A Manager’s Guide to Orientation

The first week on the job can play a crucial role in motivating and retaining new employees. We often spend lots of time and money recruiting and wooing new employees and as soon as they start we turn around and treat them like barely welcome strangers. We need to begin looking at recruiting as only half of the task of hiring. Orientation is the other, often ignored element. Every manager needs to approach orientation using his or her own style, but there are some things that most managers should include. The following list is a “toolkit” of possible things that a manager can do to improve orientation, increase productivity and eventually increase the retention probabilities of new hires.