Team Building Tips for Your New Hires

You’ve finally gotten to that stage in your business journey where you were able to hire a team. While you’re both ecstatic about this new opportunity, you as a founder are thinking about how to aid your new hires to work well as a team. Good team work means high job satisfaction early on (so reduced employee turnover with better relationship building), great communication that’s crucial for project quality and completion, and creates a sense of belonging. Since it’s important to have a great team to help your business become more successful and reduce employee turnover, here are a couple of helpful tips that can help with team building for your new hires.

Onboarding and Integration

Your new hires are definitely worrying about first impressions and this is something you should worry about as well. It’s crucial that new hires feel properly welcomed, mentored, and informed when coming into your company for the first time. You’ll want to ensure that they’re clear on their role, day-to-day tasks, have access to resources, and have a superior or experienced employee they can reach out to for guidance in their first week or two. Here’s how you can ensure this happens:

1. Create a Company Guide for New Hires

One of the best ways to help your new hire feel a lot more confident and welcomed is to provide them with a company guide that can be quickly referenced. Think of it like providing a crash course of what your company uses and references day to day. It should include things like links to role-relevant documents, guides, resources, and contacts. This makes sure new hires have everything they need to work well and efficiently.

2. Mentorship and Guidance

New hires, especially in entry level positions, will often come with lots of questions and not a lot of confidence. This is where they need your and your team’s support. You can do this through making sure they know they can reach out to you whenever they need to and by having 1:1 check-ins with them. You can also assign a more experienced member of your team to mentor the new hire for a week or two. This lets new hires know they’re not alone and that your company values them doing a good job by taking time to mentor them.

3. Assign a Meaningful Contribution

Your new hire isn’t just a new employee; you’re welcoming a new team member to contribute to your company’s mission. However, your new hire may not feel that way, especially when there are other more experienced team members and they’re still learning the ins and outs of your business. So, to really drive home that they’re someone you added to the team because of their talents and skills, make the first task they complete or project they contribute to something meaningful or important to the business’ progress. They should feel like they’re an important part of the team as well, that they’re relied on for what they do, and not just someone being told what to do.

Team Building Exercises

At a first glance, team building exercises may seem like you and your team are just having fun on company time, but these activities take minutes to complete and can improve teamwork altogether. The better your team knows one another and has shared positive experiences with each other, the better your team will communicate, collaborate, and be engaged with the company. This is also how you can establish this early on by doing these when onboarding new employees.

Of course, you can tag on fun questions that your team should answer at the end of their introductions in meetings or play games like two truths and a lie. But if you’re looking for some other activities, here is a list of 21 activities that help welcome new hires. You can also take personality, communication styles, and leadership quizzes to share in meetings as well.

Why It Matters

Welcoming and considerate onboarding combined with low-pressure social activities can really help with integrating every new hire into your company, making them confident in their role, and create camaraderie between all of you. It may not seem as vital as marketing or financing your business, but it’s one of the main things that will make sure that the team you worked so hard to gather will remain to properly support your business to keep it a success. While there were costs to start and maintain, don’t forget there are employee turnover costs too, so this might be more important than you realize.

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