Onboarding New Employees in Today’s World

Improving the onboarding process is a common concern among many companies. Often this is based on a low retention rate or maybe a drawn-out time to proficiency. Both of these outcomes are wonderful business metrics, but unless we examine the changes in the current workforce, success is far off.
 

COVID impacted all of us in many ways, some very surprising, and some we just realize now years later. That period has come to be known as the Era of the Great Resignation. Turnover rates shot up across the nation. In January of 2023, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 5.9 million separations. This is compared to 3.5 million in December 2019. According to new benchmarking data from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire was nearly $4,700. But many employers estimate the total cost to hire a new employee can be three to four times the position's salary. Knowing that replacing employees can cost this amount, this phenomenon places a huge financial burden on many companies. In some cases, it dramatically impacts production and even the ability to stay in business.

One big change has to do with the way employees look at their jobs and their employers. Their expectations have changed, and this is not just based on salary. This is based on workforce experience. At first, COVID felt like a big slowdown machine. It seemed everything had come to a stop. In reality, the pandemic turned out to be an accelerator of sorts. Companies that had been putting off consolidating their software systems, digitizing their training, or supporting a hybrid workforce found themselves forced to begin the transformation. Employees, for the most part, began to work from home. If their company didn't provide them with support for making that transition, their children's school did. Many parents were thrown into working with their children on the computer for their lessons. Many towns provided the children with tablets to use. In a way, the children were modeling the behavior of the hybrid worker. According to the US Census Bureau, between 2019 and 2021, the number of people working from home tripled to about 9 million. There is an expectation that the number will grow to 36 million by 2025. Globally, almost 20% of companies have gone fully remote.

Some of us have worked from a remote home office for decades, but for almost everyone, the work-from-home experience was new and seemed very daunting. In reality, they realized that it actually enabled them to work better, eliminating long, arduous commute times and those endless social interruptions that occur in the office. Additionally, our technologies supported our online communication through video conferencing. Employees began to realize they could live anywhere, be productive, and reap the financial and emotional rewards of a great job well done. Therefore, it has become the norm that a new hire comes to a job and expects flexibility in the work environment, expects to be skilled, has a succession path to grow, and hopes to be nurtured with a supportive network of supportive colleagues.

So, why would anyone ever hold a boot camp where they firehose information at a new hire or possibly give them hours and hours of reading to do when they get hired? Up until a decade or so ago, the thinking was that the new hire came with the exact skills required and fulfilled the profile of the perfect employee. That meant the only thing missing was information, and many people with good intentions loaded the firehose and doused the new hire with this requisite information. Over time, a more student-centered approach to training was adopted. By focusing more on the learner, it changed the nature of training to look at the context and understand what you want that learner to be able to do, to say, to show, or to find differently than they do now. So, the transition here was from a content-driven straining exercise to a learner-centric training exercise. In many ways, the collision of student centricity with a disruptive pandemic has brought us to this great day.

At Infopro Learning, we approach every training intervention by establishing a success plan. This is essentially Kirkpatrick's evaluation model, but our focus flips it to look at levels three and four first.  That means we're looking at behavior change and business results. Now, if you think about hiring for potential and passion and recognizing that the knowledge and skill required for the job can be taught, the onboarding process becomes easier. Our approach is to look at it as people who need people and learners who need context.

One key element of an effective onboarding program is to establish a weekly huddle to just check-in. What that did was provide a network of peers, the class of some month and year, providing a kind of bond with those people so they didn't feel alone. This eliminated that moment that we have all experienced when the hubbub of the first day ends and the new hire does not quite know what to do next.

There are some very good reasons to offer the huddle with rolling admission so those in the first week are with those in their sixth week. This practice provides confidence to those in their first week and empowerment to those who know the ropes a bit. It is also good to mix roles, so managers can be with individual contributors if possible. Most companies support a collaborative culture, and this practice emphasizes that.  In parallel, more formal training was offered both in synchronous sessions and in asynchronous modules online.  That insinuates the training into their context. If they only were going to do something once a year, then we would introduce that to them and provide a job aid they could quickly find when that time was right. If it was something they had to know every day, then that required a different training intervention, but the reality was we were looking at the context, so they understood why they were learning about something.

This means they could grow in their job. It means they understood why they were there. It aligns with the mission of the company. And guess what? They want to stay. There's your retention rate. They grow in their jobs and there's your succession plan. They quickly understand what they need to be doing and that's your time to proficiency. So, thinking about your success plan at the front end, considering your new hires as people who need context, and then hiring them for potential and passion enables you to unlock that potential and build a successful team.

Author Bio

Carol Cohen is Vice President of Strategy and Sales Enablement for Infopro Learning leading both the strategy and sales training practices. She is the author of the book REAL Selling, a Simple Solution to a Complex Problem. Her focus has been on success planning and learning strategy for today's learners. In addition, her passion to enable sales success has empowered her to develop a new sales approach and associated customizable training modules.