Employee Onboarding Experts on Building a Great Experience in New Hire Onboarding

Shankar Ganapathy on October 13, 2016

Effective onboarding is the cornerstone of human capital management. There’s no doubt that it sets the tone and in many cases can also set the trajectory for new hires joining your organization.

According to an Aberdeen Onboarding Benchmark report, “New employees often feel that the attention they receive during the pre-hire stages is abandoned once they are hired.” In Fortune 500 companies alone, about 500,000 managers take on new roles each year and, overall, managers begin new jobs every two to four years. Unfortunately, in the midst of all these transitions:

  • Half of all senior outside hires fail within 18 months in a new position
  • Half of all hourly workers leave new jobs within the first 120 days

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Source: Aberdeen Group, The Onboarding Benchmark Report

What we want to avoid is new hires feeling that your organization is not meeting the expectations set by the hiring process. Fortunately, this challenge can be overcome with investment in a pre-join program. Pre-join is the time between the employee accepting the offer of employment and starting in your company on day one. For most companies, the pre-join investment includes checklists with tasks like ‘get your email set up, take a drug test, and register for your employee number’. If this doesn’t sound inspiring, that’s because it isn’t.

For more inspired ways to deliver an excellent pre-join new hire onboarding experience, we decided to speak with two experts: Mohit Garg, Co-Founder of Mindtickle and Todd Raphael, Chief Editor at ERE. Ere is the premier resource for the employment, HR, and recruiting world.

Read on for our conversation!

In your experience, can organizations benefit from engaging with new hires between the offer and the first day of work? How does this help the new hire?

Mohit Garg: Modern-day talent development is about keeping your employee at the center of the experience. It’s important to treat every new hire as a new customer that you are prospecting or pitching and, like a marketing campaign, invest in building the relationship through referral and retention. When you look through this lens, it is similar to onboarding a new customer. You want the experience to be high touch and ensure that expectations are met.

In many ways, your new hire is forming an opinion about your organization before the hiring process begins. Research from Aberdeen Group shows that employees make a  decision to work with a company long-term within three months of joining an organization! They are asking, “Is this consistent with my expectations?” They are comparing your organization’s values to their worldview and value system.

The pre-join phase is an opportunity to engage your new hire with the value proposition of the business. You can show new employees what it means to work in your organization by starting your new hires off in an excited and positive state of mind.  Focus on fostering a strong appetite to learn and get engaged. Having info on what to expect can reduce your new hire’s anxiety on day one.

Todd Raphael: I agree that investing in the pre-join experience is a great opportunity to invest in your new hires. However, it’s important to really consider your approach and ensure that your pre-join experience is relevant and voluntary.

For example, you don’t want to bombard your new hire with parties and conference calls. You are supposed to get to know people as you join a new company, but it is important to be aware that when people leave a job, they sometimes need time before starting. Sometimes you just want a vacation and to be with your friends and family. You don’t want to create a pre-join experience that makes the candidate feel like it is controlling their life.

Instead, ask someone what their availability is. This allows them to set aside time in a way that makes sense for them. Just be careful about making them feel like this is going to take over their life.

What are the activities that organizations can deliver during the pre-joining period?

Mohit Garg: Let’s look at this from the perspective of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At the basic level, a new hire needs to understand how the organization offers an opportunity for a secure life for their family. At the next level, an employee is concerned with work-life balance as well as how to further learning and their future career. They want to align their aspirations with the business. The third level is for new hire self-actualization with the new hire thinking about corporate social responsibility and the ecological footprint of the business. They want to know how the business is investing in the community and working with employee partners in charity opportunities.

You want to try to hit on all three levels of Maslow’s hierarchy with a readily available pre-join program that communicates the value proposition of the business. Incorporate success examples. For example, show the “12-year employee story” featuring a long-time respected employee in the business. You can also show how the organization is making the world a better place with stories of how the business supports the community. Think of it as a welcome package with continued engagement, delivered through multiple channels – email, print materials, and online communities.

Todd Raphael: Here are some more ideas. You can facilitate many activities online. Sodexo and ADP send newsletters to employees and send a modified version to potential employees – of course, you want to make sure that it is relevant. You could have future employees meet their future co-workers in a private online group or use Twitter or other social media to have current employees welcome future employees. Put together a document, an email, or a video with half a dozen employees talking about what they are doing and what they are excited about.

