them, include questions like “Do you have any special talents?” and “Do you participate in any volunteer activities?” By going beyond the basic “What’s your name and what do you do?”, coworkers get an instant glimpse into whether Donna might be the next recruit for their cornhole team.

Be seen: During their first company meeting, new employees are brought in front of the company so everyone has a chance to get introduced to them. They also get to read a fact from someone else’s Confession and the company has to guess who the fact is about- whomever guesses it right gets a prize and everyone learns the names of the new faces (and as we’ve seen through impromptu Dougie lessons and beatbox demonstrations, it can also be a chance to show off those aforementioned talents)

By just taking the time to find out a little about your new hire, you can help make her first few weeks totally fetch. How does your company go beyond the norm to welcome new employees?

Editors Note: Candace Nicolls is the Principal Recruiter for Product, Engineering, and Marketing at Snagajob. When she’s not sourcing and interviewing, she’s baking for her coworkers or spreading the word about Snag through networking and community partnerships. Snagajob was awarded Entrepreneur Magazine’s Best Small Company to Work for in America in 2011.

 

Facebook Hires Like Google…Shocker

Word on the street is that Facebook, after realizing that traditional hiring approaches suck and subsequently scratching their heads for awhile, came up with a noteworthy approach to hiring employees. However, it turns out that their approach is the same one Google has been using for years. It’s pretty well documented in fact: Put out really hard puzzles and hire the people who can solve them because they’re obviously smart and smart people make for good hires.

My question is, why is this relatively outdated topic circulating around the web again and making appearances in books with Facebook’s name all over it when Google started it years ago? My guess is that people are sort of over Google and are ready to hear about what some of the fresher, more current tech companies are up to. So even when said fresher companies borrow ideas from Google we’re re-packaging them and giving Facebook credit. Hey, that’s fine by me.

Have any of you stolen borrowed a good Recruiting, Culture, or Engagement idea from another company and successfully implemented it? I’d love to hear your story.

Editors Note: When it comes to her professional life, Marisa Keegan is passionate about three things; employee engagement, employee advocacy, and corporate culture. Her goal is to help business leaders understand the importance of giving their employees a voice. Since leaving her position as Culture Maven at Rackspace, she has joined Modea, a digital services agency, and is helping them shape their Talent Management Strategy. Both of these companies have been nationally recognized as great places to work.

Yup, I’m The New Guy

My first culture and engagement gig was for a small email hosting company where we sat at folding tables, ate Chinese food off each others plates, and wore jeans and tee-shirts every single day. Sometimes people even wore the same t-shirts and jeans every day but that’s a story for a different time.

We were growing quickly and it became painfully obvious every week who the newbies were because at 9am they’d show up at the front door wearing a button up shirt and tie. By 10am the tie would be off and the top button would be undone. But they still stood out like a sore thumb and it wasn’t so much that we cared but they usually felt like a bit of an outsider.

They typically continued to dress up for the first two weeks because, well, most of us have been brainwashed to think that we’re supposed to dress up to go to work. But by the third week they’d start wearing t-shirts and once they got to that point the button-up’s never made an appearance again.

It was the same cycle every time: First day, button-up and tie.  Second day, button-up no tie. Second week, testing out the t-shirt and realizing that it felt ooh-so-good to be comfy at work. The rest was history.

Eventually I decided that I wanted to play a little game called “How Quickly Can The T-Shirt Show”. I pulled together a team of experts and we decided that if we just gave employees the shirt they could wear on their first day, and it was a t-shirt then they’d never wear a single button-up to work…ever. And it worked.

These “Mailtrust Rookie” shirts were the result and, let me tell you, they were a HUGE hit. I actually had to hide them in my office because so many of our current employees wanted one. Before an employee’s first day they were given the t-shirt and told that they could wear it on their first day if they wanted. They always did.

We had them printed almost four years ago and since then the company has morphed, changed names, and grown immensely. The t-shirt stopped being printed about three years ago yet when I went back into their office a few weeks ago to see if I could get a picture…someone was wearing his Rookie shirt with pride!

Your OTHER Significant Other

Ah, Valentine’s Day… a day to show your appreciation for those you care about. Offices everywhere will be awash with flowers and balloons and candy and bobbleheads before we all head out to be with loved ones.

Odds are that since it’s a Tuesday, though, you’ll be spending more time with your cubemate than your significant other today.  You know the one.  That person you can vent to. The one you confide in about that tough manager or ask what you should get your wife for her birthday. You compare budgets and deadlines . You know what he’ll order for lunch. You invite each other to your kids’ birthday parties. You have impromptu pantomimes of cheesy videos at your desk together. It just so happens that this person is the opposite sex. If all of this sounds familiar, you might have yourself a work spouse.

So what exactly is a work spouse? Loosely defined, it’s a co-worker, usually of the opposite sex, with whom you have a close platonic relationship. This friend is someone you can relate to- this person “gets” you because he’s right there living in your world every day, and what makes this relationship unique is that it’s someone you can talk with more openly than other colleagues.

For me, my work spouse was someone with whom I literally shared a cube, then an office. I saw him more than I did any of my family members or other friends. We traveled for work together, we went to company and networking events together, and as a result we became close friends. Even though we no longer work together, we still talk often and I still ask him for advice, both personally and professionally. And I still can’t hear Toto’s Africa on the radio without breaking out jazz hands.

