Onboard Your New Hires Effectively

From the moment a candidate says “yes” to the job offer and begins to excitedly envision a future career in your organization, as a leader you should turn your attention to their proper onboarding. Your new hire is coming in with stress, fear, and uncertainty—but also a great deal of drive, enthusiasm, and potential. The quality of onboarding will determine whether the latter is captured or lost. New hires are hypersensitive to the things they see, hear, and experience. It’s likely that within the first few weeks they’ve already determined whether they can build a career with you or if the job will just be a holdover until they find something more attractive. It’s been said that “you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.” You don’t have much time to make that good impression on the people you’ve worked so hard in prior weeks and months to hire.

Often, managers succumb to the temptation to rush a new hire in for their first day of work. Why? Because for some reason they believe that taking a few more days to properly organize and plan for a new hire’s arrival is too inconvenient. The result is often a negative onboarding experience for the new employee, or at very best one that’s mediocre. Don’t give in to this temptation. If your organization has a preparation checklist for onboarding, use it. If not, create one. Obvious areas to concentrate on include the ordering of equipment, supplies, business cards, uniforms, and systems/building access. Ensuring that the physical workspace is set up (desk, chair, phone, monitor, supplies, etc.) is also important.

Ensure that you build in touchpoints such as a welcome email or check-in call with your new hire the week before their first day, and even a welcome card on the workstation. These things go a long way toward making them feel welcome. Announcing the future arrival of the new hire to the team and other stakeholders in the organization (including HR and training) is also important so they can also prepare themselves for the new hire’s arrival.

Creating an hour-by-hour, day-by-day schedule for your new hire for the first few weeks of employment is another crucial aspect of successful onboarding. Leaders commonly fall down here, failing to plan the new hire’s early days on the job. As a result, onboarding appears disjointed and unprofessional. This exercise might take you a little longer as a leader, but the return on this investment of time is significant.

Items to schedule during the first several weeks may include: 1) the induction/orientation session, often coordinated by HR or training, 2) introductory meetings with stakeholders, including internal customers, mentors, and those the new hire should build ties with to perform their role successfully, 3) classroom training sessions on systems/procedures, 4) regular one-on-one check-in sessions with you to discuss progress and issues (should be twice weekly at a minimum in the first month, then at least weekly thereafter during onboarding), 5) open time for self-study and review of material, 6) assigned eLearning, 7) job shadowing or other side-by-side time spent with experienced staff, 8) participation in group meetings, and 9) sessions spent with you as leader personally training and coaching them.

If you can take only two actions regarding orientation, make them building a checklist to prepare for a new hire’s first day on the job and using a schedule template for the first several weeks.

When new hires are provided the schedule for several weeks of work, their stress and fear associated with uncertainty diminishes. A schedule also evidences your leadership’s professionalism to the new hire right from the first day of work, which is important to their engagement in onboarding and future retention.

As a leader, you are the shaper of reality for your people. Create one of excitement, growth, challenge, empowerment, and support, and do so as quickly as you can. New team members crave those feelings as much as you do, and as the weeks go on, excitement and anticipation for the new job wanes with onboarding mediocrity.

• Do you properly prepare for your new hire’s first day of work, using a checklist or other guide to make sure you are thorough and well-organized?
• Do you plan the hour-by-hour, day-by-day schedule for your new hire for the first few weeks, presenting them with a copy of the schedule on their first day and explaining it?
• Do you explain to the new hire who they will be meeting with as part of their onboarding and their relationship to the new hire’s position?

The First Few Weeks of Onboarding

Giving your new hire a tour of their worksite, including introductions to team members, helps make them feel more comfortable and welcome. If you’ve produced an onboarding schedule, then sit down on day one and explain it to your new team member. Talk about the plan for learning, and outline who the new hire will be meeting with (and the relevance of those people to the new hire’s role). This decreases the stress that comes from uncertainty. Your new hire will be impressed with the fact that you’ve prepared well for their arrival and planned out their early experience.

Have the conversation about the operating environment early. New team members need an overview of the organization, its market position, the issues and environmental influences affecting company performance, and the strategy of your business unit and team. Everyone needs to be clear about the company’s mission, vision, and purpose—and how their role supports them. Discuss your expectations for behavior and performance and go through the job description together.

Your new team member needs to understand how competence in their position contributes to the success of the team. Talk through the metrics used to assess their effectiveness in the role. If you do intend to use a mentor, make sure the introduction occurs within the first week or so. As the mentor will act as part of your new team member’s support network, the earlier they get to know one another the better.

During the first several weeks, your new team member will likely participate in formal training sessions, job shadowing, self-learning and e-learning, meetings with stakeholders and their mentor, and periodic meetings with you as their leader. It’s very important that you schedule regular time to meet on a one-on-one basis with your new hire. One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is to work hard to engage and convince a prospect to join their organization and then neglect regular, planned interactions with them over the crucial first few weeks.

Everything we do sends a signal to our people, and your new team member will be particularly sensitive to their environment and interactions. A lack of attention from you is going to go over badly, with your new hire feeling that he or she is far more engaged in their onboarding than you are. During the first couple of weeks, schedule time at least every other day or so to have a follow-up discussion so that you both can discuss progress and issues. You can move to having them less frequently as both you and your new hire’s comfort level with progress increases. It’s easier to reduce the cadence of meetings than to have to increase them, by which time your new team member is already struggling and the damage to their early engagement is already done.

• How often do you meet with new hires during the first month of their employment?
• How well-organized is the schedule for the first two weeks of your new hire’s experience?
• Do you explain right away how good performance in the new hire’s role affects the success of the team and impacts others?

*The above contains excerpts from the book “The Leadership Core: Competencies for Successfully Leading Others”

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