5 Ways to Help a New Hire Get Comfortable with Your Culture

5 Ways to Help a New Hire Get Comfortable with Your Culture

With the prevalence of Glassdoor and other websites that allow past and current employees to provide feedback on workplace culture, it is not surprising that many companies have increased focus on employee wellness. After all, a healthy, happy employee is a productive employee. Healthy, happy employees will enjoy their jobs. A healthy, happy employee will encourage others with a similar mindset to apply for jobs at your company.

How do you create this positive environment for your employees? Perhaps your company cannot afford to hire a wellness expert. What can your managers do to create a great place to work?

Talk about your work environment during the interview.

Ask those you interview about previous workplaces. If during your conversation, you discover the applicant has negativity oozing from his or her pores, consider offering the job to someone else. Talk about the positive workplace initiatives you have enacted at your office. See how they respond to this discussion. If he or she seems excited, the candidate may be a great addition to your staff.

What about those employees you did not hire? How do you encourage positivity from them, especially if the previous management did not pay attention to workplace wellness?

Offer healthy food options for your employees.

Instead of throwing a box of donuts in the break room every Friday and ordering pizzas for work nights, stock your workplace refrigerator with Greek yogurt and string cheese. Purchase fruit and keep it in an area convenient for all. This may seem like an expense that may deplete your petty cash account, but in the long run, you may reap the rewards of having more productive employees who are out sick less than before.

Who doesn’t like a little competition between departments?

Offer weight-loss challenges between staffs. Worried you will offend some of the heavier employees? How about purchasing inexpensive step counters and giving prizes to the department who can record the most steps within a week. The more managers participate and promote these challenges within their departments, the more buy-in the employees will feel.

Offer a free gym membership to your employees.

One of my friends works for an area orthodontist. When the doctor heard about how some of his employees were starting a weight-loss challenge, he went to Planet Fitness and purchased a basic membership for all of his employees. My friend and her co-workers were over-the-roof impressed with this gesture. In fact, my friend shared her experience on Facebook. A basic gym membership can be purchased relatively inexpensively.

Give your employees an outlet to share their gratitude for each other.

Create forms that allow an employee to compliment a co-worker. Cleverly display the forms. Purchase a copy of How Full is Your Bucket for each of your employees. The premise of this book is that we either fill each other’s buckets by being positive with each other or we deplete other’s buckets with negative comments. Use that terminology when dealing with conflict.

Remember positive energy is catching! Bring a little sunshine to your office every day.