Make an inspiring video. For example, if you are a shoe company, you can feature an inspiring athlete who has used your shoes. If you provide medical devices, show a patient that has benefited. This can be really inspiring. In every industry, you have former customers, buyers, and partners. Show the impact your business is making on the world to future employees.

In terms of offline activities, you could Invite your new hire to company calls and get-togethers, but again be respectful of time. Check in with the new hire and see how they are feeling. Allow time for a check-in to address any concerns they may have before the first day.

Another angle to consider is your current employees. When a new employee starts, the employer is often thinking about how to make the experience good for them, but they don’t think about current employees who are often nervous. The current employee may be thinking: are they going to be promoted in my place? Are they a threat?

To address this, consider communicating what the new employee’s role is all about. Make your current team member feel valued. Work on reducing their anxiety and nervousness.

How can you influence the possibility of employee retention during pre-join?

Todd Raphael: The problem starts pretty early for external hires. It stems from when they get to work and it isn’t like what they expected. Start with setting expectations early. To get a handle on expectations, talk to your own employees and see what they experienced. You might find out things you didn’t know about the new hire experience and then you can tailor accordingly.

Also, there may be an opportunity for long-time employees to be involved. Have the new hire meet up with a mentor for coffee during pre-join. This is often more beneficial than the new hire meeting with their future manager who may be busy or not as good at coaching. The new hire benefits from knowing that they can ask questions of someone who can advise them but is not connected to hiring and firing.

Mohit Garg: To add to Todd’s point, you also have to consider what stage the employee is in and connect the pre-join to the post-join experience. This requires communication between human resources, recruiting, and learning and development as the new hire get handed off to different groups throughout the new hire onboarding experience. A seamless view of the new hire experience is needed.

Typically only public domain material is available. Once they are inside the building, then proprietary information is then made available. So one of the challenges for businesses in the pre-join period is having a way to deliver access to secure company information before day one.

Secure online learning platforms like Mindtickle enable you to provide links to private information with a pre-join program login. This provides an opportunity for motivated new hires to learn as much as they want before formal new hire orientation starts.

Using gamification in a pre-join program, you can begin to identify the strengths of new hires beyond what you know from the interview process. It also allows employees to self-select and show progress as part of the pre-join experience. New hire self-selection and performance on learning modules can be good indicators in order to skill matching. This can help retention in the long run.

What is the best way for organizations get started developing a pre-join program?

Todd Raphael: Human resources managers should speak with recruiters to get a sense of what would be good. Look at your company’s history with pre-join and new hire onboarding to figure out what the gaps are. You are looking for what prospective employees are concerned about.

You might also look at Glassdoor to see what are people saying about your company. Don’t forget to talk to your current employees as they are a valuable resource in creating a strong pre-join experience!

Mohit Garg: It is also important to begin by looking at the mix of hires joining your organization. For example, are the entry-level hires or lateral hires? These segments have different needs. You have to treat entry-level campus hires differently than lateral recruiting hires that come to the business with more experience. Technology can help you deliver a flexible experience that recognizes differences in new hire needs. Technology can help automate the order and priority for pre-join content delivery.

Next, you can implement a small pilot and have pre-join new hires go through it. You can get feedback and ensure that target outcomes are being achieved. Start with a geography or a region and scale from there.

Thank you, Todd and Mohit for your helpful insight on building a great new hire pre-join experience!

What are your thoughts on more inspired ways to deliver an excellent pre-join new hire onboarding experience? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

Todd RaphaelTodd Raphael is a widely cited/quoted figure in the employment/HR/recruiting world and is the Chief Editor at ERE. Find ERE at www.ere.net.
Mohit GargMohit Garg is the Co-Founder of Mindtickle. Prior to co-founding Mindtickle, he served as a Director in PwC’s management consulting practice in New York. He was awarded “Entrepreneur of the Year” by Startup Leadership Program (SLP) in 2012. Mr. Garg holds an MBA degree from ISB and an MSEE from Stanford University.





How Modern Sales Organizations Leverage Sales Enablement for their Competitive Advantage [Webinar]

Shankar Ganapathy on September 19, 2016

webinar-mindtickle_500x500_listen-now“If you can structure and enable your sales team to get out of a bad deal early or bring it home to Papa as quickly as possible, then you have enabled your sales team to do the right thing at the right time.

