What your New Employee Wants you to Know

Onboarding for Small & Medium-Sized Businesses

Too often, people start new jobs motivated, excited, and ready to roll only to have the life sucked out of them with days of reading policies, completing required training, and/or being trained by someone that either doesn’t know how to train effectively or doesn’t have the time to do it right.

This results in added cost to the employer and a less enthusiastic employee.

The stage has been set for a less than ideal working relationship. It doesn’t have to be that way. By adapting your onboarding approach to the employee, you can maintain that enthusiasm while still getting your required paperwork completed. And you can ensure your new employee is receiving training that maximizes their potential as opposed to draining them.

Whether it’s their first or 500th day on the job, here’s what virtually every employee wants from their employer — to feel valued, respected, and heard. Yet, employers continue to make new hire training/onboarding about the employer dumping all their required information on the employee instead of ensuring the employee feels valued, respected, and heard from the moment they walk in the door. They create an onboarding process to ensure everything gets taken care of and don’t consider the employee or their learning needs in that process.

Disclaimer: This post is not about the sub-par employee that was a bad hire to begin with. It’s about retaining and maximizing the investment you’ve already placed in hiring someone. If there is a performance issue, check out one of my other blog posts for how to handle that.

Back to the investment you’ve just made. As an added note of interest, it’s intriguing how so many companies spoon-feed their employees during new hire orientation yet say they want critical thinkers and employees that will search for solutions. It seems it would make sense to start the employment relationship with the behaviors you’d like to see for the long term. . .just sayin.

First impressions count . . .especially in employment relationships.

First Day/Week Employee Thoughts

If it’s been a while since you started a new job or if you happen to be a business owner, human resources professional, or manager, allow me to remind you how it feels to be a new employee. While, of course, all circumstances are different, I think we can make some safe generalizations.

1. I’m so excited about this new opportunity and can’t wait to get started!
2. Are we going to take a break at some point, my head is so full of information I can’t think straight?
3. Why is (former employer) calling me? They know I just started a new job!
4. I hope the kids got off to school today without any problems. I need to be sure and call the school to make an appointment with Caleb’s teacher. Oh, geez, I don’t want them to think I’m going to be one of those employees.
5. What was the name of that benefits lady again?
6. Oh shoot, I should have checked how long my benefits last from my other employer?
7. When do we get paid?
8. Where did you say the bathroom was?
9. Okay, I’m not sure what the deal is, but this person training me is giving me more information than I could ever possibly retain.
10. Am I supposed to be taking notes are they going to give me a manual or something?
11. I am starving. Will we ever take a break?
12. If I have to take one more online training course or read another policy, I’m going to scream.
13. When will I get to start working?
14. You want me to spend the day reading this at my desk? And do the same thing tomorrow? Really? Are we testing my ability to read?
15. I’ve been here a week and still haven’t spent any time with my boss. Maybe I made the wrong decision.

As you can see by the list, employees are coming in with a thousand thoughts. On the one hand, they are excited about this new opportunity yet, they still have the life they had before they got this opportunity. They still have family responsibilities and often, a prior employer that didn’t plan well for their departure. And learning is hard work. It takes effort to listen (just try not to multitask on your next conference call and you’ll see what I mean) which is literally what new employers are asking them to do non-stop for days on end.

First Day/Week Employer Thoughts

And while employees are trying to navigate all the thoughts listed above, here’s what employers are thinking.

1. Get all the mandatory paperwork and regulatory training done in the first few days.
2. Geez, I hope this employee works out.
3. Make sure they know about the company and culture and since they can’t do any work yet, let’s fill up their schedule with tons of activity, job shadowing, and providing information they may or may not use again just so they are “aware” of everything in the company.
4. They must read the employee handbook before they can start working.
5. Give them to the most experienced person to “train” them.
6. We don’t know what they know about how to do their job so let’s assume they know nothing and teach them everything in the way we like to teach (as opposed to the way they best learn).

If you compare the two lists, it’s easy enough to see why there is a disconnect. Read on to figure out how to bridge some of that gap.

