Category Archives: Business Tips

Online Reviews: Should You Strive for a Perfect Five?

In today’s age, online reviews and ratings can make or break a business. Potential customers look to ratings to determine whether or not they want to support a business. With all that pressure, striving for a perfect five-star rating can be tempting. However, is that always the best approach? Let’s dive into the complexities of online reviews and how they can impact your business.

Five Star Reviews Only!

Firstly, it’s important to note that a perfect five-star rating isn’t necessarily the goal. While it may look impressive, it may appear fake to consumers browsing the web. A mix of ratings ranging from three to five stars can be more beneficial to your business. A mix of ratings shows potential customers that the reviews are authentic and will provide a well-rounded view of what to expect.

Quality Over Quantity

In addition to mixed ratings, quality should always come first over quantity. While an abundance of five-star reviews can look impressive, the content within the review truly matters. Customers aren’t looking for generic praise. They want specific examples of what made their experience great. Genuine reviews can truly paint a picture of what customers can expect from your business and are much more valuable than a high quantity of generic, uninformative reviews.

Responding to Negative (& Positive) Online Reviews

While we recommend responding to both positive and negative reviews, negative review responses are even more essential to your business’s online rating! Respond to negative reviews with understanding and a willingness to make things right. This effort to resolve or correct a negative experience can help change a customer’s perception of your business. This type of response shows that you take feedback seriously and are willing to go above and beyond to provide a positive experience. If you can “make it right” in the eyes of the customer, ask them if they would be willing to update their rating and review!

Where to collect reviews?

In terms of where to focus your reviews, it depends on your business.

  • Google My Business is a popular platform for reviews, allowing businesses to appear in Google searches and maps.
  • However, if your business has a strong social media presence, Facebook reviews can be just
  • as impactful.
    No matter what platform they are on, keep an eye on reviews and respond promptly to any feedback.

In the end, the focus should be on providing exceptional service rather than striving for a perfect five-star rating and listening to the feedback provided, both good and bad! Remember these tips and watch as your review ratings naturally improve over time.

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Marisa Lyon
Marisa is the Finance and Marketing Manager at Innereactive, and we are so grateful to have her. She enjoys helping businesses find the right solution for their marketing needs.

 

Increasing a Team’s Commitment to Performance Goals

The beginning of every year starts the same. We set performance goals for the upcoming year. Call them New Year’s Resolutions, initiatives, focuses, or objectives. We are inclined to establish them year after year, even when past years have had little or no success. This is true for personal and professional goals. So how do we increase the likelihood that the goal will be accomplished? Increase the team’s commitment.

The Basics of Setting Performance Goals

To increase your team’s commitment to performance goals, we must ensure all goals pass the SMART goals test. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. All performance goals should have a clear definition of success and a process for measuring progress. They should also be realistically possible with other action items taking place in your life, align with your life purpose, values, and long-term plan. And finally, set a target date for the completion of your goal.
Take these two goals for example:

  • “I am going to lose weight this year” is a goal.
  • “I am going to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year and will track my progress by logging weekly weigh-ins on my Google Fit app” is a SMART goal.

Don’t Tackle Too Much At Once

Outline all of your company’s objectives and attempt to rank them in order of importance. Chances are, you came up with a long list of objectives and want to rank each one as the most important. You are not alone, but to succeed and increase your team’s commitment, you must limit the number of goals you focus on. Creating one or two clear priorities allows each team member to focus and dedicate their energy to completing one goal instead of taking baby steps on many goals. Most importantly, be willing to course correct or even drop the goal as new information and priorities present themselves. There is no faster demotivation for a team than having to continue to work on a no longer significant goal.

Except maybe course correcting or dropping goals too quickly or often. Explore what has changed with your team so they understand the need for the charge course. And don’t course correct or drop goals for the “new, more interesting initiative.”  If you have been strategic in your planning and know what a new commitment will cost you, then you can confidently refuse new opportunities. Keep track of those new exciting initiatives to consider when setting future goals.

Ask Team Members to Help Set Performance Goals

Selecting and shaping goals should be a team effort. When possible, collect team input on company objectives and ranking of importance. In larger companies, including the team on their specific department goals. The more involved they are in setting goals, the more they’ll be invested in the goals. Even if you cannot include your team in the goal-setting process, highlight how each person’s efforts contribute to achieving team goals. Connect with them emotionally and share how the goal will make their jobs easier. Encourage people to ask questions! When people understand the end goal and the steps the team will take to achieve it, the direction forward feels easier.