This objective is at the core of Cloudera’s sales enablement strategy according to Lars Nilsson, VP Global Inside Sales, who has helped the company scale from a team of just 11 salespeople to a global selling operation with 200 sellers and over 150 sales engineers, solution architects, business development and customer-facing individuals. In this webinar you will learn:

  • How to methodically onboard your people and make them productive sooner
  • Benefits of creating an infrastructure that supports enablement initiatives
  • Sales enablement activities that drive conversion from discovery to final sale
  • How to ensure sales reps are consistently on the message to deliver a best in class customer experience, and
  • How Cloudera leverages sales enablement as their competitive advantage

Listen now

to hear the Cloudera team, along with our VP Sales, Marc Wendling, and Max Altschuler from Sales Hacker, talk about how a modern sales organization can leverage sales enablement to bring value to their customers and prospects consistently and efficiently.

How to Overcome Ongoing Training Challenges for Remote Workers

Mohit Garg on September 10, 2016

As your company expands and launches new offices across the country and internationally, the once intimate environment that was once so effective for training becomes less feasible with employees working remotely from the central office. For one, it’s hard to keep everyone up to speed when they’re geographically dispersed. You could fly the remote workers to New York for training, but that is expensive and you’ll have to get permission to do so. There has to be a more efficient solution. Also, when companies expand, two corporate cultures can develop and this can be a disaster.

Sometimes satellite offices can have as few as 2-3 employees and they never get visited by the leadership team. A person joining such a team can very easily feel undervalued and marginalized. Here’s where online training, and more specifically blended learning, can come in handy in making sure that your remote team has access to the same great training as your headquarters (HQ) team.

Is Online Learning Really Good Enough for Remote Staff?

Not surprisingly, the transition to online learning for your remote team will raise many questions for you.

For example, isn’t clocking in face-time important for engagement? Won’t online learning sacrifice the high touch experience that you get from face-to-face learning? Will you be able to deliver on the same learning perspective to your remote trainees online? Also, what happens to the PowerPoints and other materials that you use? How do you begin to make your course materials online ready? These are good questions but there are other equally important challenges that you may not have considered!

  • Tracking Employee Performance. For one, how can you measure the performance of remote workers? After all, it’s important to keep track of whether employees are performing up to the standards. Not to mention that you have to analyze the effectiveness of your program in developing relevant skills and productivity.
  • Foster Social Engagement Between Remote and HQ employees. Establishing personal interaction among all employees is necessary to encourage collaboration, but it’s challenging to create if everyone is not in the same geographical location. Are there communication or social media tools that can allow remote workers to feel up to speed and not alienated from the employees in the central office?
  • How to Use the Dynamics of “Gamification”. Gamification has proven to encourage participation and productivity in a workplace – the concept of using game mechanics when training is a great way to engage new remote hires! How can you apply gamification to increase learning, team building, innovation, and the satisfaction of remote workers?
  • How to Use the Right Technologies. As your training program transitions from face-to-face learning to online-based learning, technology will play a bigger role as a resource. You’ll need to think about what technology would be appropriate to achieve effective sharing of information, communication, and can deliver an engaging experience.
  • Language Localization. If you are going international, international offices can create language barriers. How can these barriers be broken? And how will you ensure that foreign speakers are equally engaged to the informational materials given to them as your native English speakers are?

Steps to Establish a Stellar Learning Experience for Remote Workers

Step 1: Define Your Success Criteria

First, make sure that you and management understand what is needed to make the training program successful for your company. Know your organization’s goals and define what behaviors the team needs to get there. These are the behaviors that you then reinforce in your training program. However, with multiple goals to tackle and limited resources, you can’t hit everything. Use these two questions as a framework to identify where to begin when you have limited resources.

Question 1: Should You Repurpose Content or Create New Programs From Scratch?

You will have to think about whether you want to create a new training program from scratch or use existing materials. Repurposing content would mean, for example, that you convert the content from your PowerPoints into eLearning modules.

This may be far less costly and time-consuming than creating completely new content. However, creating new content may also be necessary to fill information gaps that remote workers may not have access to.

Question 2: What is More Important Right Now, Scale or Effectiveness?

