Written by Lilith Christiansen, Vice President, Kaiser Associates
Hiring employees is the biggest investment you can make in your business. Surprisingly, you may be forfeiting profit and competitive position by failing to invest in the design and implementation of an effective new hire onboarding program. Research has shown that less than a third of executives worldwide are positive about their onboarding experience. This statistic underscores the fact that the way that we onboard our new hires needs to evolve.
To achieve success, onboarding programs should deliver a more seamless experience that is integrated with your business processes. To get you started, we recommend investment in four organizing pillars:
Early career support.
Orientation to your culture and performance values.
Insight into your strategic position, intent and direction.
Activities that enable your new hire to build beneficial relationships.
Delivering a Successful New Hire Onboarding Program
Here are the pillars with actionable online training ideas for the Mindtickle audience. These practices are good starting points, but should not be considered a comprehensive list of best practices.
1. Provide Early Career Support
Acclimating a new hire to your company should begin the moment you offer them the position, and the process should continue for a full year after they start work. Considering that almost a third of employees who have been in their current job less than six months are already job searching, offering ongoing support during the early months is one of the most important things you can do. You can begin the absorption process right from the day that you give the offer by pre-boarding your new hire.
Take Action: With pre-boarding activities such as goal planning, your new hire has the opportunity to begin the integration process from the moment they accept the offer. For example, consider developing a cloud-based online training module on how to develop SMART goals and have them watch it before day 1. After the new hire starts work, consider reviewing your business SMART goals with them and guiding them to create their own 3 months and 6 month plans based on business priorities.
2. Deliver an Orientation to Your Culture and Performance Values
While you may assume that new hires will learn company culture by socializing with your team, cultural norms can be elusive and ill-communicated – so culture is not something you should leave to chance. Using employee work stories such as ones demonstrating integrity related to business practices and/or engagement with community organizations can be a really powerful and memorable way to teach organizational culture.
Take Action: Consider developing a video with the help of long-time employees providing specific examples of how your organization’s performance values might play out in everyday life. There’s no better way to make your employees fall in love with your company than by sharing stories in your onboarding program.
3. Offer Insight into Your Strategic Position, Intent, and Direction
Your new hires view their new job as a step toward their personal goals and success. Onboarding is a journey and your new hires need to feel that they’re an important part of that journey. You can motivate your employees by mapping out clear milestones that allow them to see what the next steps are in the journey.
Take Action: Consider recording leadership panels where business strategy is discussed. Then, have managers debrief the sessions with new hires and discuss the relevance to their specific jobs and teams. Offering insight into the direction of the business with periodic updates is a great way to introduce strategy early in the new hire experience as well as help new hires understand how their role impacts the business.
4. Plan activities that enable your new hire to build beneficial relationships.
A new hire may not know who to turn to if they want to share an idea or have questions about their role and specific processes. Being confident and fitting in at a new company means not just having a mentor, but also having friends and peers to interact with. This means actually having someone there to be supportive every step of the way. Your new hires will perform at much higher levels when they have strong interpersonal networks.
Take Action: For teams with members working remotely, consider having everyone shoot a quick video with a fun fact about themselves, what they specialize in and an invitation to connect. You may also use social and game mechanics to facilitate the connection between your team members. By integrating online social interactions and discovery as part of the new hire onboarding program, you will create a positive effect on productivity and employee retention.
Effective new hire onboarding programs help you foster a more successful work atmosphere, more satisfied employees, lower turnover rate and better bottom line results. Effective new hire onboarding programs also have the added benefit of reducing the time it takes for the average employee to achieve expected productivity levels. This decreases workplace errors, increases morale and minimizes the time spent doing much-dreaded paperwork. A well-planned onboarding program can help shape the future of your company for years to come.
For more helpful details on implementing more effective new hire onboarding programs read my book Successful Onboarding: A Strategy to Unlock Hidden Value Within Your Organization. Ensure that your business does not leave value on the table by designing an effective new hire onboarding program. What is the best part of your new hire onboarding program? Leave a comment and let us know!
Today’s businesses – big and small – are under tremendous pressure to deliver profitable growth year after year. Equity markets, private investors, competition – you name it. Add to this, the uncertain elements of risk. It is pretty tough out there for most businesses – global and local.
