New employee adaptation

Joining a new company is a complex and difficult process even if it is a positive move. New environment, new people, new responsibilities can shake everyone’s world and make one feel uncertainty. That is why many companies create adaptation programs in order to ease this process for new employees.

We at ADCI Solutions also care about each team member and strive to ensure that everyone feels safe and sound at work. Therefore we put efforts into a good adaptation program development. Most people in our team start from a position of an intern and make all the way up the career path from that point. Sometimes it means that being the intern in our company is the very first workplace for the person. We value such growth inside our company and try to make it comfortable for newbies to work with more seasoned team members.

The first point of adaptation in the company is a job interview. Surprising, right? But it is so. During the job interview, a potential employee receives the first impression about the company and its corporate culture and sets the first expectations, too. Researchers this stage anticipatory socialization and a decision for the job. Therefore it is very important for an interviewer to be highly transparent about the job tasks and a working atmosphere. Otherwise, after being hired the person will experience the emotional burden caused by reality mismatch.

We approach the stage of the interview after the candidate finishes the test tasks and his/her programming skills are confirmed. This means that on the interview we only check if this person matches the team spirit and fits the corporate culture.

When the person is hired and comes to his/her first working day we welcome him/her with a small booklet with our traditions, other corporate culture rules, and opportunities such as English classes, the bonus system, educational events and so on. This helps the new employee to adapt to a new environment knowing whom to ask questions and how to behave in a particular situation.

From the moment of employment starts the stage of introduction to job duties. All of our new interns and employees have a team lead and a mentor who guide them through their working integration. This person provides the necessary education and helps with getting to know other team members. After the internship is finished comes the stage of individual strategies development to manage adaptation issues. It is connected with both professional and social integration which finalize the employee incorporation and adaptation. To achieve that the three following points should be present:

1. the new employee should be familiar not only with direct duties but also with related responsibilities, the scope of competence and other ways to prove him/herself;
2. the new employee should perform his/her first results;
3. the new employee should understand the values of the company and behave accordingly.

In order to provide the new interns and employees with necessary information about work and the corporate culture we not only delegate it to mentors. We also organize special team buildings that are attended by team members who work less than half a year but the rest of the team is also welcome. The agenda of such team building includes, first of all, getting to know each other better. It is crucial since the company grows bigger and we want to make sure that people know everyone’s name, hobby, etc. The other part is a team building itself. Here we accomplish some exercises to get bounded and feel the team spirit. And the final part of the agenda is a corporate culture presentation where we openly speak about unclear moments and try to be on the same page as the team.

Besides such special activities, we have several permanent things that help newbies to adapt. These are common lunches, Xbox, and board games playing, corporate parties and, of course, group chats.

Since we have included these activities into the adaptation process new team members seem to be more confident and open. However we think that there’s no limit to perfection, therefore we also developed a short survey for team members who work more than half a year. This survey includes a question on how easy or hard was the process of adaptation in the company and what would help to speed it up.

We are still in process of improvement of our adaptation system. And hope that we’ll find the ideal way to make each day of our team members memorable.