A healthy staff culture is essential for the success of your daycare center. To ensure this, daycare providers need to follow a comprehensive on-boarding and retaining process for their teachers and cultivating a passion for caring for children.
As a daycare owner, there are several ways you can make your staff excited to be working with you. Here are some things that you need to do to set up your new member and your daycare for success from day one.
Provide Them with An Employee Handbook
Once you have hired new staff, one of the first things you need to do is to send them an employee handbook. The earlier you share this essential handbook, the more quickly they will be able to absorb everything before their start date.
Some of the things that your employee handbook includes are the mission and vision of the center, its organizational structure, state licensing rules and regulations, employee benefits, expectations from the staff, curriculum planning, health and safety policies, attendance policies, and growth and development opportunities.
Also, encourage your staff to approach you if they have any questions about how things are run at the daycare center.
Host An Orientation Session
If you have hired several staff members, you should consider hosting an orientation session. During this session, you share key logistics information and hope to inspire your new staff and instill a passion for working at a daycare in them. This can include anything from your daycare’s history to real-life stories about how you made a difference.
Additionally, it gives you a chance to add a number of team-building activities to your agenda.
Give a Facilities Tour
It can be quite confusing to start a new job in an unfamiliar setting. Daycare providers need to give a tour of their facilities to every new teacher so that they know their way around the place on their first day.
The first-day tour also includes information like the main responsibilities in a classroom, all the emergency exit points and procedures, the cleaning protocols, daily breaks and schedules, the pick-up and drop-off procedures, and parking information.
Shadow a Teacher
Before you start them on a new job, it is important to have a new teacher shadow the experienced staff. This will allow the new teacher to understand how things are done at the daycare.
At the end of the day, the new teacher will take a debriefing session to discuss what the staff has learned and answer any questions they have.
Assign Staff Buddies
Although it is important to remain accessible to your new teachers, you should also encourage the existing staff to pitch in and offer their support to get the new teacher acclimatized. This will help them get a handle on things, reduce their workload in those crucial early days, and let them know that their colleagues are very supportive as well.
Help Connect With Families
Another great way to help new teachers get comfortable with their new position is to introduce them to parents. Send a message to each parent letting them know you have welcomed a new staff on-board and share a “teacher spotlight” with them to get them to know the teacher better.
How You Can Protect Against Early Resignation
Some of the most common reasons why daycare staff quit are because of a lack of effective training, not receiving due credit from the owner and their peers, or not getting the right opportunity to build a rapport with the management.
By offering all these opportunities, you can help extend the new employee’s tenure in your daycare center.
At Standout Daycare, we understand that it is not easy to hire and retain excellent childcare staff. We hope that these on-boarding tips can help create a healthy staff culture in your daycare and lead to happier and more inspired teachers.
For more tips and advice, visit us at www.standoutdaycare.com and view our blogs and resources.
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