Celebrate your interns!

As the summer is almost over and most inters are in their last weeks of work it is very important to do a few things that will leave them with a lasting positive impression of their time with you and your company:
- Spend a little time with your interns, go sit down at their work station and just chat;
- Ask them how their summer and internship went;
- Ask them what they liked about their time in your company, what they didn’t like, you may be quite surprised by the answers;
- Celebrate them: tell them that they did a good job, focus on the positive points, and turn the little problems into learning and development opportunities.
Most important of all: make sure to show/remind them that what they worked on matters for the team and the company.
What I always do at the start of any internship is ask my interns what are 1-2 things/tasks that they would like to do during their internship. These could be directly related to their role or not at all. And I make sure to let them have the opportunity to do this whenever possible.
Hence at this time of the year I ask them how they liked to do these things they specifically asked me to do and what else they would like to do if they have any opportunity in the last few weeks with us.
This takes very little time and I have found that it makes their internship much more valuable for them and it gives them the feeling that their work was indeed important and that they were able to contribute not only to their role, but also outside of their normal work.
Wrap up with something fun! Most interns will only work inside the physical office space and have very few opportunities to go to external meetings or events. Get them out of the office and go do a fun team activity. It doesn’t need to be physical and it doesn’t need to be costly but you need to do something fun.
I do an end of summer staff BBQ at my home, I invite my staff and interns over and I cook for them to show them my appreciation of their hard work. If you do something similar, always remember: Don’t talk too much about work or tasks but take the time to talk about people and ideas. These are rare opportunities to remind everyone that behind every hard working colleague, there is a person and very often it’s easy to just work work work and forget to ask how they are doing, how their summer has been, how the family is doing. I for one tend to forget to do this, so taking everyone out of the office and enjoying a nice BBQ all of us together is a great team-building activity and this is even more appreciated as a back to school event for interns.
The results: over my career managing SME’s, I have hired 8 interns and 7 of them came back to work for me part-time during the 12 month period following the end of their internship.