All Aboard!

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

How do you turn new hires into long-term, valuable employees? Getting off to a good start can make a big difference and whether you call it orientation, a core curriculum, onboarding or something else, that first round of communication and training can make a significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.

Why, then, do I often see programs of this kind being cobbled together without the detailed attention, the serious application of professional resources, the rigorous evaluation and improvement, which is routine for other training provided by the organization?

That first round of training is often neither efficient nor effective. That’s always a concern, but it is particularly worrisome when the economy is down and resources are tight. What’s missing from many onboarding initiatives?

• Clear, Modular Objectives: Look at post-onboarding training for specific functions within an organization and you’ll usually find a nice list of clearly defined desired outcomes, along with plans for objective measurement of the results. Does your onboarding scheme boast the same? More often than not, objectives for this crucial initial communication are very broad, if they exist at all. Not only do you need tighter goals for your onboarding efforts, you need to break the content down into smaller units and develop objectives at a much more granular level. (I’ll have more to say about that in my next post.)

• Investment Perspective: For most training, we look at ROI in terms of higher productivity, fewer errors and similar factors, all translated (when possible) into more tangible benefits for the organization. Those returns apply to breaking in new employees, but don’t leave the retention benefit out of the equation. In making budget decisions about the components of an onboarding program, don’t just compare what employees will know, or what they will be able to do, with or without a particular training module. Compare the investment in initial training and communication with the cost of finding, recruiting and hiring replacements! Helping your new employees fit into the way the company works more comfortably, smoothly and rapidly pays significant dividends when you factor in higher retention and lower turnover.

• Shared Responsibility: Don’t let that essential first step with the new employee become solely a human resources responsibility. HR and training staff should play a professional role in helping the leadership team and department/function heads make sure that employees know “how we do things around here,” not do it all themselves. Without the ongoing involvement of functional units of the organization, the transfer of knowledge and skills from your onboarding programs to actual job performance is going to be greatly reduced.

• Balance Between Efficiency and Effectiveness: In most orientations or introductory curricula I see, some chunks of information should be delivered more efficiently and some should sacrifice efficiency to maximize effectiveness. Key company values (ethics, compliance, respect for other employees, customer service) must take root from the first days of employment. Often the personal touch can make all the difference in modeling these values and helping new employees to embrace them, having an impact that even the best constructed online courses or reading assignments aren’t likely to equal.

In the eyes of your new employees, the first round of training they experience sets their expectations, their standards, for the more specific training they are bound to take later. How many rave reviews do you get for that first training all employees receive when they are hired? How many cheers do you get from management for the results your initial efforts produce from new hires?

Make sure your organization applies the highest possible standards to the quality and impact of this initial experience, equal to anything you do in any other training activities you offer.