To address these challenges with confidence, businesses need the dependable lever of high-performing engaged employees. Ironically, this throws up another business challenge, of Managing Talent. A shrinking workforce because of aging employees is further complicating this matter. Never before in business, has it been so important to attract, retain and grow talent, as today – and become an Employer of Choice. Therefore, the increasing importance of new employee orientation.
New Employee Orientation isn’t just an HR initiative, as most businesses think, but a unique opportunity to catapult your new employees into a high-performance orbit in the pursuit of business objectives. World-Class companies and organizations understand the link between New Employee Orientation and Business Execution. The annual “The Great Place to Work” list featuring the World’s top blue-chip companies is a standing testimony to this. These companies have also created stakeholder value consistently over the years, emerging as corporate leaders in their respective industry sectors and beyond. Businesses, across the board, have this incredible opportunity to leverage New Employee Orientation to drive good competitive business focused on profitable growth, employer of choice, risk management.
1. Profitable growth
Businesses exist to maximize profits – an objective they need to pursue in a sensitive, sustainable and relentless manner, in this fast-changing milieu. Simply put, businesses have to grow revenues and minimize costs. New Employee Orientation has a critical role to play in impacting each of these positively, by driving,
Time to productivity of new hires
Employee retention and addressing employee turnover
Employee engagement
Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company and a global thought leader in business research, has been at the forefront of exhaustive cutting-edge business research in the area of New Employee Orientation. Its numerous studies on Onboarding, over the years, have time and again, established how businesses have achieved improved productivity, employee retention, and engagement, through New Employee Orientation. The studies have established that through new hire onboarding, organizations can focus on their biggest asset, their employees because the experience of new hires has a direct impact on profitability.
In the book “The First 90 Days” Michael Watkins puts the break-even point of new hires at 6.2 months, highlighting it remarkably through this graphic.
As can be seen from the graphic, new hires consume value for the first three months and then begin contributing. New Employee Orientation can improve the chances of achieving this break-even on time and at times, even early. Any slippage in onboarding new hires would not only add to direct and indirect costs, it would also result in loss of revenues, especially in the case of top management executives and business facing employees.
Employees and new hires in an organization, given their bearing on revenues and expenses, can be broadly classified into the following:
a) Top management – Employees at a senior level often in leadership roles are the most expensive assets for an organization, but they can be the most productive of the new hires as they will be the one to guide their team to perform up to potential and contribute to the company’s growth. Personalized new employee orientation for leaders that help them is indispensable to get them contributing in a meaningful productive way. They:
Align with the company’s overall business strategy,
Understand short and medium term business imperatives,
Experience the company culture, and
Bond with their team
b) Employees on the Business Front – New hires who are in the marketing and sales departments contribute to the revenue and profits of organizations directly. New Employee Orientation can establish and communicate a ‘line of sight’ from the new hire’s performance to the company’s goal. This can help them see and understand how quickly their productive contribution can benefit the organization, their performance and ultimately their professional careers.
c) Business Support Functions like Human Resources, Accounts – While new hires in these departments do not impact company revenues directly, it is essential that they get productive at the earliest to optimize on costs. New Employee Orientation can help engage and motivate these new hires to become productive sooner.
In one of its studies, Aberdeen interviewed 466 companies that were running some form of new employee orientation. It was found that the top 100 of these companies reported a 24% year-over-year decrease in time to productivity for new employees and 12% year-over-year decrease in cost per employee for onboarding. Another example is to look at the talent management practices of IT and ITES outsourcing companies that have been recruiting in large numbers over the last few years. All the top tier IT outsourcing companies have institutionalized new employee orientation to buttress their off-shoring business strategy that thrives on “cost arbitrage” and “value creation”.
The present-day economy continues to make it expensive and challenging to find, hire and retain talent. The cost and time involved in the recruitment process make employee retention a priority for all business. Retention of employees is critical because hiring employees and training them to contribute directly to business costs. Added is the fact that a new employee makes a decision to stay with the company within the first six months. So, in the initial onboarding phase, the employer is vulnerable with respect to the new employee. Therefore, the necessity of new employee orientation.
