Cultivating a Positive School Culture Through Hiring & Onboarding

Have you ever worked in a school with an amazingly positive, supportive culture? The type where relationships are characterized by respect, trust and transparency; where mistakes are seen as opportunities for growth; where individual successes are recognized and celebrated. If you’ve been lucky enough to work in such a place, you know that a positive school culture has a certain magic to it — you can’t see or touch it, but there’s no denying that it’s there, uplifting staff and students alike.

While strategic leadership is vital to cultivating that kind of culture, building and maintaining it involves effort from everyone in the school — including your newest hires. So, it’s crucial that your school’s mission, vision and values are clearly communicated (and actively modeled!) in your hiring and onboarding processes.

Here’s how to do it.

Align Hiring with School Culture

School culture starts with hiring professionals who believe in and connect to your organization’s mission, vision, and values.

To achieve this:

• Get specific about culture: Are you relying too heavily on a gut feeling about “culture fit“?
• Examine your hiring process: Does your school culture shine through?
• Reflect on interviews: Are you discussing school culture as a part of the discussion?

At one school, the tagline “Dedication. Collaboration. Innovation guides administrators in hiring candidates who are likely to be a good fit.

Communicate and Model the School’s Values

There’s no single set of characteristics that define whether a school’s culture is positive or not. But you know what it is that makes your school a wonderful place to be — and you know your values aren’t just words on a wall. Take a close look at what you think are the most important qualities that contribute to your school culture … and shout them from the rooftops!

• Are they clearly communicated in job postings?
• Are they laid out front and center in new hires’ welcome packets?
• If you had to describe your district’s brand as an employer, could you?

These practices help you move towards hiring “culture carriers” — highly qualified professionals who will be models and champions of your school culture.

Make sure your school’s values are intentionally modeled throughout the hiring and onboarding process. For example, if collaboration is a key part of your culture, don’t let new hires feel isolated. Plan networking activities to welcome new employees into the school’s community and consider setting up more coaching or mentoring programs. Likewise, if your schools prize innovation, don’t make new hires slog through an inefficient, old-fashioned paper-laden onboarding process — find an onboarding system that makes the process easier.

Focus Oon What Matters in Onboarding

Onboarding and induction should inspire new hires to be enthusiastic stakeholders in the school’s culture. But in many school districts, employee onboarding is focused on paperwork and process — not supporting new hires and ensuring their success.

It’s understandable how this happens: the sheer volume of paperwork necessary to bring a new employee into the district can be overwhelming. But it’s necessary to “tame the paper beast” in order to focus on what really matters in onboarding: setting the stage for each employee’s success.

So, don’t let paper or process distract you (or new hires) from building relationships and being a present, positive force in the organization. Obviously, you can’t just let onboarding paperwork go by the wayside — the information collected during onboarding is crucial to actually employing someone to work in the district. But the paperwork itself shouldn’t be the focus on onboarding, it should be an administrative task that doesn’t take up too much of anybody’s time. When you’re able to automate paperwork and process necessary to onboarding new employees, you can find time for celebrating culture. You’re able to look for opportunities to maximize the human element of employee onboarding whenever possible:

• Answering new hire’s questions
• Building relationships
• Wholeheartedly welcoming them into the community

That’s when you can really show what your school culture is all about.