Once the goals are finalized, include regular communication about your progress toward the goal in your team meetings and individual one-on-ones. If the team is on track, celebrate. If the team is off-track, discuss what steps must be taken to get back on track. This shows that leadership is committed to performance goals. Our team of dedicated marketing strategists can help coach your team through establishing SMART Marketing Goals and creating a process for regular check-ins to ensure success.

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

Create a Culture of Coaching

What is a coaching culture? Creating a culture of coaching means your business intentionally establishes a structure, processes, and systems across the organization where individuals and their personal and professional development are prioritized. If it sounds daunting, it is, but the benefits of creating a coaching culture are substantial.

You may already have some individuals in your organization who promote a culture of coaching without any formal processes or systems in place. So what are these individuals doing to create this ideal culture?

Create a Safe Environment

This one is a no-brainer, but many businesses need help with it. People in working environments with explosive leaders or leaders who prefer to place blame instead of explore solutions often hide mistakes and feel like questions are a way to trap them. If employees do not feel safe, secure, and equitably treated, they will not be willing to explore the deeper conversation necessary for a culture of coaching.

Ask Questions

Quiet Leadership has been around for a long time, but when implementing a culture of coaching, the idea of asking questions instead of giving answers takes on a new level of importance. The main premise of Quiet Leadership is to ask questions to encourage individuals to think through challenges and solve their own problems. Many people in leadership positions mean well when they jump in to solve problems or immediately share how they would handle the issue, but it sends the wrong message to employees. Instead, leaders should focus on asking the right questions to help the person get to the answer independently. Some of these questions are:

  • What does the ideal outcome look like?
  • What are the options for moving forward?
  • What barriers do you foresee running into?
  • How will you overcome barriers?
  • If that doesn’t work, what else could you try?
  • What is your first step going to be?
  • When are you going to take that step?
  • Is there anything specific I can do to help?

Setting Clear Expectations

It is important to know what success looks like, what to prioritize, and how to improve. Defining what success looks like begins with setting goals. From there, it is communication, communication, communication. And in case that didn’t sink in, some more communication!

Everyone at the organization has many fighting initiatives they are attempting to juggle. Communicating your expectations on a project once and then not following up again until the deadline is going to result in a misunderstanding. Be sure to continue to share necessary updates, ensure people have the tools they need, and trust them to do the work.

Focus on Development

To have a culture of coaching, people in leadership positions must want people to and believe people can grow, learn, and develop new skills. What’s the point of coaching if you believe they couldn’t? This process should be collaborative, exploring each individual’s unique strengths and passions. Sometimes it means letting one of your best sales reps explore a path in web development. It is about giving individuals opportunities to explore things they find engaging.

Creating a plan allowing your organization to implement coaching into its structure, processes, and systems can be daunting. Get started by grasping your team’s desires and headspace through an employee engagement survey. Based on the results, identify who will have access to coaching. Hopefully, the end result would be “everyone!” but select a small group within the organization when getting started. Test some processes, collect feedback, tweak the process, and expand. If you need help getting started, consider using Innereactive’s employee engagement services! We can implement surveys, measure and report on results, and consult on the next steps based on individual results.

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

This is the Year for Performance Appraisals

It’s everyone’s favorite time of the year! Performance Appraisals!!!

“waits for the collective cheer*

Well… this is a little awkward. I guess we might be on our own with excitement for performance appraisals. But hear us out before you rule out performance appraisals for your team!

The Benefits of Performance Appraisals

When done correctly, performance appraisals have proven to:

  • improve employee performance
  • increase employee engagement
  • clarify expectations
  • determine training or coaching needs
  • allow for improved conversations between employees and supervisors

With all those benefits, it’s mind-boggling that more employers are not leaning into performance appraisals. However, to receive these benefits, it is important to structure your appraisal process based on your company goals, vision, and values.

The Correct Performance Appraisal Process (For Your Business)

Now that you are convinced of the benefits let’s talk about your options! There are Traditional Performance Appraisals, 360-Degree Reviews, Self-Appraisals, Employee-Initiated Reviews, Group Performance Appraisals, Upward Appraisals, and more. Hopefully, we haven’t lost you! There is no one size fits all solution for performance appraisals.