An Employee Centered Approach

The best way to ensure employees feel valued, respected, and heard is to take the time to adapt your approach to the employee. And it isn’t that hard. Regardless of the size of your organization, there is room for an employee-centered approach to onboarding. And while your organization may not have the means to invest in virtual reality or artificial intelligence, there are many ways to adapt your onboarding to the employee.

Instead of trying to cram them full of everything they could ever possibly want to know about your organization and/or the role they will be fulfilling, why not try a more customized “drip” approach to onboarding? Drip learning provides smaller chunks of information that are more easily digestible. It gives them a chance to assimilate the information before building on it. And what is onboarding but learning?

Here are just a few examples of how this could work for a new employee.

1. Paperwork: Send new hire paperwork (i.e. benefits packages) to the employee via email before their start date and provide a chat location (or schedule a meeting several days later) where they can contact a benefits expert to ask questions and complete their paperwork.
2. Day 1 Burning Questions: Why not create a web page for employees only that lists typical burning questions your new employees will have even prior to starting their new job? Nobody wants to have to ask, “When will my first paycheck be?” Provide detailed explanations on this website and send them a link prior to their start date. Be sure to provide specific examples. Then, on day 1, you can give them a few minutes to review the link (in case they didn’t have time) and ask them questions instead of taking the time to spoon-feed them.
3. Company Welcome & History: Instead of spending the first day (or week) giving the new employee the history of the company, provide a brief welcome message and then allow them to “get to work.” Create various videos that can be watched throughout the first 30 days and break up their days by allowing them time each day for independent study, training with a buddy, and doing some value-added work.
4. Leverage Learning Tools: Too many employers focus their onboarding efforts on online learning and someone telling them everything. Allow new employees to engage their minds by leveraging a variety of learning tools. A crossword puzzle is just a fill in the blank quiz but somehow it is so much more interesting. Video clips, infographics, and activities that engage the mind will be much more effective than telling them to read an employee manual or watch 10 web-based training courses.
5. Daily Follow-Up: Leverage electronic tools to check-in at the end of each day. 15Five.com has a great tool that is non-invasive and allows you to quickly gauge how the employee is feeling about their new work experience. The questions are customizable and might include anything from “How are you feeling today?” to “How productive were you today?” The employee simply rates each question according to a 5-point scale. This is an interesting tool as it feels somewhat anonymous, is quick and easy, and is a great barometer to determine if a change in approach is needed.
6. Assigned Trainer: One of the biggest mistakes many companies make is to assign their most experienced employee to be the “trainer” or new employees. This is a mistake because training requires a different skill set than working. Some of your most productive employees are likely your worst trainers. And that means your new employees are suffering. Assign an OJT training buddy that 1. Knows how to assess their preferred learning style and 2. Knows how to adapt their style to the learner.
7. Integrate Feedback Everywhere: Without feedback, the employee does not know what they are doing well and where they need to improve. And employees want feedback from the very beginning. That’s when they are the most uncertain. They want to know if they are catching on fast enough, meeting your expectations, and/or what they need to do differently. The trust level is low because the relationship is new, and they can’t “read” you yet. Ensure you have processes in place that provide frequent feedback from the day they get started.
8. Bosses Should Schedule Time: Assuming you are a small or medium-sized business, at least the first two levels of leaders should make time in the first two weeks to have a planned, scheduled follow-up with the new employee. How can they possibly feel valued, respected, and heard if the boss can’t even make time for them? Their immediate supervisor should be meeting weekly and the second level (if there is one) should meet in the first two weeks with at least two follow-ups after that. These are your employees. You wouldn’t be able to take care of customers without them. They should be valuable enough to be able to schedule a time to see how it’s going.

While this certainly is not an all-inclusive list, by thinking of your onboarding process just a little differently, and focusing it on the employee, an experience could be created for the new employee that maximizes the enthusiasm they naturally have in starting a new position.

Hiring and training are expensive.

Changing your approach could decrease the cost and totally change the trajectory of the employee-employer relationship from day one.

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And I’d love to hear any feedback you have on the topic or on the style of writing. What do you wish I had covered that I didn’t? What would you like to know more about? Please help me to know how I can best help you below.

Mari