Onboarding new employees: The two most valuable strategies I've learned
As a new employee at a new company, I’ve been onboarded five times. As a hiring manager, mentor, and coach, I’ve directly and indirectly onboarded new employees over fifty times — from individual contributors to managers to C-suite folks. I’ve made plenty of rookie mistakes — from forgetting to obtain user access to an important system, to inadequately planning a welcome lunch, to not setting clear learning goals and deliverables for the first 90 days. Out of everything I’ve learned from previous managers, peer managers, and my own experience of trial and error, here are my two favorite strategies that yield disproportionately high value to cost. Side note: as a new employee, you can implement these proactively as well! 1. Schedule 30-minute Q&A check-ins with your new hire at the end of every workday for the first two weeks. Tell them this space is to act as a catch-all bucket for any and all questions that have arisen from their day of trainings, reading materials, and meeting people. Their job is to capture and bring a list of questions they want more clarity on. Your job is to answer those questions or point them to the people who can. Tips:
Benefits:
Individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave the company, are more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, bring in more revenue, and are rated as effective twice as often by executives. (emphasis mine) There’s no way around the feeling of drinking from a fire hose, but this practice can help the process feel more manageable — and dare I say it, enjoyable.
2. As your new hire goes through the onboarding documentation, ask them to make updates that reflect the current state of the world. I mean, who better to evaluate the effectiveness of onboarding docs than a pair of fresh eyes with no prior internal company knowledge? :) Tips:
Benefits:
Give these a try and let me know what you discover. 2021 |