At Innereactive, we wanted something that was less formal, more frequent, and ensured employees were living by our values. We landed on monthly appraisals where we focus on one value each month and three to five supporting questions that allow for deeper exploration of employee satisfaction and career development.

What to Discuss During a Performance Appraisal

Career growth. Career growth. And… what was the last one… oh yeah… career growth. We’re only half kidding. If you were to ask your employees what they wanted from you as an employer (and this is something we highly recommend you do), it would probably be a conversation around career growth and development. According to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report, 94% of employees say that they would stay with an employer for longer, if they invested in their career development. So if you are not using your performance appraisals as an opportunity to discuss career development, it is a missed opportunity.

Tips for Discussing Career Growth

When discussing career growth and development with employees, it is important to understand and care about each employee’s career growth dreams and expectations. However, it is even more important to keep the growth ownership with each employee. As a manager, it is not your responsibility to push each employee toward career growth. It is your responsibility to:

  • provide opportunities for growth to each employee
  • promote from within when possible
  • prioritize employee learning and development
  • take a personal interest in your employees

The last one is a must for this process to be successful and employees will know if you are faking it.

If you need help getting started, our team of dedicated marketing strategists is here to offer consulting services to discuss the challenges you anticipate facing and explore the solutions you can implement to have a successful performance appraisal process. Our goal would be that every employee and employer shares in a collective cheer when it is performance appraisal season!

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

The Importance of SMART Marketing Goals

Whether you are trying to boost social media engagement, grow brand awareness, increase website conversion rates, or generate new leads, having defined marketing goals for your efforts is important. Without a defined marketing goal, your team may become misaligned, focusing on individual efforts instead of your overall goal.

Marketing Goals Outline the Intentions

Having a clear goal helps make clear the intentions of your organization when you have an internal marketing team or are hiring a marketing agency. Knowing the intentions for growth helps the marketing team determine where to focus their resources and energy. When working with clients, we believe it is important to establish marketing goals before outlining the services we recommend. If a business is looking to bring in new clients our recommendations for marketing services will be entirely different from the client who has a maxed-out client load and is looking to increase revenue per client.

Goals Provide a Way to Measure Success

Without a marketing goal, you cannot prove your efforts were successful. If you have ever spent money on a marketing campaign and then struggled to answer, “was it worth it,” you are not setting clear enough goals. Setting goals can be more complicated than one initially wants to believe. Goals that follow the “from x to y by when” model are a great starting point, but there is more. It is important to set realistic, achievable goals.

For example, if you set the sales goal of “increase annual first-time sales from $300,000 to $500,000 by the end of the calendar year” that’s great! However, over the past two years, your annual first-time sales have only grown each year by $20,000. In this scenario, it’s important to have a concrete plan for how you plan to go from an average of roughly 7.5% to 67% growth. If you aren’t making major changes to the status quo, you shouldn’t expect to see major changes in the outcome.

Steps to Achieve Your Marketing Goals

Even if you have a goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART), you are not guaranteed to succeed.

  • Generate Team Buy In | If at all possible, have your team assist in the process of determining the team goals. Teams without buy-in are more likely to lose focus of the goal.
  • Consider the Whirlwind | The Whirlwind was made popular by FranklinCovey and it discusses the importance of the day-to-day activities that need to be completed for the business to run. Never set a goal that doesn’t first consider the essential action items a team has to complete.
  • Create Bite-Sized Milestones | After establishing your goal, create smaller milestones that can act as stepping stones to the larger goal. When each of those milestones is achieved, celebrate the success to keep your team motivated.
  • Set Up a Scoreboard | Create a scoreboard that measures the team’s progress toward the goal. Allow all team members to check whenever they want. This generates ownership and creates a visual reminder of how close or how far away from the goal you are. Report on this progress weekly or monthly to ensure you are on track!

Whether you need help setting goals or implementing marketing campaigns to achieve your goals, our team of dedicated marketing strategists can assist and help your business grow!

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

Social Media Posting | The Benefits of Using An Agency

It’s the end of the year and everyone is saying “Marketing budgets are tight.” So, should you still be working with an agency for social media posting on your behalf? The answer? Maybe. When considering whether or not to work with an agency, each business should consider four aspects of its business:

  • Time
  • Expertise
  • Desire
  • Money

Let’s break down each of the following to determine if hiring an agency to post on your behalf is the best decision for your business!