So what about you? Do you have a work spouse? Why or why not?

Editors Note: Candace Nicolls is the Principal Recruiter for Product, Engineering, and Marketing at Snagajob. When she’s not sourcing and interviewing, she’s baking for her coworkers or spreading the word about Snag through networking and community partnerships. Snagajob was awarded Entrepreneur Magazine’s Best Small Company to Work for in America in 2011.

Why Start-Up’s Have More Engaged Employees

The thing I love the most about start-up’s is the energy that you can feel when you walk into the office. There’s a buzz and an unspoken excitement that’s contagious.Why is that?

Start-up’s only have a certain amount of money that they can spend on employees so they tend to hire generalists who can help out in all different areas. But they don’t just hire any generalist. They hire smart, motivated people who are excited by the prospect of working hard and doing whatever it takes to make the company successful.

Because smart, motivated generalists are hired leaders tend to rely on them to help solve problems that lay outside their area of expertise. For example, at a small email hosting start-up that I worked for I was all things HR, Culture, and Engagement but it wasn’t uncommon for me to be brought into a meeting to brainstorm branding strategy, sales initiatives, or operational adjustments. In return, it wasn’t uncommon for me to pull together a room of thinkers to help me solve some of my biggest challenges.

This cross pollination was really exciting, allowed us to gather ideas from smart people of all different backgrounds, and created a really strong energy. Unfortunately, as companies grow so do the silo’s that separate departments. People become more specialized and are relied on less and less for their general intelligence and are only called on to perform in their area of expertise.  Slowly that buzz starts to disappear.

Here’s the take-away: If you are hiring smart employees then chances are they are smart in areas other then their expertise. Break down the silos and start using employees from all areas of the organization to help with creative brainstorming, problem solving, new initiatives. It will send a clear message to those smart employees that they add value across the board and not just within their niche – and to smart, ambitious, overachievers that’s a huge source of motivation.

Editors Note: When it comes to her professional life, Marisa Keegan is passionate about three things; employee engagement, employee advocacy, and corporate culture. Her goal is to help business leaders understand the importance of giving their employees a voice. Since leaving her position as Culture Maven at Rackspace, she has joined Modea, a digital services agency, and is helping them shape their Talent Management Strategy. Both of these companies have been nationally recognized as great places to work.

Pieces of Flair?

I was sitting at my desk the other day, and for some reason I decided to take a look around and count the pieces of company swag in my office. Fifteen. Fifteen pieces in one office, and that’s not counting all the mugs and glasses and shirts I have at home. It made me wonder, is this the equivalent of my fifteen pieces of flair, or is there more to it?

I think the answer is simple- if I didn’t love working here, I wouldn’t be flying our colors. When you foster a culture that your employees are proud to be a part of, they’re going to be your best brand ambassadors. By the time new employees here are done with onboarding, they’ll have at least five or six pieces of branded swag. I think it’s more telling, though, that we can and do buy company gear from our in house store by the boatloads. We’re a passionate bunch, and it’s not unusual to see dozens of folks here walking around in Snagajob shirts every day. There’s no requirement here to do this- people love working here and are proud to be plastered with our logo.

Does the swag itself help to foster the culture of our company, or is the opposite true? Here, I think it’s both. Our swag is emblazoned not just with our logo, but our tagline, and it’s a reminder of what we’re all here to do. It’s fun, colorful, and eclectic… just like us.  It’s also well thought out, tasteful, and high-quality, and that’s one more reason people are excited to show it off.  And we don’t even encourage them to wear thirty-seven pieces.

What do you think? Is swag critical to a great corporate culture?

 

Editors Note: Candace Nicolls is the Principal Recruiter for Product, Engineering, and Marketing at Snagajob. When she’s not sourcing and interviewing, she’s baking for her coworkers or spreading the word about Snag through networking and community partnerships. Snagajob was awarded Entrepreneur Magazine’s Best Small Company to Work for in America in 2011.

Bite Your Tongue

I’ll tell you, one thing I see over and over again with entrepreneurs and small business owners is that they can’t let go…of anything. They love their business so much, feel immense passion for what they’ve created, and have such a strong vision that they spend all their time in the day-to-day workings and end up neglecting the strategy and thought leadership that needs to happen to ensure continued success.

A growing company will never scale if leadership can’t get out of the weeds. It’s  hard, I get that, because we all have a vision for exactly how we want something to be done. We all have an exact way that we’d do it. But the truth is that we don’t have time to do everything that needs to get done in a day. We hire employees so we can free up time to strategize. Yet then we nitpick over minute details…and then we’re back in the weeds because one line of code isn’t how we’d write it, or the painting on the wall isn’t in exactly the right spot, or that one line in the company memo is off, or, or, or…

Face it, no one will ever do things exactly the way you would. The goal is to hire the best employees and hope that they can do the job almost as good as you can. Over-communicate to them your vision, goals, and parameters then set them free.  Let them own the project within the goals you’ve set. And when they come back with the end result ask yourself if they met those goals.

If they met those goals and stayed within the parameters you set then move past the insignificant things that you would have done differently here or there. Bite your tongue, thank them for their hard work, and move on.