You also need to consider your priorities – do you want a few highly trained employees or rapid rollout of training sacrificing high touch training elements? Often, in the earlier stages of business, the first few hires have a lot of impact on the company so high touch training is valuable. However, as the company undergoes rapid expansion, high touch training becomes a less efficient process. In an illustrative example, one of our clients, a fast growing, mobile ad network, realized this challenge when they got to 100+ employees and they continued to stick with a very high touch onboarding process for their new hires. They soon realized that they weren’t having onboarding sessions for several weeks when the founders were gone on overseas business trips. Using Mindtickle, they were able to flip the training process and codify the key messages and orientation information for the new hires. This freed up energy for leaders to deliver the strategic content in intimate coffee chats, allowing for a meaningful exchange of ideas. Now the Co-founders spend more quality time with their new hires after they have gone through the online onboarding experience.

Step 2: Recognize the Learning Culture

Next, be aware of the learning culture at your company. Is it a “learning culture,” where improving performance, knowledge, and skills are encouraged? If this is not the case, a “change management” investment may be required so that the right incentives are put in place to motivate employees. This is important to consider because your training program will be easier to launch and more successful in a culture that already invests in ongoing learning. Setting relevant principles, values, and preferred behaviors from management down help to paint a clear picture of what all employees should be striving for.

Step 3: What Approach to Take: Staged Rollout or Big Bang

In terms of implementing change in a business, big bang refers to instant adoption and staging rollout refers to more gradual adoption over an extended period of time. Consider both options and determine which is the more appropriate approach for your situation. The big bang adoption could be faster and cheaper but more overwhelming and prone to failure due to inability to adapt and substantial productivity loss while everyone is adjusting to change. On the other hand, staging rollout may be more time and cost consuming but there is more time to adapt and productivity loss is less critical.

Step 4: Know What Resources You Have at Your Disposal

While transforming the training program to meet the learning needs of all employees, consider the resources that you already have and how you can adapt it to a more online-based system. What technologies does your company already possess and how can you take advantage of employees’ subject matter expertise in order to create an efficient and effective training program.

Step 5: Create a System to Achieve Your Goals

You should not only focus on what to achieve but also how to achieve it! You can set goals but you also need to create an effective management and training system. For example, what are the specific training processes that should be introduced and the right timing? How does the training program need to tie in with performance management? How should the training promote work-related habits to reinforce positive outcomes?

Remote employees don’t have to feel like orphans or second-rate citizens. Blended learning combines internet-based learning with face-to-face learning in order to create a personalized and engaging learning experience. It has the potential to decrease training costs, increase employee engagement with training, and adapt to the individual needs of each employee.

With a blended learning model and some effort, your remote employees can have access to a high-quality learning experience – the same as their colleagues over in HQ! Now it is your turn. Let us know your thoughts. How do you keep your remote employees up to speed with training?


MongoDB’s Formula for Sales Success [Podcast, Episode 4]

Daniel Kuperman on September 6, 2016

In this 12-minute

interview Powers outlines:

  • The key tenets of sales excellence for MongoDB;
  • How MongoDB’s onboarding program and advanced sales training keep their reps at the top of their game; and
  • How their sales reps become Courageous Qualifiers.

Listen now

to hear how Powers equips MongoDB’s sales team to differentiate themselves in the market.

To download or subscribe to the Sales Excellence podcast login to

Soundcloud

,

Stitcher

,

iTunes

or find it

here

.

Sales_excellence_podcast_episode4“A key tenet of sales excellence is an effective, purposeful and great discovery with the customer. Ensuring that both you and that customer or prospect are really focused on the biggest business issues at hand.”

Jeremy Powers is Senior Director of Sales Enablement at MongoDB and he’s kicking some big goals while the company’s sales team scales rapidly. A critical component of their sales enablement strategy is their onboarding boot camp.

“During boot camp we always give our reps a forum to practice. Really try things, struggle a little bit and really dive in using real-life customer opportunities. That’s a win any time you can do that.”

“The goal of our onboarding program is to provide our sales team with an in-depth understanding of the industry, our customers, our technology and our solution sets. Then build upon that baseline to equip our reps to consistently qualify for opportunities, get and set great meetings with the right people and ultimately prepare them to engage in highly effective, highly valuable conversations with prospects,” he continues.

“Ultimately we want to arm our sales team to not only differentiate themselves based on what we sell but also on how they sell and interact with customers.”