Employee turnover is not always about direct costs. It consumes expensive management bandwidth, dampens employee morale and not to mention the loss in revenue opportunities. Worse still, if the leaving employee joins the competition, it increases the possibility of loss in market share. So, new employee orientation assumes significance when onboarding new hires.
An Aberdeen Survey based on the analysis of about 282 organizations, reported that organizations which conducted a new employee orientation program saw a 50 % increase in retention rates. The report also stated that the new employee orientation program was used as a means to reaffirm the new hire’s decision to join the organization and ensure a long-term commitment from the new hire thereby reducing costs of hiring and training. Other than increasing employee retention rates, the study highlighted the opportunity of leveraging new employee orientation to help new employees plan long-term careers with companies. Without a doubt, organizations have experienced higher retention rates and lower turnover costs by having a new employee orientation program.
3 Employee engagement
An exhaustive study by Aberdeen on Employee Engagement pointed out that almost all 466 participating organizations identified New Employee orientation as a means to engage and align employees. The same report states that employee engagement contributes to retention, productivity and most importantly drives customer satisfaction – an important revenue driver. In fact, the top 100 organizations marked engaging employees to drive customer satisfaction as the top objective of their onboarding program, and rightfully so.
Increased customer satisfaction leads to positive word of mouth, loyalty, repeat business, cross-selling opportunities, and high-quality referrals. All these are key revenue opportunities that businesses can capitalize on, by driving employee engagement through new employee orientation.
New employee orientation can drive employee engagement and alignment by focusing on new hire development and performance, taking frequent informal feedbacks, updating them on a company’s vision and encourage leadership where appropriate. New Employee Orientation can work wonders in aligning the new hires to business strategy and execution. Employees who are engaged early, from the word “GO”, are better placed to deliver a quality experience to customers.
2. Employer of choice
The ups and downs of the economy have made, sourcing and retaining good talent, extremely challenging. To counter this, organizations are striving hard to become employers of choice, as part of a business strategy. Therefore, businesses are adopting Talent Management Best Practices with New Employee Orientation being right up there. The reason is simple and straightforward, to make a good solid First Impression. This is also corroborated by the research from Aberdeen that suggests that New Employee orientation can help make that first good impression, which in turn positions the company as an employer of choice.
New employee orientation is a good “first” opportunity to introduce company culture and tradition. Culture and traditions are unique to an organization and give it the advantage which takes them towards successful business outcomes. Onboarding program can help introduce this culture to the new hires at the earliest. The sooner the new hires understand the culture of the organization, the more engaged and aligned they are, to perform. New employee orientation is also an opportunity for employers to demonstrate respect, reward, and responsibility, such that they are able to retain the new hires forever.
It is really interesting to note how Facebook and Google – Best companies to work for in 2013 – communicate their engineering and people culture through New Employee Orientation.
All new engineers – fresh or laterals – at Facebook undergo the Engineering Bootcamp during new employee orientation. This Bootcamp is intricately linked to Facebook’s Scale strategy. Facebook uses the ratio of users to engineers metric, to scale and grow. Through the Engineering Bootcamp, Facebook not only onboard engineers to push code onto the live site, but also germinates an engineering culture of fearlessly fixing bugs and not leaving it to code another day.
The new hires at Google are called Nooglers, no marks for guessing why. Through this, Google propagates its culture to new hires, helps new hires make connections in their workplace and increase their motivation.
Great workplaces are responsible towards their employees. They respect, reward and compensate the employees well enough to earn their trust and loyalty creating a brand name for their company in the eyes of the outsider. Great workplaces are employee focused and judiciously use the new employee orientation to also share the company’s immediate goals with the new hires. They understand that an aligned, engaged employee who trusts the leaders of the company will make extraordinary contributions to the success of the business.
3. Risk management
Remember Enron and Arthur Andersen. And more recently, Lehman. The risk is truly real – whether it is market, regulatory, reputational and operational. New Employee Orientation is a non-negotiable opportunity to sensitize the new hires on the various aspects of risk, whether it is with respect to the organization or the industry sector it operates in. Organizations would do well to customize the New Employee Orientation program with respect to risk sensitization, depending on the criticality of the position of the new hires. Senior management onboarding can definitely feature an exclusive track on risk management.
New employee orientation, so what’s next?
Challenges of the Economy, the positive impact new hires can have on business and many other business imperatives, are putting increasing pressure on organizations to include New Hire Onboarding in their business strategy and with good reason. Business profitability, typical HR challenges like Employee Engagement and also risk management, new employee orientation programs can address it all.
Only having a new employee orientation is not enough. As the wants and needs of each organization are different, the approach to new employee orientation should also correspond accordingly. Organizations have to determine the best practices for their new employee orientation and implement them in the pursuit of their business objectives. Many approaches to new employee orientation are possible:
Formal and informal
Full and partial Automation
Mentoring
and more currently, Enterprise GamificatioN
Onboarding approaches that drive engagement, alignment, productivity and contribute to company growth, have the highest chance of driving business success. This is where the importance of social HR comes to the fore. Jeanne Meister, best-selling author of “The 2020 Workplace: How Innovative Companies Attract, Develop, and Keep Tomorrow’s Employees Today” in her January 2013 Forbes article touted 2013 as the Year of the Social HR, wherein organizations would integrate social technologies in recruiting, developing and engaging employees. Of the five social media trends that Meister writes, will impact HR in 2013, Enterprise Gamification ranks at the top.
The World’s leading knowledge organizations like Deloitte and Capgemini have already taken leadership in employing Enterprise Gamification to drive higher levels of employee engagement. Fresh graduates joining the workforce, the now omnipresence of Gen Y millennials at the workplace and the rise of remote teams, are all contributing to heightened interest in the concept of gamification to drive business execution.
Business, it seems is discovering FUN, all over again. And what better than to begin at from the starting line – New Employee Orientation. Get, set, go!
As startups grow and evolve so does their sales team and along with each stage of growth comes different challenges. While each business is different, it is possible to be better prepared and take advantage of the learnings from other businesses, so that you can scale your sales team faster, better and stronger. Here’s an outline of the four key stages of a startup from inception to scaling, and the challenges they face along the way.
Stage 1 – Inception
Sales People:
0
Customers:
0 to 10
Product Stage:
Idea or prototype
Challenges:
Without any salespeople, at this stage, the business is just learning about the size of its opportunity and what its customers (or potential customers) may actually want. This is the customer discovery stage according to
Mark Birch, Investor & Entrepreneur
, with founders focused on building the product and determining if there is any interest in it. Many of the challenges from a sales perspective revolve around finding someone who is interested in your product, and in demonstrating to your potential customer your
passion for the product
.
Stage 2 – Testing
Sales People:
1 (most likely a founder)
Customers:
2 to 5
Product Stage:
Testing and validating the product
Challenges:
At this stage, you know you’re onto something but you’re still testing whether your solution is valid. While you may have only a few customers, your resources are tight so that’s all the business can manage at this stage, but you still want to get your product out to as many people as possible. So according to Terry Kelman, Director of Sales Enablement & Training at Senstay, “talk to anybody you will talk to you. Sell your product for any price you can get.” This may mean you’re giving your product away for free or make it Open Source to encourage testing.
It’s also critical at this stage to get feedback and open a conversation with your customers where possible. Think of it like market research which can be performed using analytical tools, that help you
discover symptoms in your sales process
(or product) and identify where the issues lie.
Stage 3 – Sales Acceleration
Sales People:
2 to 3 (with perhaps one sales manager)
Customers:
30 to 200 (depending on the type of product)
Product Stage:
Testing and validating the product
Challenges:
With only a few salespeople, but the opportunity has proven, the real challenge according to Birch is, “to build a base of loyal, passionate and successful customers to establish credibility while preparing the startup for full-on growth.” As many customers at this stage are early adopters, they provide a source of low hanging fruit for salespeople.
The sales team is still quite unsophisticated in its approach according to Kelman. Prospecting is akin to a shotgun approach and the focus is on selling features and functions rather than customer value or needs. As resources are scarce at this point in the business’ development, “the types of skills needed during this phase differ from those needed to sell more mature products. Salespeople must be resourceful, able to develop their own sales models and collateral materials as needed,” observe
Mark Leslie and Charles Holloway
.
Stage 4 – Revenue Explosion or Scaling
Sales People:
10 to 100
Customers:
As many as possible
Product Stage:
Refining
Challenges:
The biggest issues for startup sales teams tend to arise at this stage. Perhaps the business has just closed Round B funding and investors want to see rapid growth. All bets have been laid and it’s now time to show the results, so most businesses start to hire. As Kelman points out, “What investors don’t understand is that a big increase in the sales force brings big problems for the sales manager”.
This is where startups need to ramp up what Leslie and Holloway call ‘The Sales Learning Curve’, with “the more a company learns about its product, market, and sales process, the more efficient it becomes at selling, and the higher the sales yield”. Sales managers need to look at how they hire, train and scale. As
Professor Mohanbir Sawhney
of Kellogg School of Management explains, “executives need to embed expertise into the company’s processes and structure to lessen its reliance on a few key people.”
This is where sales training and enablement become a key factor that can make or break a startup. With strong training, agile processes and good collaterals, the business can rapidly bring on board new sales reps,
build trust in customers
and potentially have them selling at a rate that meets investors expectations. Another alternative that Swahney suggests is to “tap partnerships to access capabilities, technology, and customers.”
Regardless of how the startup decides to scale, the needs of their sales team will change considerably. Find out how to prepare your business to scale your dream sales team.
You can create interactive videos to engage your learners at a whole new level. In the age of interactive and gamified learning, the one obstacle Learning & Development teams face is the ability to convert the existing text-heavy content into an interactive video. The charge to hire professionals to make great videos is quite high and one does not always have the budget for these video professionals.
What if you could quickly create your own videos, right from your desktop? Surprised? Well, don’t be! Even you can create interactive videos which are short, crisp, to the point, and engage your learners at a whole new level. And guess what? There are many basic tools which are easily available on the internet that allow you to make great videos!
Let’s step through the process of creating a learning video of your existing presentation, with the help of these tools.
The Planning Stage
It is absolutely vital that you plan your conversion process first. This would help you avoid unnecessary “outtakes” and prevent you from pulling your hair out.
To get started, make sure you:
Break down the content into small presentations which cover all the topics. Make sure each topic is a bite-sized one so that you don’t overwhelm your learners.
Remember to use animations to strengthen your presentation. These will be very useful to focus your learner’s attention, something that you might have relied on a trainer to do in a classroom setting.
Identify how you can test each topic at the end of the videos and also give them further material to explore. This will ensure that your learners’ interest is kept high even after the lesson has ended
Prepare a script for the voice over that you will record when running the slideshow. You need to have a plan about what to talk about on each slide. It is as good as giving a live presentation in a training session. Make sure the narrative is as interactive as possible. Keeping it casual and having a sense of humor in the script is the way to go.
Keep the video script short and crisp. A learner’s attention span is usually around 3 to 4 minutes, which is why the ideal length of a learning video should not be more than that.
Here is a sample plan for the narrative for a screencast to search for a product on Google.
The Execution Stage
Once you have the topic presentation ready, then starts the fun part! Download a screen recording tool
The tool that we recommend (and use internally) is Camtasia. It has extensive features but is also extremely user-friendly. Camtasia even adds a plug into your MS Office PowerPoint, from which you can record your presentations with a single click. In case you do not like Camtasia, there are lots of screen recorders that can be found on the internet which include:
Download any one of the above, which will enable you to record your screen when you are running a presentation.
Record the Video:
To start recording the video, you will have to use the screen recording tool. Prior to recording, make sure you have adjusted the settings according to your requirements. This will save you a lot of headaches if in case something goes wrong!
Once you are ready with the settings, click the Record button and start the presentation.
Voice During Recording
A very common beginner’s’ mistake during recording videos is that we forget to pay attention to our own energy levels. During a classroom training, the trainers also feed off the energy of the learners, and hence it creates an energetic, interactive experience. But while recording a video, the trainer does not have the energy of the classroom to feed off of. Due to this, even his energy levels drop while recording. This is the surest way to create extremely boring videos.
There are many ways to avoid having low energy during the recording session. Some people have found coffee or energy drinks to be useful, whereas others might resort to standing during the sessions or even jumping up and down in between the recording to maintain their high energy levels.
Important tip: Voice modulation can be the most versatile tool you have while recording a video, to bring emphasis to certain points. Try to use this to your advantage! Even minor fluctuations can be very effective.
Put on the Editor’s Hat:
Now that you have finished recording the video, it’s time to wear the editor’s hat! No movie is recorded in a single shot. You do not want the video to be incomplete or miss its crispness. Let’s add some make-up before it goes live!
In Camtasia, once you are done with the recording, the first step is to set the video output resolution. For web purposes, the best practice is to use the dimensions of 1280 x 720 pixels. If you do not select this and choose a setting which is lesser, the video that will be generated will not be ideal for full-screen playback on today’s screens. This means that your text and images might be too small for the learner to read and comprehend.
A simple timeline with the recording tool allows you to edit the video. In case you are not happy with the current recording, you can go back and record only those parts and merge it to the current timeline.
In the editor, you can very easily trim the video, cut it, increase the voice pitch for certain sections, and even zoom into the video while explaining the important parts. These (and a host of other more powerful features) really put the finishing touches on your video.
The Publishing Stage
Now comes the time to cut, save, and call it a day!
Once you have edited the video, the last step is to save the file in the format most preferred by you. If you any text in your presentations, then the ideal output for the video is the HD option which gives you a high-quality output. However, this does create quite large video files. Hence, if you wish to lower your bandwidth costs, then you could go in for a lesser resolution format. But do make sure that the text in the video is readable for your learners!
Run the video past your teammates or users and collect feedback. Use the feedback when creating the next video!
Congratulations! You just recorded a video with no help from professional video makers. The number of people using this method to record videos is increasing by the day. Though we just focused on making videos through screen recordings, the other popular forms are getting a cam recorder and record the demonstration of you presenting on stage or on a blackboard. Once recorded, you can edit the video with the help of your favorite recording tool.
We certainly hope that you will be creating a lot more videos from your presentations now, and join the brigade of L&D professionals who are using video regularly in their courses.
How do you record your videos? Do you have any tips or tricks that you can share with our community? Do share with us in the comments below!
Onboarding programs should move beyond merely completing a new employee orientation checklist. Today, onboarding managers need to conduct a well-designed, centralized, and cohesive orientation program, well beyond the scope of a new employee orientation checklist.
Let’s look at the six ways to create a great atmoys to sphere where new hires feel that they are a part of something special.
1. Send a welcome kit
Making good first impressions applies not only to blind dates and clients but with new hires as well. Putting together a welcome kit will ensure a new hire feels welcome and valued. The kit should contain:
Welcome letter
Directions to the office
List of restaurants, banks, and entertainment in the area
A small celebration makes an employee feel welcome. The simple process of having the workspace ready with phone connections, PC/laptop, an email account, and a bag of snacks communicates a great deal – especially on the first day. Involving senior members in team-building activities and lunch with the team will increase the new hire’s comfort level.
3. Mentor program
A mentor or buddy can act as the go-to person for the new hire and guide them through filling out forms and understanding benefits and company policies. The role of the mentor should continue until the end of the new employee orientation program. Companies like Motorola give the mentors access to hiring data, which helps the mentor assist the new hire with the necessary tools and resources required to make him/her productive from the start.
4. Share your organization’s goals
It is essential to share your organization’s goals for the near future and highlight the expectations from the new hire by defining his role in achieving this goal. Establish the fact that the employee and the employer grow together.
5. Focus on the skill set
All Employees, new hires, and laterals alike are constantly, are looking to improve their skill sets. A clear roadmap with training programs scheduled during the coming months that are integrated well with the new hire’s performance management plan will indicate to the new hires that the company will take all efforts to increase their skill set and contributions in an organized manner.
6. Ask for feedback
A new employee orientation program is not a one-time event, but an ongoing process. Feedback plays an important role here. Provide a timeline for new hires indicating when and how their inputs will be taken. Ensure to act on the inputs given and communicate to the new hire that the issue is being addressed or has been solved.
Helping to create a great workplace is very appealing – especially to managers and leaders who are aware of the benefits that come with great workplaces. The Aberdeen Report 2010 survey revealed that the initial experiences of a new employee have a direct impact on an organization’s productivity and profitability. The report also states, “Make a good impression and you can be considered an employer of choice.”
The new employee orientation checklist is definitely a good start and onboarding managers would do well to adopt all or some of the above-mentioned tips to enhance the onboarding experience.