How to successfully onboard a foreign employee

Onboarding a foreign employee is a challenging task. You’re not just onboarding the foreign talent, you’re helping him or her integrating into a new country. You’re both making sure the talent knows all about its new workplace while being its extended arm when getting all necessary info about living in Denmark as well as settling down in the country and city. This blog post strives to give you a quick overview of how to successfully onboard a foreign employee.

Keep track of all the practical stuff

You’re probably already welcoming new employees with open arms, flowers and greetings from all their colleagues, so you’ve already got this part spot-on. Let’s break it down anyway, in case you’re missing something:

• Technical set-up at work such as workspace, hardware, software, mobile phone and work email. Anything that ensures that your new employee can start working from day one.
• Practical info and relevant documents such as info about the first few days of work, relevant company information, employee handbook, code of conduct, list of colleagues and so on. Anything that is need-to-know about your company and its employees.

Be sure to keep track of all necessary info and details that your new employee must receive during pre-boarding and when the onboarding process starts. If you don’t have a list of all the pre-boarding details, make sure to draft one.

Give the talent time to settle in

Your new employee goes through a long and hard process due to both filing necessary paperwork and moving the family to Denmark, housing and financial changes. If you want to assist your new talent during this process, check our blog post on how to relocate a new foreign employee to Denmark for more inspiration and guidance.

There’s also a very important factor of team integration. It’s important that the team and talent get to know each other as fast as possible so they can synchronize their teamwork and workflow. If you’re not part of the team, appoint someone from the team with the task of being the focal point of integration.

Going that extra mile or two when integrating a foreign employee into your organisation will pay-off in the long term. This will also serve as a great word of mouth about your company’s onboarding process and improve your employer brand.

Employees learns organisational culture by doing

Your new employee is moving to Denmark from a different country with different workplace culture. There’s only so much papers and folders about company culture can do. Help the talent recalibrate his/her working routines, flow and understanding of workplace culture in a Danish organisation.

Let the employee know how your collaboration style works and what the general workplace culture is. This is done best by learning by doing. Let the talent get involved in projects from the start instead of shielding him/her. This way the employee will pick-up your workplace culture much faster and it will help to understand and adjust to a new workplace culture instead of trying to hold on to old routines that don’t fit your company culture.

Feedback and communication is key

Most people need to know how they’re doing in order to be able to perform at the highest level. We all need feedback and open communication to adjust or improve our workflows in order to perform better. We suggest you structure the feedback loop so both parties know when and how feedback is delivered.

This can be done with weekly or bi-weekly meetings with the new employee and yourself or someone from the team. You don’t need to make it a formal meeting or over-complicate it. Make it easy and comfortable for all parties involved. The important point here is that these types of meetings are for feedback that will ensure that the talent is fully integrated and up to speed after two to three months.

Onboarding is essential for retention

As a company, you must acknowledge the importance of employee retention. Retention starts during the recruiting process and is carried on into the onboarding process. A successfully onboarded employee is a happy worker who will slot into the team quickly and efficiently and will be able to do the tasks at hand much more effectively. A failed onboarding process or non-existing program can be a costly affair - the talent might jump ship as quickly as it boarded. Read our full post on employee retention here.

Read more about relocating a foreign employee to Denmark or check our post on how to strengthen your employer brand.