How Company Org Charts Can Help New Hires Feel Welcome

The whole point of onboarding new hires is to help them to feel welcomed and engaged with your company as quickly as possible. Doing so will help to ensure they stay with your company for a respectable amount of time and don’t up and quit within a few months - or even sooner.

In fact, a UK study found that having a great onboarding process can increase staff retention by a huge 82% and that:

Employees who have a poor onboarding experience are two times more likely to look for a new job soon.

The good news is, that once you’ve got an awesome onboarding program in place you will be able to confidently welcome new hires and ensure they quickly become a productive member of your team.

Read more: Is It Time You Upgraded YOUR Employee Onboarding Program?

But that’s easy for us to say, right? After all, you need to create that onboarding program first.

(May we suggest taking a look at some of our other articles about new hire checklists and onboarding employees for some ideas?!)

As someone who works in Human Resources, you already know there are a number of critical steps you need to add to your onboarding program:

From sending new hires a welcome email, to making sure they understand the business and the company mission, to assigning them a buddy, to ensuring you (or their manager) check in with them frequently throughout onboarding.

But there are other, smaller ways you can help your new people feel at home in their first week that might, at first glance, seem a little inconsequential. However, every factor you add to your employee onboarding program will become an essential part of the bigger picture.

We’re talking about company organization charts.

How company org charts can help new hires feel welcome

If it's never really occurred to you that the humble organizational chart might have a part to play in helping new hires feel like part of the team from the get-go, here’s why:

It’s a subtle way of making a new hire feel part of the team

Make sure your new employee is on the company org chart before you send it to them. This is a discreet, psychological trick that tells them they are already part of the organization and part of a team.

It’s a quick and easy way to introduce your structure to them

This goes without saying really - after all isn’t that the entire point of a company org chart? Well yes it is, and it’s a useful internal document to have for many reasons.

Where it comes into its own in onboarding, however, is that it can help a new employee quickly understand the company as a whole.

We’ve all been there: When you start a job at a new company it can feel totally overwhelming trying to understand who’s who, what departments make up the company, how those departments relate to one another etc. It’s literally an overload of information and a blur of names and faces.

Giving your new hire a copy of the company org chart to take a good look at will help them become acclimatized more quickly.

Read more: Your Onboarding New Hire Checklist for Interns

It helps new employees get to know their team and coworkers before they start

If you send your org chart out to your new hire before their first day as part of their welcome package, they’ll have time to sit down, study the chart at their leisure and be able to see who they’ll be working with directly and what that person does.

This will help to reduce the embarrassing issue of not being able to remember everyone’s name in the first few days because they’ll have had a head start on who is who.

It also means they can reach out to the right person from their first day, without having to waste time by asking who they need to speak to about getting a new laptop cable or the logins for your various software solutions.

(Of course, in an ideal world, you’ll have taken care of all these things before they even start as they’ll be covered on your new hire checklist!)

It’s essential for helping new remote workers get their bearings

Making sure new employees are feeling welcome, engaged and able to work from the start is tricky enough. That’s multiplied when you’re onboarding a remote worker.

And chances are, if you have remote employees, they’re scattered across different cities, possibly even states, countries, continents and time zones.

This is where having a great company org chart that clearly states who people are, what they do, and where they are is crucial. It will help new remote hires to get to know the structure of your organization and enable them to contact the correct coworker should they need to.

Read more: Your Onboarding New Hire Checklist for Technical Staff

It shows people potential career paths

As humans we are programmed to learn and take onboard new information. If we’re not progressing, we stagnate and become disengaged. And that’s when productivity dwindles and people start to look around for a new job.

The potential for growth is a factor that many candidates consider when applying for a new job and your org chart is an ideal way of demonstrating how a new employee could potentially move around within the company.

It’s inspiring, and the likelihood is that a new hire is in the mindset for being inspired - for change and growth. Of course, you’ll have probably covered the opportunity for learning, training and even eventual promotion in the interview, but here the reality is mapped out, quite literally on a chart.

Read more: How to Tell if Your New Hire Engagement Strategy is Working

How company org charts can help new hires feel welcome: conclusion

Don’t underestimate the humble org chart’s potential as part of your employee onboarding process. It may not be as exciting as taking your new hire out for a team lunch or assigning them a workplace buddy to help them settle in, but it can be a quietly powerful weapon in the fight to retain new people during that six month danger period that every manager and HR person dreads.