Effective onboarding: Another lens to look at the first 90 days
Let’s agree on some numbers before we talk about anything else.
- A new employee that isn’t onboarded properly, costs the company at least 3X the salary.
- Around 20% of employee turnover happens within the first 1.5 months.
You never get a second chance to make the first impression.
To put it simply, if your hiring process ends at the candidate accepting the offer, there is an elephant in the room. Don’t feed it anymore.
This write-up will talk about a framework for effective onboarding from a team’s perspective, built on top of the lessons learned as the team tackled the exact same problem.
On top of that, add the context that the team was playing a central role, wearing at least 4 hats (read “roles”), which is typical for a startup environment.
It was challenging to the point where the team started to have problems performing their “core” role, in order to keep everything else working.
Quickly getting the new members up and running felt like the next logical step.
Understanding the problem
It’s important to understand the problem-space addressed here before moving forward. This article covers setting an environment where the employee can start making an impact as early as possible.
What’s not covered:
- General company orientation
- Remote onboarding problems during COVID-19.
If you’ve read the book “The First 90 Days,” it talks about the concept of “The break-even point.”
This is the point in time after your transition to the new role, where you’ve generated as much value for the organization as you’ve consumed.
As an employee moving to a new role, your goal is to get to the break-even point as quickly as possible.
But the real experience is quite different from what was portrayed in the book. As a new employee, you don’t have to wait for all the relevant value to be consumed.
In reality, the exchange of value is a rather ongoing process. A new employee shouldn’t be stopped from generating value until the consumption is done.
Now that you’re on the same page (and on the exact same line), we will talk about how to achieve the continuous value exchange.
Facilitating the continuous value exchange
Based on the above-mentioned structure, setting up an environment of a continuous value exchange depends on two factors.
- Removing friction during the value-consumption
- Accelerating the value-generation (perceived and real)
If your organization is able to cover two factors, it will end up creating an environment for the new employee to thrive.
Removing friction during the value-consumption
Transitions are periods of acute vulnerability where a new candidate lacks established working relationships and a detailed understanding of the role.
Socialization
As per Google’s Project Oxygen research, it’s important to count on each other to be able to do high-quality work as a team.
Along with vertical relationships, it’s equally important for a new candidate to establish horizontal relationships to build a supportive alliance.
In order to help establish these required relationships, we setup informal catch-up sessions between the existing and the new candidates during the first week.
These sessions covered interactions with the members from:
- Consumer team (a team that uses work done by the candidate’s team)
- Provider team (a team that provides work/support to the candidate’s team)
We had an existing agenda for the different types of sessions, which was flexible enough to ensure the discussions aren’t being modeled strictly but gave enough direction to the new candidates.
Personalization
Even though every candidate comes through the same interview process, everyone has their own way of working, learning, and making an impact. Given this information, a universal-cure for all the problems won’t work out in this case.
If you're using a single method to onboard every other candidate, you should look closely at the feedback provided by the employees. It will be clear that a single way to deliver content and teach doesn’t work for everyone.
This requires you to personalize your onboarding sessions for each individual (and role).
Here are some of the initiatives we have taken to personalize the onboarding experience.
- Curated content/material to read that’s specific to the individual’s context (a section of the organization’s wiki)
- Course design to onboard team members new to their specific function, with personalized assignments based on their context
Accelerating the value-generation
The previous section talked about removing friction during the value-consumption period for a new candidate. At the same time, it’s important to provide relevant value-generation opportunities to the new member.
Small wins
Securing small wins early in the transition journey helps the new members build their credibility and give them a sense of momentum to continue working in the right direction.
Frame a situation as an opportunity rather than a problem
In the early days, the new member might not have the complete picture to take the relevant actions in any given situation.
This requires additional efforts to ensure you’re framing it as an opportunity and giving enough supporting material, instead of painting the situation as a problem.
In one instance, the team backed a new member in our CUX team to structure and present a potential solution to the customer team, just on her second day.
Eventually, it resulted in a huge compliment from their CTO, and this small-win was enough to provide a boost to her onboarding.
Be vulnerable
We can all agree that trust is the key element to transform a group of people into a team. Without trust, we just coordinate with each other at best, there is no true collaboration.
According to Patrick Lencioni, the absence of trust is the first dysfunction of a team. It’s the fear of being vulnerable with each other that prevents team members from building trust with each other.
In order to be a functional team, we try to be vulnerable with each other wherever necessary.
We talk about negative things or unsolved areas during the onboarding period itself.
This acts as a catalyst, and the new members go all-in to solve the problems for the team.
Summary
To summarize it all, the new members joining your team will do their best to start making an impact, but it’s the team’s job also.
An effective onboarding happens when the perceived context-switch is minimal.
Here are some practices we have employed to create a resonating environment faster for new members of our team.
- Help the new team members socialize with the relevant team members
- Personalize the onboarding or learning period for the members
- Help the new members secure small wins early on
- Build trust and get involvement by being vulnerable where it’s right