When Should an Agency Manage Social Media Posting

If your team doesn’t have the time, expertise, or desire to post content, it is time to invest in working with an agency. This lack of time, expertise, or desire will manifest itself in many ways. Many people think that paying someone to post on your behalf is an all-or-nothing solution. For some agencies, that is true, but it doesn’t have to be!

Start by asking yourself, “When was the last time someone on your team posted to your social media pages?” If it has been awhile, why?

Time

Sometimes, your team is too busy focused on the day-to-day requirements of running a business. This is especially true for small businesses where employees have cross-functional responsibilities. They may rock wearing multiple hats, but the social media hat has started to fall down and no one is there to catch it.

Expertise

Even if someone is posting content, if no one is engaging with it, it is as if no one is posting content. When looking at social media, average follower engagement is between .5% and 1%. If you are not seeing an average engagement in this range, your messaging needs improvement.

Some businesses have the time and desire to post content, but lack the expertise. In these situations, Innereactive crafts unique marketing strategies that outline a posting schedule. In some situations, we even design branded posting templates to allow the business to post.

Desire

In other situations, a business may love sharing posts that showcase the company’s personality and culture but don’t enjoy creating and sharing educational content about products, services, or promotions. Innereactive works with clients to create posting schedules that show when we will post educational content. This allows for a decreased investment from the business and still allows the business to engage its audience with personalized content.

When Should You Keep It Internal

There are a few key features when considering continuing to do your own posting.

  • If your posting schedule has a healthy balance of brand, educational, and promotional content.
  • Your audience is taking action on the posts requesting them to do so.
  • Your average follower engagement maintains 1% or better. Anything over 1% is considered exceptionally well.

However, even if all of these things are true, if your team feels like posting content is taking too much time or no longer has the desire to maintain it internally, an external agency can help.

Paying someone to post on your behalf has been a question that plagues business owners since businesses started creating Facebook accounts. It isn’t right for every business, but for those businesses where it makes sense, it is important to pick the right partner. One that gets to know your business so well, they are an extension of your business, not just a marketing agency. We look forward to being that agency for your business.

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

Are Social Media Contests Right for Your Business?

A social media contest can increase excitement around your brand and offer an exciting opportunity for the participants to win something! Additionally, you are growing word-of-mouth advertising by inviting engagement and interaction on your page. So, is running a contest on social media right for your business? Yes, it most likely is!

The most critical step to launching a social contest is outlining your end goal. With every business and marketing decision you make, it’s important to be able to evaluate its success. To assess a contest’s success when it is over, you need to have a specific and measurable goal already defined. Common goals could include increased engagement, followers, leads, or brand awareness.

Keep Your Social Media Contest On-Brand

For a social media contest to be successful, it has to excite participants and logically connect to your brand.

Tie your contest in with your brand by both the type of contest you choose to run and the prize you offer. For example, you work at a car dealership and want to run a social media contest. Your goal might be to increase follower engagement. Try running a contest asking followers to comment with their top must-haves when purchasing a new vehicle. Using a simple question like this that talks about your product is a win-win gaining you more engagement and pushing your followers to think about making a purchase. 

Now the prize! Your prize should align with your brand and business, in this case, cars. Brainstorm different on-brand prizes that interest your audience in entering. If we are asking about a must-have in a car, maybe your prize is a gift card for accessories sold in your dealership. 

Tips for Running a Successful Social Media Contest

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your contest by deciding your goal and prize, it’s time to implement it! Here are some tips on how to create a successful social contest campaign.

Share Share Share!

Write your contest post with all the information necessary for followers to participate. Then share and keep your contest top of mind! You can do this by:

  • Pin your post to the top of your Facebook page so any new followers coming to your page can easily enter.
  • Share your post to your Facebook stories or on other social platforms.
  • Write another post remaining followers to enter before the contest ends!

Continue the Conversation

Your followers are engaging with your page, engage with them back! If you’re asking followers to comment on their favorite product from your business, comment back on their entry about why you think that is an awesome product too. Or something as simple as liking each entry or saying thank you to your followers for entering is a great way to continue that engagement. 

