The first few days at work are the most stressful for a new employee. It’s pretty challenging to start building a relationship with new colleagues while learning new corporate rules and trying to complete the first tasks. For this reason, it’s crucial to foster the onboarding process and help an employee to get to work as fast as possible.
The first step you should take is to write a welcome aboard email to demonstrate your loyalty and support. You should make new hires understand that they have chosen the right company to work with. If you have never written welcome emails before, check the following tips, which might help you:
Key elements of welcome aboard email
Depending on the size of your company, as well as its policies and procedures, you will find it necessary to add the following elements to welcome email:
- Exact start date and time
- Office’s working hours (you should mention whether it’s possible to work flexible hours)
- Dress code (formal, semi-formal or casual)
- List of required documents (ID, social security card, diplomas, certificates, insurance card, i.e.)
- Detailed first-day schedule
Moreover, you can include some useful new employee onboarding instructions:
- Where to park
- How to check in at reception
- Where is a smoking area located
- Where to find a coffee machine, free drinks, snacks, i.e.
If you need to add lots of instructions in one email, it would better to create separate files and use them as attachments.
Personalize every email
You should never start your welcome email with phrases like “Dear new employee” or “Hi there”. The personalized salutation is a must for the welcome aboard letter. The first words of your email should show how much you value your new employee.
Also, you can add some information related to previous personal meetings or interviews with this new hire. Phrases like “It was nice talking to you last Monday” works pretty well. It will make an employee believe that you wrote welcome email from scratch, not just used a standard template.
Introduce yourself
Don’t forget to mention who is a sender of the welcome letter. Write your name and drop a line about your role within the company. Whether you are a representative of the HR department or a senior manager, you should explain in which way you will communicate with a new hire in the future.
Provide your contacts
You should encourage new hires to ask you any questions related to the onboarding process. You should provide at least one contact phone number and email. Moreover, you can share not only corporate, but also personal contacts to ensure that new employee will be able to reach you on weekends in case of urgency.
Show your excitement
Feel free to express your excitement about the new employee and his role in your company. You should praise his professional achievements and point out goals of the further collaboration.
The HR generalist at PickWriters, has this to say about welcome email writing: “Your task is to show how happy you are to meet the new talented members of your team. You should be sincere, and then you will be rewarded with new hires’ loyalty and enthusiasm.”
Promote your company’s core values
You can also write a sentence or two about the company’s core values, mission and/or traditions. This is a simple way to make your new employees get acquainted with the basics of your corporate culture. Everyone, who gets a job at your organization, must be extremely proud of being a member of your outstanding team.
Set a friendly tone of voice
It’s not necessary to make your welcome email look formal, especially if you are going to reach Millennials. It would be better to set a friendly tone of voice to make your new employee feel more comfortable. This is the first important step you can take to break the ice and start building trust in a relationship.
Do you consider your company a big family? If yes, you should welcome a new employee with open arms just like a new family member. Being friendly will help you to smooth the onboarding process and to boost your recruiting efforts.
Keep email short
The last, but not the least important rule to follow is to keep your welcome email short. Every word in every sentence should be meaningful. Otherwise, it must be deleted.
Why it’s so important? The point is that modern people find long emails “irritating to read”. For this reason, you should make sure that a recipient will need less than 3 minutes to finish reading your letter.
Alexis Kleinman, Huffington Post’s contributor, says: “In most cases, the recipients don’t need as much background information as you think they do.” Crafting a welcome email, you shouldn’t add any general information regarding your company, which is available online.
In conclusion
Before new hires have started working for your company, you should address all their questions regarding their new jobs. In this way, you will prepare them for the first day at your company.
Writing an email, you should demonstrate your friendliness and readiness to help. A perfectly crafted welcome email will convince new employees that they will be able to achieve their ambitious career goals within your organization. As a result, they will start working with great enthusiasm.
About the author:
Kristin Savage nourishes, sparks and empowers using the magic of a word. Along with pursuing her degree in Creative Writing, Kristin was gaining experience in the publishing industry, with expertise in marketing strategy for publishers and authors. Now she has found herself as a freelance writer. You can find her on Facebook.
