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What is this about…
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Put simply, onboarding is introducing your new team member to their new company, team & role. Some companies do it really well, some do it terribly!
Even if your company doesn’t have a set onboarding process, as their line manager you have huge power to impact the success of the individual and actually your whole team and company if you give them what they need to get up and running quickly.
Think of all the things that you would have loved to know when you first started. What would have made your life easier?
<aside> 💡 Why it matters…(to you, to your team(s), to the business)
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Starting a new job is one of the big “moments that matter” in a person’s life, right up there with moving and getting married. We want to make sure that our new joiners feel welcomed and that they belong right from the start. As Maya Angelou wrote: “People will forget what you said, they will forget what you did, but people never forget how you made them feel.”
Consider breaking onboarding into 3 distinct parts:
There's no way to sugar coat it - onboarding takes work! But it is worth the investment in setting your new hire up for success. Study after study shows a direct correlation between onboarding and employee retention.
By planning ahead and having an Onboarding Plan in place, it will alleviate the stress for both you and your new hire.
💡23% of employees leave within 6 months because they haven't received clear guidelines about their responsibilities
💡 Strong onboarding process improved new hire retention by 82%, with new hire productivity improved by 70% (Brandon Hall)
💡 69% of employees stay 3 years or more if onboarding is great.
The Bottom Line: By planning ahead and having an Onboarding Plan in place, it will alleviate the stress for both you and your new hire.
<aside> 📖 A word on onboarding from Michelle Davies, StartUp & ScaleUp Advisor
We’ve all been there, it’s your first day at a new company. A laptop showed up a few days ago and someone emailed you a handbook and a 90 day target list (maybe) and left you to read it and figure it out, but with the encouraging message that “we are here if you have any questions”.
And then the cold sweats start! Even if you weren’t nervous of ‘looking foolish’, you don’t even know who to ask questions to.
Why are we still doing this to people, smart people we’ve decided we want to work with?! The answer is simple, because we are looking at it from the business’s point of view - we gave them the tools they needed (kinda), and told them what work to focus on (cause we are a start up and we need them to hit the ground running obviously), we want to treat them like adults and trust them to figure it out.
But if we take a minute to sit and think about it, if we really want them to come in and make an impact, and fast, we need them to know how we got here and we need them to feel safe & welcome. Even the best handbook in the world isn’t going to accomplish that for you!
As someone inside the business already you are used to the way things work here, and it feels “normal” to you. Newcomers won't know the rituals and ways of working specific to this business, and will have expectations based on previous experiences that may not match your own expectations. So you need to be explicit in your expectations of how you do things here.
Think of it from the newcomers point of view
People make an impact when they know:
If you’ve hired well, by now they know the mission of the business and hopefully their role in helping to build it! But we need to get them up to speed on the rest as quickly as possible, there’s never any time to waste.
You hired adults, who want autonomy and ownership, so your only job is to give them the context they need to get on with things!
Put yourself in their position, how do you get as much of the implicit knowledge that employee number two in your business has; all that context, history & learning, to them as quickly as possible. There are tons of templates out there, but like anything, a tool doesn’t work unless you are proactive about it and consider the intended outcome for the individual!
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