When you’re bringing on a new member to your team, it’s important to set them up for success. You want employees to be informed about your business, inspired to do great work and equipped with the tools they need to do their job well. We just brought on two new employees to MarketBeat. In this video, I walk through how we prepared our new hires for their first day, taught them about the company and got them going on their first assignments.
Here is a rough script I used for the video if you prefer to read. Pardon the typos.
In this video, we’re going to talk about bringing on new employees. MarketBeat brought on two new employees last week. and I wanted to cover what we did to help our two new employees get going.
I think it’s important to give employees a really good start in the company and set them up for success. I think in too many cases employees are handed some logins and a computer and told to get going without enough training. You’re spending a lot of money on payroll when you bring on an employee and you want them to have a good understanding of your organization, what it stands for and how it operates before you have them do any work.
So, here’s what we did. First, we made sure we had all of the paperwork covered ahead of time. When you hire a new employee, you have to have them to complete a W4 form so you know what to withhold for a taxes, an I9 form to verify they are legally allowed to work in the US and you have to report them as new employees to the state for purposes of unemployment insurance. MarketBeat has a health plan, so we had to register them for that too so they can have health insurance after the first of the year. We got all of these things done ahead of time and that way we could focus on learning about the company on their first day of work and not on paperwork. Is the first thing you want to do at a company fill out paperwork? Probably not.
We also ordered their new laptops ahead of time and made sure they were ready to go on the first day of work. I let everyone pick out their own laptops up to $2,000.00. I figure if I am going to pay a professional salary to an employee, I shouldn’t waste their time by making them deal with a slow or under-powered computer. So, I let them pick out whatever laptop they want that they think they’ll be the most productive with.
We were fortunate enough to have both employees start on the same day, so we had a training and education day that I called MarketBeat university. In the morning we covered the company’s history and its core values. We walked through the organization’s business model, it’s primary revenue sources, who our key partners are and who our key competitors are. We talked about who our customer avatar was. We talked about the role each of us filled on the team and what our general expectations for employees are. We had our two remote employees Skype in and introduce themselves to our local team as well.
We broke for lunch around 11:30 and all ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. At lunch, we talked more about personal stuff. We talked about our families. We talked about our kids. We talked about stuff that people don’t know about us. I learned that Will is a Canadian immigrant and Ryan danced on stage with some band I’ve never heard of.
After lunch, we moved to more hands on things. I gave them a tour of the MarketBeat website and the back-end that powers our business. I showed them through our server setup and how we have built out our customer database. We also setup their development environments so they could start writing code and working on our systems as needed. The last thing that I had them do was start on the first task they had been assigned so they could do a bit of real work while I was there to answer questions.
I also invited my more seasoned employee Rebecca to come to MarketBeat university. She has been working for me for 3.5 years and she said she was very glad she participated because she learned several things about the company she didn’t previously know.
On the second day, I let them both get going on their own days and didn’t bother them until later in the morning and checked in on them to make sure everything was working okay. So, I met up with one of them and hit the other one up on slack to see how it’s going.
Our next in person touch point will be on Monday, I’m recording this on a Thursday, so our remote employees will have a couple of days to work on their assigned projects and we’ll figure out what we’re going to work on in person next week on Monday morning.