Enhancing the Onboarding Experience for New Carleton Employees (Oct 2017)

Building and strengthening community at Carleton begins the very first day new employees arrive on campus. Whether a new faculty member, regular staff member, or a casual employee, how new employees are brought on board – how they are (or are not) welcomed into the Carleton family in the first hours, days, and weeks – is essential to creating employees who feel connected to a broader community, and not merely to their department and the colleagues with whom they work. Our Strategic Impact Group (SIG) explored how to enhance the on-boarding and orientation experience at Carleton. We began by interviewing a diverse group of Carleton employees, including various staff, faculty, managers, and senior leaders, to assess their experiences with on-boarding and how it impacted their sense of connectedness to Carleton. All had different orientation experiences and felt there was a need for something more fulsome. We then surveyed on-boarding best practices and the experiences of other Canadian Universities. With those insights we examined current on-boarding programs at Carleton and identified some important gaps in current practice. We offer a number of suggestions to enhance the on-boarding experience with an emphasis on more effective support and socialization of hiring managers.

• Jacques Charron, Manager, Workplace Relations & Case Management, Human Resources
• Erin Chezick, Info Carleton/Campus Card Coordinator, University Services
• Amrita Hari, Assistant Professor, Pauline Jewett Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies
• David Mendeloff, Associate Professor, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs
• Christina Noja, Manager, Office of the Vice-Provost and Associate Vice-President (Academic)
• Claude Phaneuf, Manager, Project Management Office, Information Technology Services
• Alicia Poole, Shift Manager, University Safety