How would keeping your talented team help your business grow?
- Adam Spacht
- Apr 27, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Oct 13
Leaders want to build engagement and long-term retention from their teams.
Nearly 70% of employees report they're more likely to stay with a firm if they have a strong onboarding experience.
Building a solid onboarding that ties your new hires deeply to your organization, and prepares them for a job role isn't beyond your reach.
Yet, a huge swath of companies report focusing solely on the compliance tasks of onboarding like paperwork or issuing a computer during onboarding.
Or worse yet, offer nothing at all.
Onboarding is often more like an orientation and usually a shoddy one at that.
And if you leave it up to the front line managers, who are under all manner of pressure, they will always choose to skip it because "we're too busy".
Not because they are bad people, but their KPIs and rewards are usually focused on activity and results which alters their focus.
Building a focused onboard experience, which includes some job skills training, is not beyond your reach and is a huge opportunity to build a long-term depth of talent
Here's how it's not done:
❌ Leave it up to team/sites/plants & have 10 different groups with 10 different experiences
❌ Rely exclusively on unstructured shadowing
❌ Cram a years worth of knowledge into a 2 hour "boot-camp" of powerpoint slides in an attempt to teach them everything about everything
The first step?
Make the commitment right now that you're not "too busy" and begin communicating to your managers that actual onboarding and job skills training will happen.
From there, it's not cumbersome, complicated or costly to line out a program.
A short orientation to cover compliance topics such as completing HR paperwork, regulatory requirements, policy overviews and understanding the organizations culture all set the stage for team specific training.
It is a huge opportunity for a small to medium sized firm, late-stage startup or large autonomous team to carve out a competitive advantage that leads directly to talent retention.
It's a time to build connection, purpose and direction with your new team member. To help them feel welcome and build a connective tissue to the firm.
To push them beyond "first day jitters" of being the new person and help them settle in.
This also clearly highlights important HR and company culture issues first to give them more importance.
It's also a great opportunity for a low cost, high impact investment into your team. To spend actual real time helping them settle in without just throwing them haphazard into the role.
Use this table to list out all of the topics you'd cover in an orientation session & begin to organize them in a logical order:
Here's an example of possible topics
HR welcome & paperwork | Company Ethos Presentation | Office Tour | Expense report policy & process review | Company SWAG and welcome box |
Issue ID badge | Safety Brief | Factory Tour | Company History | Company departments & key leaders overview |
Issue computer & other equipment | Harassment & Dress Code Policy Review | Team lunch | Wellness Programs Summary | Set up workstations & review policy time block |
IT policy review | Meet the CEO | Meet the director | Regulatory Topics Summary | Overview of customers & markets |
Depending on your firm, industry and needs, orientation could be a morning or a couple days.
But this time is designed to welcome them into the firm, help them understand how they fit into the company and understand the norms & expectations.
It's a general program that applies to everybody.
Depending on the size of your firm, orientation can be owned and coordinated by the office manager, HR team or the hiring manager themselves.
Consider having different members of different teams going through orientation together to foster community.
From there you can move to job role specific training
Job role training happens at the team level.
After general onboarding, marketing folks get job specific training at the marketing team.
Accounting folks learn accounting procedures in their groups. Salespeople with the sales teams and so on.
This allows those teams to start from a uniform baseline and then provide job specific practices to the new hire.
Now you can begin spacing training out over relevant times and based on the needs of each team.
But you maintain a uniform baseline of company culture and norms and that information can flow and be mirrored from both phases.
Job skills training can be a few hours or months depending on role and can be delivered by a corporate training team or the team itself (again depending on the size of the company).
Be separating orientation & job skills sessions you space the information over time and avoid overwhelming your new team member.
Depending on the situation the orientation & job skills training can happen in concert with each other.
This framework can help orientation and job skills training to be smooshed together.
This framework outlines what that looks like. By cutting ramp time into reasonable time blocks you can both onboard and provide job role training spread over a reasonable time.
Time blocks nearer to start date will be more HR compliance and company culture heavy.
Future time blocks shift more to job role specific topics.
In closing, putting energy into onboarding increases retention of your new hires.
However it is structured, the evidence is clear people stay longer at companies with good onboarding.
It's not cumbersome, complicated or costly to get started.
Small efforts can pay huge dividends and impact the metrics that matter.
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