Welcoming a New Team Member During Lockdown 

We have had the pleasure of welcoming two new team members during lockdown at Embryo, Daniel our website developer, and Hannah our Marketing Executive. Both of whom have had to adjust to a brand new company with a completely new team whilst in the comfort of their own homes, which I can’t even imagine doing myself. I imagine it must have been very overwhelming and extremely hard to get to grips with new processes and platforms without having people with you to show you in person.

For most businesses out there, having to welcome new team members over zoom or google hangouts is completely abnormal for us and it means that we have to think slightly differently when it comes to delivering your typical face to face staff induction on their first day. I wanted to make sure that our new team members were well prepared for their first day as part of #TeamEmbryo and knew exactly what they were doing before even starting with us.

A few ways you can prepare for this are:

• Keep in contact with them as much as possible in the run up to their start date even if it is a quick call to say hi and see how they’re doing or if they’re excited for their first day! This can go a long way when people are feeling lonely as it is being stuck at home all the time.
•  Set a plan out for their first day with their schedule on so that they know exactly what they will be doing throughout the day. For example:

Morning schedule: 

8:45 am- Team call via Google Hangouts

9:00 am – Complete new staff induction documents that are in your inbox

10:00 am – Video call staff induction with Operations Manager

11:30 am – Take a good nosy at our website and workflow management system Notion

12:00 pm- Lunch for 1 hour

Afternoon schedule

1:00 pm – Call with your line manager

2:00 pm – Individual team calls or workflow tasks set by line manager

5:00 pm – Last team call of the day

Communication Channels

Make sure your business has a communication channel in place like Slack, or Skype so that you can easily communicate with everyone at any time throughout the day. It’s really important that the new team members can ask as many questions as possible rather than having numerous calls every time they want to ask something.

Team Coffee Breaks

Get your team to organise individual coffee break meetings with each new team member so that they can get to know each other in the business and understand what the different departments do day to day. This can be really helpful particularly if your business offers quite technical services such as SEO and PPC. It will also help to make the new employees feel much more settled in and comfortable especially when having to go on video calls with all these new faces staring at you (it would certainly make me nervous). Google hangouts is a perfect tool for this if your organisation already uses G-suite.

Ask Questions

Lastly, at the end of their first week, make sure you give them a mention as a well done for adjusting to the business and working from home. Make sure you ask them questions to see if there is anything they need for the following week or anything they don’t quite understand. Offering help and support can go a long way in times like this where many people are experiencing mental health problems during lockdown which is completely understandable during this tough time we are seeing.

Keep up to date with our careers page as we’re currently looking for an experienced Social Media Executive to work closely with our Social Media Manager to create campaigns for many of our lovely clients. Get in touch today on: 0161 327 2635.