Setting the Stage for New Hires

Question: We are an accounting business with seven full-time employees, two of whom work from home. All our people have been with us over 5 years, and we are in the process of hiring several new employees to accommodate the growth in our local market. The current workload has us working 60-70 hours and it’s not even our busiest time of year. We need the new hires to get up to speed fast to provide some relief. They they need to help us prepare for tax season. What can we do to get them on board and up to speed as soon as possible?

 Answer: Congratulations on your organization’s success. You have a great opportunity to lay a strong foundation for your new employees. You can now make the most of the time and money you have already invested in recruiting and hiring new staff. Consider these three critical pieces of a successful onboarding process.

1. Set expectations
2. Make sure they have the resources they need to begin their work the first day on the job.
3. Introduce them to your organization’s culture.

First Impressions Matter

According to Aberdeen Group’s 2014 study, 90% of businesses believe that employees make their decision to stay with their employers within the first year of their job. Equifax reports find that over 40% of all employees who left their job in the past year did so in the first 6 months, costing employers significant time, money and productivity.

Here’s the good news, the Aberdeen Group found that newly hired employees are 69% more likely to still be at the company three years later if they had completed a structured onboarding process.

Please note that we are talking about a ‘structured process’ to align employees with your company. While corporate training programs are possible for larger companies, you can design a highly effective onboarding process that reflects your organization’s realities and priorities within your time and financial boundaries. Upfront planning and strategic development are a required first step.

Onboarding Objectives

Onboarding affords you an excellent opportunity to engage and improve the productivity of your new hires, as well as reduce the potential for first-year turnover. You’ve made a large investment of both time and money in recruiting and hiring.

Set Expectations

How frustrating would it be to arrive for your first day of work and not understand what it is you need to accomplish; let alone sit at your desk week after week not knowing what is expected of you.  Bamboo HR asked 1000 employees who left their job within the first 6-months what would have made them stay on the job, 23% of respondents said, “receiving clear guidelines to what my responsibilities were.” Fortunately, the solution is all in your control.

Not only are you setting the expectations for your new hire, you also need to set expectations for current staff. Let them know when a new hire will be in the office, and when they will be officially starting work. And most importantly, identify who is responsible for meeting with the new hire when they arrive, and who is responsible for conveying the following:

1. Provide a clear job description that includes roles and responsibilities as related to the organization’s mission and values.
2. Relate how the new hire’s roles fit in with the roles of other employees.
3. Detail how performance will be measured, and company-wide, department and individual productivity metrics.

Resources

In today’s business world, we talk a lot about increasing the culture of performance. Set up your new hire to hit the ground running. Ensure they are familiar with all the tools and resources needed to do their job.

1. What specific tools are required – a desk, computer, documents, online, intranet? Make sure they have access to them.
2. How do team members communicate? Establish email and internal messaging accounts.
3. What team members should they speak to first? Set these meetings up in advance.

Introduce Your Company’s Culture

In light of the fact that most new employees (87% of them according to a study by the Aberdeen Group) aren’t fully committed to a new job for the first six months, their perception of your company’s culture is critical to their tenure. By investing the time to indoctrinate your new hires to the organization, you:

• Are far more likely to retain a great employee
• Can identify bad hires more quickly
• Reach minimum expected productivity levels quickly rather than letting them learn by trial and error
• Decrease stress and increase engagement in new hires
• Build your company’s brand leading to client referrals and potentially new hire referrals

There is no single design or approach to an onboarding process, but here are key characteristics to consider:

• Use the time between the offer letter and their first day to jumpstart employee loyalty by linking onboarding to the organization:
  • History of the company
  • Vision, mission and how they are connected to strategy
  • Organizational language proficiency
  • Overview of finances
  • Networking socialization
• Use technology to introduce new hires to the organization via the company website, intranet and other e-tools. There are excellent apps that are easy to set up that can increase the transfer of knowledge from employee to new hire.
• Consider onboarding an ongoing process. Have set times over the course of the first year where you can assess how the new employee is doing, ask what resources they need and seek their perspective.

Onboarding versus Orientation

Lastly, I want to differentiate onboarding and orientation.  Orientation encompasses signing up for benefits, understanding payroll and distribution of leave, sick time and vacation policies. Orientation is also the time to complete industry-related documentation. This might include compliance law and regulation, health and safety, competition clauses, or information security.  Before the first day you expect your new hire to start work, ensure all this information is completed.

This is the fourth in a six-part series on what organizations can do to improve and support their performance culture. The discussion began with five lessons learned from the Amazon culture debate that made headlines following the expose in the New York Times. The following post focused on how consistent unwritten practices and consistent application of formal policies is critical to a dynamic culture. We then discussed how organizations can truly engage their employees by drawing a clear connection between the organization’s mission and vision and employee roles and responsibilities.