Stay Timely

Be sure to keep it timely and easy for participants to enter. If you have them “like this,” “comment this,” and then “submit this,” they will talk themselves out of putting in the effort for the prize. A good timeline to follow is 10-15 days for a contest entry period. If you do it longer, it could get lost in the algorithms, and people will forget about it. Causing a headache trying to get ahold of the prize winner.

Don’t Over Do It!

As much as you want to continuously increase your engagement and following, running a contest every other week can decrease the excitement and success of your posts. The hype won’t be there if people constantly see a contest running. As a result, most people will lose interest, and you won’t see an increase in your end goal. 

 

Ready to launch your first Facebook contest? We’d love to help you create your goal, think through the fine details, and implement your contest for success!

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Marisa Lyon
Marisa is the Finance and Marketing Manager at Innereactive, and we are so grateful to have her. She enjoys helping businesses find the right solution for their marketing needs.

Domain-Based Emails | Building Trust and Credibility

As a new business owner, did you start sending emails from a personal email account? Maybe you always had plans to get a more credible email address, but it got lost in the shuffle. If you’re still sending from your Gmail or Hotmail account, you may think, “what’s the big deal?” Our answer is trust and credibility! The email you’re sending plays a major effect in the appearance of your business.

Domain-Based Emails Build Credibility

If we asked for your initial impression of the following three emails, which one would you say was most credible or trustworthy?

  • MirandaLovesPandas@gmail.com
  • MirandaVeterinarian@gmail.com
  • Miranda@westlakeveterinarian.com

We chose Miranda@westlakeveterinarian.com as the email that seemed most credible… did you? Compared to the other two email addresses, this email sends a clear message of an established and professional business. We naturally view this person as invested in their business’s growth and success.

Help Increase Marketing Results

You’re growing your brand recognition every time you email or pass out a business card with your professional email address. Sending emails with domain-based emails increases its legitimacy in the eyes of the consumer and the email providers. It can also reduce the likelihood of your sales emails being marked as junk or blocked as spam as compared to a free email address.

An Affordable Investment

Most domain-based email providers offer email accounts for a few dollars per month for each email. Don’t look at this as an unnecessary expense but as an investment in your business. Many providers offer credible domain-based emails, and you can often get them through the company hosting your domain name. Robust providers, such as Google Workspace, offer an abundance of additional benefits within their domain-based email packages.

If you’re ready to get domain-based emails set up for your business, we recommend doing it as soon as possible! This avoids needing to complete a huge undertaking of migrating the emails. As part of your marketing team, we can help set up your domain-based email and have you hitting send in no time.

Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

What Should be Included in Your Brand Guidelines?

Brand guidelines are clearly defined standards showcasing how you and others should talk and present your company to the world. These guidelines are a physical or digital booklet to share internally with your entire team and with any vendors or partners.

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing. Just kidding! By providing a guideline for your employees, vendors, and partners to follow when representing your company, you are establishing consistency. And consistency is no small feat. From your logo and colors to your mission and messaging, your brand guidelines provide direction allowing employees to establish an “on-brand” decision without always needing to consult upper-level management.

The Power of Consistency

Consistency breeds recognition. This recognition generates feelings of understanding and trust that help drive consumer brand loyalty. If you think about some iconic brands, can you recognize their ad campaigns without a logo? In a lot of cases, yes! This is because of their consistent brand elements and messaging. For example, can you recognize the saying “Just Do It?” Doritos took this concept even further and launched an ad campaign that didn’t show their logo or name, but still clearly represented their brand identity. These companies established that iconic recognition by presenting a consistent brand identity outlined in clear brand guidelines.

What should be included in brand guidelines?

What you include in your brand guidelines might differ slightly for each brand. However, as a general rule of thumb, you want to have anything that helps people understand your brand. Remember this document will help guide individuals inside and outside your company, so be sure to include information you assume is even basic company knowledge.

The Basics

No matter your industry, company size, or location, there are certain brand aspects that every brand guideline should include.

  • Company History | Your company story, including why you got started.
  • Logo | Variations of your logo, color options for your logo, and logo sizing and spacing.
  • Brand Colors | Colors you tend to use throughout your brand materials, including the HEX, RGB, and CMYK codes.
  • Fonts | Font variations and text sizing.
  • Imagery | Examples of photography, illustrations, and icons in the proper aesthetic (and ones to avoid).

