New Hire Onboarding: It’s time to get it right.
We’ve been having the same conversation for decades —something has to give.
Plenty has been written on the importance of designing a great new hire onboarding process, yet it seems as though many companies are still really struggling.
The statistics are relatively abysmal:
- Only 33% of individuals report being actively engaged at work
- More than 50% of all senior outside hires leave within the first 18 months
- 60% of companies don’t have clear milestones or metrics in place for onboarding
- Only half of companies cover more than just compliance in their onboarding process
Organizations know the importance of new hire onboarding and yet many companies are still doing it wrong. The stats above only paint part of the picture.
SHRM outlines four components to new hire onboarding processes.
1. Compliance: Compliance is the lowest level and includes teaching employees basic legal and policy-related rules and regulations.
2. Clarification: Clarification refers to ensuring that employees understand their new jobs and all related expectations.
3. Culture: Culture is a broad category that includes providing employees with a sense of organizational norms — both formal and informal.
4. Connection: Connection refers to the vital interpersonal relationships and information networks that new employees must establish. (source)
The report shows that most companies cover a basic new hire orientation process (compliance) and only about half of companies cover clarification in addition to compliance.
Worse, only 20% of companies cover all four sections of a well designed new hire onboarding process.
Put differently, 80% of companies are leaving out processes that facilitate a clear understanding of company and team culture. The same percentage are forgetting to facilitate social connections for new hires.
Getting it right.
Your onboarding process should focus on more than just making sure a new team member understands compliance or the basics of how to do their job. A great onboarding process should strive to ensure that new hires have the information they need to better understand the culture, norms, and expectations of the organization.
Taking it a step further, a well designed process should set new hires up to be a credible member of the team and helps them find their footing and confidence as quickly as possible.
When these factors don’t align, companies face long-term problems: high employee turnover, low morale, poor performance, lack of confidence among team members, and more.
Understanding New Hire Onboarding
Onboarding is about more than just welcoming a new hire to the team and dumping loads of information on them their first day.
It’s about providing an individual with the tools, resources, information, and expectations they will need to succeed over the subsequent 12 to 18 months.
Yet in many companies, new hire orientation (paperwork, policies, and tours) gets mistaken for a propper new hire onboarding process and things fall apart.
Even when a great process is in place, it can quickly be sidelined by an eager new employee and a manager who “needed-that-team-member-to-be-productive-by-yesterday.”
As a result, new hires are often thrown into the deep end and expected to sort of “figure things out”.
Solving for the Right Jobs
New hire onboarding is a process with one very clear job: Help new hires integrate successfully within the organization.
More specifically, the goal of new hire onboarding is to help new individuals become “value-adding” members of the team as quickly as possible and help them stay that way for as long as possible.
To do this, they must have confidence, support, and the means to gather information quickly (i.e., internal social connections).
The“Jobs to Be Done” theory highlights the fact that people “hire” products to do a certain job for us in a certain moment.
For example, we hire a coffee to give us energy in the morning. We hire a new pair of running shoes to help us make running less painful. Sometimes we hire ice cream to keep us cool in the summer heat. Other times, that exact same flavor of ice cream is hired to make us feel better after a long day of work.
Looking at new hire onboarding through this lens, the objective becomes significantly clearer. We “hire” an onboarding process for as many as a dozen different jobs. Serving different jobs, each part of the new hire onboarding process is there for a unique reason.
If we’re not intentional about the process, jobs slip through the cracks and we leave a new member of the team floating, forced to “hire” a solution of their own.
When we think about New Hire Onboarding from a “Jobs to be Done” lens, it’s easy to see how useful it can be.
We “hire” parts of the onboarding process to ensure that new employees understand and adopt the company’s mission, values and norms.
Other parts are “hired” to help new team members feel comfortable, welcomed and safe within their new organization.
And, perhaps most importantly, we hire the onboarding process to ensure that new hires are able to prove their value as quickly as possible. This is where milestones, appreciation and feedback come in.
We hire the onboarding process to…
…remind new hires that they made the right decision choosing this job.
…help new hires understand the company culture
…make new hires feel lucky to be a part of this new company
…make new hires feel like valued members of the team — “If we hired you, you must be amazing!”
…help new hires gain a clear sense of how their performance will be measured.
…help new hires efficiently learn important parts of their new job (i.e., technologies, facts, best practices, etc.) as quickly as possible.
…help new hires form social bonds with their new coworkers
…set expectations for performance and behavior within the organization (i.e., to communicate what is considered “excellent” work.)
…quickly build credibility between existing members of the team and the new hire.
And so many more.
When companies see new hire onboarding as something that needs to be rushed, they miss big opportunities to make sure a new team member feels valued, prepared and supported.
The problems that HR teams often face can easily be tied back to expectations that were not properly set during the first few weeks on the job.
Does your onboarding process need attention?
If your team has recently faced any of the following problems, I recommend taking a look at your new hire onboarding process.
If you have experienced any of the following situations, consider looking into which parts of the new hire onboarding process might have prevented it.
Managers complain that team members aren’t performing at the expected level within the first 12 months.
New hires struggle in their first performance review or communicate that they’re unsure what is expected of them.
New hires find it difficult to integrate into their new team.
Team dynamics become complicated with each new hire (i.e., excessive interpersonal conflict)
Team members leave the company before the end of their first 18 months or request a transfer to a new team within the first 6 to 12 months.
A large percentage of team members are terminated before the end of their first 18 months due to “lack of culture fit” or “poor performance”.
Any formal new hire onboarding activities end before the end of their first two or three months.
The Importance of Expectations:
We can count on individuals to identify weaknesses in our new hire onboarding process. Individuals aren’t in a position to connect the dots between the individual challenges they’re facing and a corporate process.
Even if they were to make those connections, they don’t have a clear incentive to speak up about the challenges they face. When team members are up against an obstacle, they have a few options for how to handle it.
Most often, individuals will try to handle it themselves, suffer in silence, or simply go find a new job.
If you’ve heard the comments below, it’s time to rethink how your team communicates expectations around performance and behaviors.
The time to start communicating those expectations is during the first few months of a new hire’s experience with the company.
“I don’t know what is expected of me.”
“I don’t understand how to do my job successfully.”
“My manager manages me in a way that I’m not used to and/or don’t like.”
“My team members don’t like me, don’t respect me, or don’t trust me.”
“My team members are smarter than me (or not as smart as me) and it’s difficult to work in that environment.”
“My work isn’t valued within the team.”
“I’m afraid people will realize I don’t belong here.”
“I think my manager is disappointed they hired me.”
“I’m not able to provide feedback without being ignored or shutdown.”
“I thought I have been doing a great job for the past 12 months but for some reason am not being promoted.”
“There’s nowhere for me to grow within this organization (because of any number of comments above).”
“The conflict I had with a coworker / manager will stick with me forever. I should just find a new job.”
It’s time to develop a solution.
The conversation around new hire onboarding has been happening for years and yet companies aren’t finding lasting solutions. What will your company do to enhance onboarding in the coming months?
Today marks the beginning of the conversation. If you want to participate, follow me. Each week, we’ll share a new article on how to onboard your team members more effectively.
Take it one step further — write a post on how your organization onboards new hires. Let’s share best practices.