5 Things Your Field Sales Team Needs to Become Sales Ready

Shyam HN on September 6, 2016

field_sales_readyI often hear from our customers how challenging it is to manage distributed field sales teams. After all, it’s difficult to get everyone in the same room more than a couple of times in a year. This makes achieving alignment on key topics on an ongoing basis challenging. Another issue often cited is coaching and sharing feedback, as you cannot see what your reps are doing on a day to day basis.

These issues are all compounded by the growing need to constantly be on the ball and stay one step ahead of your prospects and competitors.

While every sales rep will learn their baseline knowledge and have their message calibrated when they are onboarded, there is still a need to constantly keep them primed on multiple topics. This could be anything from new product launches to updates on competitive positioning, or any other information that is specifically relevant to your team, region or industry. This is why the ongoing readiness of your reps is very important.

While the challenges most of our customers express are broadly the same, there are some strategic differences in the readiness approach I recommend for them. Primarily, it depends on whether their business model is sales led or distribution led.

Sales led businesses tend to rely more on solution selling, so the needs of their sales team are focused on things like re-baselining knowledge and sharing success stories for example. On the other hand, a distribution-led sales model requires reps to get the right inventory in the right place at the right time. So ongoing communication on these topics tends to play a bigger role in making their sales teams successful.

With this in mind, I’ve found that there is a five-part communication framework that best represents ongoing field sales readiness: Baselining, calibration, refreshing, communication, and coaching and accountability. Each section requires a different type of communication to your reps that in turn contributes to their ongoing field readiness.
Field Readiness Framework

Each of these enablement initiatives is aimed at ensuring your sales team masters both message and process excellence. The amount of information that is imparted to your reps in each of these enablement components differs, as does the amount of time that your reps will need to digest the information. In addition, different types of enablement processes often have varying shelf-lives. Some of them may only occur once every six months while some others may be more frequent, even weekly or monthly.

I’ll take you through each of the components of this framework and how they are used by our customers below.

1. Knowledge Baselining

Baselining includes those changes that require the knowledge of your sales reps to be significantly updated. This could be changes in messaging or a process, often driven by strategic events such as acquisitions, new rep onboarding, new product launches or a change in the corporate or product branding. Given the impact of knowledge baselining it is imperative that all your reps are aligned, so it may require significant time and enablement effort.

By far the largest volume of content that will be pushed to your sales reps is for knowledge baselining. The enablement efforts may include several different tools, such as role plays, presentations, and quizzes, to ensure successful baselining (or re-baselining).

2. Message calibration

Calibration involves updates to the knowledge that will change the way your sales message is articulated. This could occur straight after your sales kickoff, for example, to realign the sales message with the new vision presented by leadership. It may also be necessary when a new competitor enters the market, there is a change in pricing or a new customer objection comes to light.

Depending on the nature of the message change involved, there may be quite a bit of content pushed out to recalibrate your message

.

It may also be necessary to utilize several enablement tools, such as role plays and short videos, to help align your reps with the new message.

3. Refreshing knowledge

New knowledge or skills that your reps have recently learned need to be constantly refreshed to counter the forgetting curve. This is helpful after a sales kickoff or new hire onboarding, where your sales reps have been trained on something completely new and need to remember it.

This content is usually delivered in relatively small bites so that they’re easy for your reps to digest. Your enablement efforts may involve tools such as short quizzes that can be completed on the go and provide a quick litmus test of whether the information has been retained.

4. Communication of new knowledge

This enablement process involves communicating updates that your reps can use in their sales conversations. In a distribution led business model this may be about inventory or pricing incentives that change regularly for example. It can also include reverse communication from the field through polls and surveys. If your business is a fast-growing technology platform then new product and competition updates could be included here.

These communications provide short, bite-sized pieces of new information that your reps need to stay on top of quickly.

5. Coaching and accountability

Coaching and accountability happen at four levels; Your sales reps, sales managers, sales enablement, and leadership. Your sales reps often know what their gaps are and should constantly work with their managers to improve and close these. Sales managers are responsible for driving readiness initiatives that improve the overall readiness of their team. Sales enablement and leadership are accountable for ensuring the whole sales team is sales ready and constantly investing in improving your sales teams’ skill and knowledge.

While the enablement initiatives may vary significantly, they are conducted as part of the day to day operations. This means that they’re usually in the context of your reps or sales team. To make it easier for your reps to digest on the go it’s a good idea to ensure that the format is familiar to them.


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