The employer's first thirty days with a newly arrived crew

The permit is issued, the flights are booked, and four workers land on a Tuesday. What happens over the next month decides whether they are still with you in two years. Most of it is unglamorous and none of it is expensive, but it has to be somebody's job before they arrive rather than after.

Week one: the administrative floor

Nothing else works until these are done, and they cannot be done by the worker alone.

Registration of the place of residence at the municipality. It is a legal requirement and it unlocks nearly everything else.

A bank account, because you cannot pay wages otherwise. Take them; do not send them.

The personal identification number, if the permit process has not already produced one. Tax, social insurance and healthcare all hang off it.

The residence permit card — attending for biometrics and collecting the card when the Migration Department calls them in.

Budget a person and a car for two or three half-days. An office manager who speaks to the municipality regularly will do this in a morning; a worker sent alone with a bus timetable will lose a week and come back without it.

Weeks one to four: making them useful

Induction in a language they actually understand. Safety briefings delivered in Lithuanian to someone with basic English are a compliance record, not a safety measure. Use English, use pictures, use a colleague who shares their language, and check comprehension by asking them to explain it back.

The certification path, started immediately. For drivers this is licence exchange through Regitra, the Driver CPC (Code 95) course and the tachograph card. None of it can begin before arrival and all of it must finish before they can drive commercially. Book the driving school before they land. Every week of delay is a week of wages for work that cannot yet be done.

A named buddy. One existing employee, ideally someone who has done the same journey, who answers the small questions: where to buy food, how the shift rota is read, what to do when the heating breaks. This costs nothing and does more for retention than anything else on this list.

Supervision that is close but not suspicious. New arrivals will not tell you when something is wrong, because in the first weeks nobody wants to be the difficult one. You have to ask.

The thirty-day conversation

Put a short one-to-one in the diary for day thirty, before anyone needs it. Ask four questions and listen to the answers: Is the accommodation working? Is the pay what you expected? Is the work what you expected? Is anything at home unresolved?

Almost every problem that ends a placement is visible at day thirty and cheap to fix there. The same problem at month four costs you the worker.

What to have ready before they land

A written arrival plan with names against each task. Accommodation inspected, not just booked. The first payslip explained in advance, so the gap between gross and net is not a shock. Contact details for a person, not a department. And the driving school or training provider booked.

And one thing not to do

Do not treat the crew as a block. Four people who arrived on the same flight are four people with different families, different debts, different reasons for being here and different plans. The employers who keep their workers are the ones who learn their names in the first week and their situations in the first month.

If you are planning your first intake and want a checklist tailored to your site, ask us — we do this every month and we will happily save you learning it the hard way.