30-60-90 Day Plan For Success
A 30-60-90 Day Plan helps the employer and the employee create success for a new employee and can help the employee get the job.
When someone joins a company in a new position, the first few months are critical. Equally so for both parties. The new employee is settling in, hoping to make a good impression and a positive contribution early on, and of course, their manager is looking for the same.
The importance of this initial period of employment is what makes a 30-60-90 Day Plan such a great tool. Have you ever begun a new job where the expectations were a bit fuzzy? Perhaps you didn’t fully know what you were supposed to do, and you might not have been clear on whether your work was as good as it was supposed to be. It’s not a comfortable feeling.
Clarity is the key to getting a new employee off on the right foot. And that’s precisely what this kind of plan does. A 30-60-90 Day Plan is a roadmap, a plan for the first three months in a new job. When it’s incorporated formally, it’s a plan agreed upon by both employee and manager. It sets out clearly defined objectives for the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
30-60-90 Plan for the Job Seeker
A quick aside: for the rest of this blog, I’ll be mainly speaking to an employer audience about how to create a plan like this one. If you’re a job seeker, you can use this information to develop a plan of your own. You can use it in a new job to help guide your first few months in the role. Some people even choose to present a draft plan in final interviews to demonstrate how they’d approach their early days in the job to their prospective employer. And some employers will ask candidates to create a proposed plan based on the provided parameters.
Creating the 30-60-90 Day Plan
Are you thinking about making a plan part of your hiring and onboarding process?
The first step is to determine, for each 30-day phase, what the appropriate focus should be. Generally speaking, the first 30 days are for ‘discovery.’ The new employee gets a sense of their place in the company and their new job. The second 30 days is ‘ownership,’ during which the new employee begins to take full responsibility for their work and its outcomes. The third 30-day period is ‘growth,’ where the employee should start making fundamental changes in their team and create value through their work. These stages, however, may differ depending on the nature of your organization and the new employee’s position.
Set Learning & Performance Goals
When you’re clear on the focus for each stage, the next task is to set goals reflecting several key priorities. These priorities should include learning and performance goals at the minimum and possibly some personal goals. Learning objectives might consist of product or service training with different teams across the organization or perhaps more technical hands-on training with databases and other technologies relevant to the position. Performance goals will be job-related KPIs at an appropriate level, which become more demanding with more experience in the job.
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Set Personal Goals
If you choose to include them, personal goals are about the employee finding their place in their new organization and getting to know others across the company and in the industry overall. For example, one goal might be to connect with several colleagues who work in entirely different company areas or join an industry organization and attend a meeting. As with any other goals, these should be?SMART?goals, including how you’ll measure success.
Putting the 30-60-90 Day Plan to Work
Creating the plan is the first step. Schedule a check-in meeting with the employee and manager at the 30-, 60-, and 90-day points. Review the employee’s progress against the set goals. Make any adjustments that are needed.
These meetings are an opportunity to ask questions that provide real-time feedback about how the employee is growing into the role. Open-ended questions, like “How are you feeling about the job?” are great conversation-starters. The first two meetings also provide the opportunity to surface any disparity between perception and reality. Is the job what you expected? Is there anything that has surprised you? As the employee’s experience grows, questions can become more specific about performance and expectations – similar to questions you’d ask a longer-term employee. What has been your biggest challenge so far? What will be your top priority goals for the remainder of the year?
Improve Your Onboarding
One last point: these early meetings can provide valuable insight into the effectiveness of your onboarding process. Listen carefully – especially in the 30 and 60-day meetings – for comments that suggest that the employee was missing tools or information they needed to feel confident and secure in their new job. Common threads in this vein could highlight ways to improve your onboarding over time.
Whether you’re embarking on a new job or hiring a new employee, a 30-60-90 Day Plan can effectively get the first few months off on the right foot. Have you used one? Get in touch. I’d love to hear about how it worked out.
Additional Resources:
Masterclass:?30-60-90 Day Plan: How To Create a 30-60-90 Day Plan
JimNewcomb.com: My?Blog Articles?are about personal and business development focusing on recruiting for employers and finding a job for candidates.