Culture

All companies have a culture, but only some are intentional about creating one. If your company leans on your culture to help make business decisions, it is essential to include it in your brand guidelines.

  • Personality | Who you are or a list of adjectives that describe your brand.
  • Mission Statement | Why your company exists and what purpose you are serving.
  • Vision Statement | What your company aspires to be.
  • Core Values | Your company principles and beliefs.

Possible Additions to Your Brand Guidelines

Now is when your guidelines become individualized! Brand guidelines don’t have to be limited to the usual brand items. Think of your brand guidelines as a consistency handbook! If there is something you want to present in a specific way, no matter where it’s shared, include it!

  • Target Audience | Specify a target audience and why they need you.
  • Social Media Assets | Profile and cover image styles, team welcome, anniversary, or closure announcements, and company-specific or common hashtags.
  • Voice | Words and phrases your brand regularly uses (and ones to avoid).
  • Grammar | The grammar rules you follow and break. For example, does your company always use the oxford comma?

Brand guidelines are an important part of a brand identity. If you need help putting together a formal document to share with vendors, partners, and new hires, our team of professionals can help.

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.

Onboarding New Hires

The hiring process is often a dreaded one. Sometimes HR professionals are so excited to finally find the perfect candidate that they immediately relax and just cross the item off their crowded to-do list. However, not staying focused on our new hires after the paperwork is a mistake that could potentially lose an amazing employee you just hired. Here are our recommendations for onboarding new hires.

Onboarding New Hires Starts Immediately

Once the candidate has accepted the job offer, it is time to start onboarding! Even if that person isn’t starting for two weeks or two months.

Your First Onboarding Email

The first email you send to your new hire after they accept the job is crucial! And it should include more than just a request for the financial and legal documents needed to start. It should be the start of your onboarding journey with your new hire and celebrate them as a new part of your team.

  • Company Handbook: While we always recommend sending a copy of your Company Handbook in the email where you extended the job offer, the next best place is in the email immediately after the candidate has accepted the job.
  • Legal Documents: This email should outline any other information you need from your employee, including any financial or legal documents for your company, like W4 and I9 paperwork.
  • Security: If you have a security system that requires an access code, ask them what they would like their code to be.
  • Dietary Restrictions or Allergies: If you provide snacks or meals in the office, ask after their allergies or dietary preferences to ensure their needs are met.
  • Culture: Provide insight into your culture and environment, including what is appropriate to wear. Starting a new job is stressful and providing this information to new hires makes them feel like they are already part of the team on day one.

Internal Announcements

While your team, or the team you are looking for, probably already knows you are hiring, you should always announce the new team member to the existing team. Share their start date, what their training schedule will look like, and what job responsibilities they will be taking over.

Get Personal and Fun

Start to flex your creative muscles and think of fun ways to welcome new team members to your team. Our team has had a blast creating “welcome videos” with our team. We then include the video in our first welcome email outlining all the details they need to know to start their first day. Think of your company culture and how you could show off your personality and culture in a video. We think this is the best part of being an HR professional!

Here’s an example our welcome video! We shared this video both on social media and with our new hire in an email.

Making Your New Hire Feel Welcome

  • Incorporate a fun question into your interview process and turn the answer into a card for employees to sign and say welcome. We like to ask what kitchen appliance each new hire would be and why.
  • Organize a team lunch for the first day to help your new hire meet and feel comfortable around your team.
  • Put together a swag bag and include things they will need at the office or fun items to use personally. Our company swag bags always had branded company gear like a backpack and jacket!

Stay Organized and Consistent

Have a developed checklist of activities to complete to ensure the employee can integrate into your company as quickly and smoothly as possible. Ensure they are provided the proper training, introduced to the right people, and have all the equipment and software they need to do their job. Most importantly, create a structure to check in with them frequently throughout the first 90-days to ensure they are thriving and ask for their input on how the transition into your company could have been even better! We can’t even begin to share the first-day horror stories we have heard, so plan some tasks and goals for your employee’s first day and first few weeks.

Retaining top talent starts before day one. Craft an intentional journey for new hires or risk losing them. If you are not sure where to get started, we can help your team establish a journey that is unique to your business!

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Heather Morrison
Heather is the VP of Operations at Innereactive and we are lucky to have her. She has over five years of experience running an HR department and enjoys helping businesses like yours find solutions to their HR needs.