Onboarding. Making New Hires Stick.

Onboarding, a word not connected to midwifery, is supposed to represent that fragile early period of a new hire. Those first six months where the emotional connection and commitment to your company is being formed. Common sense would cover off many of these points but we are in 2012, a time in history where mothers buy knee pads for babies and your new supervisor still lives with his parents.

I compiled and presented this list in one of our seminars. Use it in your company and prevent hiring failure. Hiring is too expensive and time consuming to have fail six months later.

Onboarding – how to make new hires stick.

1. Hook new hires up with your best manager or team. That experience will become the setpoint for the rest of their tenure with your firm.
2. Clear and simple direction, repeated often. Lost and confused people quit easily.
3. KPIs using numbers.
   • Give new hires clear direction in the form of KPIs.
   • Communicate: If we were to fire you, here's why it will happen.
   • Your first performance review will ask for the following.
4. Form individual relationships fast. Manager to new hire, cement the connection.
5. Narrow discretionary decision making range.
   Don't ask people to "solve a business unit problem." Ask them to do a series of activities. Provide a yellow brick road. Do not ask them to design the road.
6. Give new hires more frequent feedback than existing employees.
   Once a week for the first three months.
7. For managers and sales, give clear budgets, quotas, expense budgets.
8. Provide strategic objectives. Give them big picture focus.
9. Reduce the number of other managers influencing a new hires life. New people need one boss, not many.
10. Meet often. Staff meetings, sales meetings. Listen, help, redirect but do not reprimand or correct.
11. Provide constant support. Have other staff handy and alerted to new hire's needs. New hires give up more easily on small problems than existing staff.
12. Pay attention to existing staff. They're watching for two things; favouritism, and management mistakes. Be sure you're right.
13. Keep negative people away. Control who connects with your new hire. Allow positive people close.

Start new hires carefully. A successful company is an amazing thing.

Wolfgang

Some useful links . . .

1. Information about our pre-hiring verification program.
2. Information about our testing service.
3. Information about our outsourced human resources service.

Shoes, and Light Lager.

Nobody appreciates Metro Town Mall until they've arrived here from Yak. We take it for granted. If you're like me, and you haven't arrived from anywhere, Metro Town is just a massive, endless, collection of retail stores. I like Metro Town. After some social desensitizing and relearning how to look through people, and not at them, I cope quite well. 

Family, visitors, it's all nice. You go to places you wouldn't normally go to. I went up the glass elevator to Harbour Centre's amazing observation deck. Beautiful. Without visitors to guide, I would never have gone up. We also went to Metro Town, why I don't know. I briefly thought about Jerry Harvey's Road to Abilene management lesson. The reason's seemed the same. 

After some time in the mall, we noticed one of our group wasn't going to come out of a shoe store. She agonized, pondered, tried on another pair of shoes, sent them back, then repeated it all again. She walked out of the store, almost, then turned around and went back in. Her face showed big stress. She didn't really like the shoes, but felt she had to make a decision, she had to buy something. This went a little too long. 

My great daughter figured it out. She want back, took the lady by the arm and said, "Susan, you don't have to buy shoes here. There are another forty shoe stores in this mall. Most of them on this floor. Come, let's go to another store and look for shoes that you really like." 

Susan looked up, blank face. She said, "Oh, right, I forgot." 

Susan was from Andrews Florida, population 530. Shoe stores, one, very small at the back of the local family clothing store. If you need shoes in Andrews Florida, you'll have to decide from in-store stock. Your other option is to leave without new shoes. Coming from Andrews and landing in Metro Town has to be a mind warp. 

Yes I know Aldo's online delivers to your home and Amazon probably has shoes as well. The management lesson is this. Our history, our context, delivers up our options. How many choices do we have on our mental shelf? Like good sheep, we tend to think inside that box. It's part of being human. When shopping in Metro Town Mall is bigger than town you live in, - it's a bit surreal. I don't care how smart you are, you're not going to respond correctly. You will be governed by context. 

Over time we can introduce new habits. Acclimatization. Humans are survivors, we adjust. But in a business setting, it might not be fast enough. A major management function is to match people with the work. Load levelling they call it. When you move people into different departments, give them different projects, hire, cross train, remember, and plan to see some of their history will show up in their work. 

I'm German. I will be on time, and if you hang around long enough, a light lager will show up somewhere. 

Look at the person. Look at their history. You will get both. 

Have a great day, 
Wolfgang 
Partner 

p.s. A quicker way to make the point is to watch Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady."