Impressive Inductions

In times of high attrition and/or a scarcity of talent it’s crucially important that organisations not only leverage the work they’ve done on their culture to create a point of difference, but also to ensure that they create a great experience that encourages people to join.

In the current market many organisations are paying increasingly higher wages for specific skills. However, the benefits of doing this are often short-term, as if they can’t back the pay up with a good culture it will inevitably lead to demotivated (well paid) employees.

Everything starts (continues and ends!) with the culture. It’s got to be defined, unique, with a strong set of well-written values reinforced by management behaviours that create safety, allowing people to be the best versions of themselves. Oh and if you have good benefits and can pay in line with responsibilities, then even better!

However, if there isn’t a strong plan to bring those new, highly motivated people into the business the opportunity for immediate emotional capital and value creation may be lost. So in this week’s blog I wanted to provide some simple guidance on the steps that teams need to take to create impressive inductions.

For ease, I’ve split this into three sections; pre-boarding, onboarding, postflight.

1. Pre-boarding

In order to attract people who can add value to your organisation then you can use tools like Textio to help you write job ads that are inclusive and don’t send the wrong message from the outset. Always include the salary so that people can see what you’re offering from the outset. Hiding this information is a demonstration of a lack of transparency, which is never a great advert for your culture.

Once you have a good mix of candidates, don’t keep them hanging around. Get the interviews locked in, start them on time, end them on time, be respectful throughout (recognising that some people will be more nervous than others) and talk openly about the opportunity you have.?

This is where a well-defined set of values is crucial. You can’t hire for ‘culture fit’ if you don’t know what emotional commitments you’re looking for in new employees. You want to hire people that value diversity and know how to be inclusive in order to ensure that it becomes endemic in the organisation. Similarly, if you value humility, then you’ll ask questions around this topic too. ‘Innate Humility’ is something that technology company Slack values.

CEO and co-founder of Slack Stewart Butterfield said of this: ‘We’re looking for humility and an acknowledgement that luck has played some part in the job prospect’s success.’

Yet most organisations still have ‘standard’ questions for interviews. In my experience, if you ask standard questions, you get standard people who’ve answered queries about their strengths and weaknesses so often it’s become another strength!

Make no mistake that in an environment where talent is scarce, the organisation is being interviewed and if this process isn’t a good one, then don’t expect a call back from the potential employee!

2. Onboarding

Great, they joined… now what?! What you don’t want to do – which is something that happened to me on my first day – is to sit them in front of a laptop and get them to read the intranet and the acronym dictionary! Nothing screams ‘THIS IS A PLACE THAT DOESN’T VALUE SIMPLICITY!’ like a list of acronyms. In a Word document. That new people have to read before they can understand anything.

A better thing to do is to create a 90-day plan that provides new people with a tour of the business. According to the Wyndhurst group, over a quarter of new employees leave their new job in the first 90 days, so a solid plan can help to avoid this. The same survey also found that almost two-thirds of employees who have a structured induction are more likely to stay with the organisation.

When I wrote Culture Fix in 2019 and. More recently, in researching organisations that did inductions really well during the pandemic, I found that they all had six things in common:

• Make the investment – all the programs look professionally put together. There is often a beautifully put together ‘pack’ of information as well as swag (which people then share on LinkedIn)?
• Start early – they are drip feeding information before employees even start. They want to set a level of expectation and a healthy dose of excitement before the new employee starts, to demonstrate that they care?
• Values alignment – the organisation’s values are at the heart of everything. They want to help new employees understand how they should be lived every day, so that they’re able to contribute from the start
• Team involvement – everyone on the team - often including the CEO or members of the executive - are involved in welcoming new people to the organisation so they can immediately put faces to names
• Clear structure – their programs don’t fizzle out after the first week. There is a clear plan and structure to the program and new hires feel empowered to take control of it as early as possible
• Trained from the start – and finally, there are no assumptions made about how technology is/should be used. Training is provided early on in the program as well as guidance around the principles of collaboration.

By doing these six things, people feel like they are boarding into business class, not being bundled into the hold.

3. Post-flight

Once the probationary period has ended, don’t drop the ball! One of my favourite Brene Brown quotes is this, ‘I define a leader as anyone who holds themselves responsible for finding the potential in people and processes, and has the courage to develop that potential.’

That’s something that definitely happened to me at least once, post-onboarding, in one organisation. My manager immediately invested their time in setting expectations clearly, checking in to see how I was progressing and ensuring that my happiness and energy had been maintained. They talked to me regularly about my capabilities and actively sought out opportunities in which I could grow. They also challenged me to make changes wherever I saw inefficiency. It was fantastic.

Atlassian does something similar as part of its Rocket Fuel onboarding program. At the end of the 90 days, each new employee is challenged to change one thing about how the team works. This is fantastically empowering for new people who get to add immediate value.

Of course, there will occasionally be people who don’t make it through the 90-day probation and that’s fine, not everyone is suited to every business. However, if you don’t provide people with an impressive induction, you’ll never know whether they’re a good fit or not and will end up hiring them anyway.

Impressive inductions send the message to prospective and new employees that the organisation cares about humans and the experience that they have and once you’ve been on the end of an impressive induction, you never forget it. Better than that you tell others about it and the pipeline of high-performing talent continually refills itself. There’s really no downside to it at all.

What induction experience have you been through that’s worth sharing?