Evolving Your Company’s Onboarding—How to Move from “Oh So Boring” to “Oh So Rewarding”

School is back in session, so how about this week we start with a little quiz? (Kids shouldn’t be the only ones having fun.)

Fill in the blank: Onboarding is a ________.

What were your first thoughts? Process? Program? What if I told you that just having an onboarding process or program is not enough? For employers and for new hires, onboarding means different things. For employers, the goal may be to get someone ramped up and productive in the most efficient way possible. But for new hires, there are so many what-if’s they’re balancing: What if I don’t fit in? What if I can’t do what I’ve been hired to do? What if I’ve made a mistake? With this mismatch in priorities, it’s no wonder that a 2017 Gallup study found that only 12% of new hires say that their company did a good job with onboarding.

The last few weeks we’ve focused on how to leverage your sales process to attract high-quality prospective talent, compel them to join your company, and keep the momentum as they move toward their start date. Using the sales process metaphor for new-hire onboarding, think about Customer Success at your company. Now imagine if only 12% of your customers said you did a good job onboarding them to your product or service. You’d probably be going out of business.

When you onboard a new customer, you want them to have the best experience so that they will have a positive view of your company and don’t have buyer’s remorse. Why aren’t you using the same approach when it comes to your new hires?

You invested both time and money attracting and recruiting new talent. Don’t drop the ball once they walk through the door. According to the Harvard Business Review, a bad onboarding experience leads up to 33% of new hires to look for a new job within their first six months.  Add to that the fact that the US is going through the Great Resignation, with nearly two-thirds of workers looking for a new job. If your new hire hasn’t found answers to those what-ifs, they may be looking to other companies to answer them.  

This week, we’re going to cover ways to help your new hires be successful when they start.

IS YOUR ONBOARDING JUST A PROCESS?

Raise your hand if you onboard new hires with one or more of the following:

• A week or less of dedicated onboarding (i.e., they aren’t expected to perform core responsibilities)
• A checklist with administrative tasks (access, benefits, HR)
• A library of documents to review to “get up to speed”
• Blocks of unstructured self-paced time with a playlist of recorded sessions or eLearning courses
• A few (if any) live/virtual sessions focused on providing company background, strategy, and vision
• An assigned peer to help them get acclimated, but with no direction on what to do

Well, you’re not alone. According to the Human Capital Institute (HCI) 58% of companies say their onboarding is focused on process and paperwork.

Why this approach is dangerous

There are a few things that happen when a company focuses their onboarding on process and paperwork. (Warning: I’m about to geek out on you with a few cognitive science concepts.)

First, if you focus your onboarding on your company and not on the new hire, you discount or (worse) completely disregard all the experience your new hire brings—experience that compelled you to hire them in the first place. When you do this, you put your new hires at a huge disadvantage. You’re not capitalizing on the wealth of knowledge they bring to your company. You’re also not giving your new hire the opportunity to contextualize their past experiences in a new environment. In learning theory, that type of critical thinking is called constructivism. A constructivist learning approach gives learners the space (and time) to think critically and synthesize information based on their past knowledge and experience. They can then connect that past experience to new challenges or problems.

Second, there’s a risk of cognitive overload. Cognitive overload is when our working memory (the part of our memory that decides what’s important to remember long term and what to forget) is trying to process more information than it can handle. Once your new hire has hit that point of being overloaded, any new information introduced will be forgotten or conflated with other information learned and lead to things being learned incorrectly. New hires are eager to learn and are often compared to sponges. But like sponges, once they’ve soaked up a certain amount of water, they can’t absorb any more.

Lastly, when you schedule onboarding to only be a week or two, your new hire will fall subject to the forgetting curve, which describes the exponential rate at which we forget information. The only way to combat that is to strengthen the memory associated with that information by reinforcing it with immediate application of that information, or through spaced out reinforcement (e.g., discussions with their peer on what they learned).

EVOLVING YOUR ONBOARDING PROGRAM INTO AN EXPERIENCE

How can you evolve your onboarding so that you don’t lose your new hire?

The first thing to do is to remember that you are onboarding a person. That may seem like an obvious statement, but many companies forget about the human experience when creating their onboarding program. Humans are complex—each one with a set of emotions, motivations, behaviors, experiences, and skills. Understanding and tapping into those traits to design an impactful onboarding experience means putting them at the center, aka using Human-Centered Design (HCD). Small ways to infuse HCD into developing an onboarding experience include:

• Interviewing recent new hires or doing focus groups with new hires to understand their experience with onboarding. Put yourself in their shoes—empathize.
• Synthesizing what you’ve learned and defining a design challenge that is focused on the experience of the new hire, NOT just the skills you want them to have at the end of onboarding.
  • Use “How might we…” statements rather than “How do/should we…” because it’s more conducive for creative problem-solving.
• Brainstorming! No idea is too small or too big when it comes to brainstorming. Wild ideas can be focused, and small ideas can be expanded upon later.
• Evaluating your onboarding ideas against these three lenses of innovation:
  • Is it desirable? (i.e., Will new hires see the value in it? Will it solve their challenges?)
  • Is it feasible? (i.e., Do we have the skills, time, and resources to do this?)
  • Is it viable? (i.e., Will this be sustainable long term?)

Second, create an environment of psychological safety for new hires. This concept focuses on building trust, curiosity, and resiliency that allows individuals to be vulnerable, ask questions, and get things wrong without the fear of being embarrassed. For new hires this is critical. If they think that they will look bad or give the wrong impression, they may be hesitant to speak up if something does not make sense or give their perspective based on their own experience. Think about those what-ifs. Psychological safety gives them the opportunity to answer those what-ifs either directly or indirectly. If you assign a peer to help with onboarding, this peer can help provide that psychological safety.

Onboarding can be more rewarding for both the new hire and your company. Ensuring your company focuses on your new-hire experience during onboarding helps establish a positive relationship and create happy and long-term employees.

Are you looking for help with recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training? Get in touch at mastery@maestrogroup.co.