High Performance Onboarding

Onboarding is interviewing's often neglected sibling, the less popular end of the hiring continuum. When you consider that most businesses don't even pay enough attention to the skilled, strategic, and appropriate selection of staff, the chances that onboarding is any more than an afterthought are slim indeed.

Yet onboarding excellence - that is, the ability to get new hires to feel they belong to the tribe, know how they can deliver the most value they can, and deeply want to contribute - can be a considerable source of competitive advantage.

Done well, onboarding can build culture, encourage innovation, and improve retention. It can be a powerful way to drive behaviours which enhance your business values and, in so doing, can help create meaningful work.

Bringing new hires up to speed quickly, giving them the tools and connections to deliver their best work as soon as possible, means the value of a hire is realized earlier in the employment lifecycle. This is equivalent (in contribution and dollar terms) to improving talent retention.

The average employee lifecycle time for most knowledge workers is around two years. However, this 24-month span in a role doesn't tell the whole story. To get an estimate of fully productive time we need to deduct six months from that total as "ramp up" and "ramp down" time - that is, the time it takes a new hire to be fully productive (ramp up), and the time lost when an employee is actively job hunting or serving their notice (ramp down). If your competitors' employees are getting up to speed in three to six months, and you have systems that help your new hires get there in three to six weeks, your advantage is significant.

Very few things a business can do can generate a return on investment comparable to creating an extra 1-2 months of effective employee contribution per employee.

But it takes work and commitment to getting to onboarding excellence. Here are a few guidelines:

Planning for excellence

Start by mapping the business's key processes. If you know your key influencers or top 15% contributors, get them involved in this process. If not, the team leads for each division can be called upon for their insights. Mapping the whole business at once can give a broader picture of how things get done, even in departments far from your next starter's remit.

Remember, you're not looking for just an operations manual, but for a guideline document on how work actually gets done: what tools to use, preferred methods of communication, channels and technologies that allow the new starter to work in ways that help them add significant value to the team as early as possible. All roles evolve with each new incumbent, but seeing the starting parameters in this way helps ensure that evolution is positive and proactive.

This insight should be made available to new hires even before they start. Doing this means their first day isn't like an escape room game.

Performance targets

These key processes help build a high-value onboarding pack for a new starter. The pack should also contain an overview of likely 30-, 90-, and 180-day targets.

Mutually agreeing on what early success will look like really helps energise and focus a new hire. The accountability and clarity offered by 30-, 90-, or 180-day targets can be extremely welcome and provide a solid framework for early conversations from both manager and employee. Having these targets in place by the end of a new hire's first day helps everyone understand the waymarkers to success.

The best way to estimate good performance at each stage is to revisit the planning you did for the hire. What problem is the hire here to solve, and what would solving this problem look like?

Start by building a very rough 30-, 90-, or 180-day model and then get input from others in the team or role who understand realistic timeframes and have a view on what "winning" looks like in the role. While it is important to build this document flexibly (it's very difficult to be accurate on these targets), you should resist the temptation to make it too easy. Good candidates like a challenge, and agreeing to a roadmap like this helps them frame and gauge their work.

Establish regular meetings with the new starter. Make these meetings weekly for at least the first two months (more if the complexity demands it). Start each meeting with the same question: "Are you having fun?" High performance results from a skilled person, slightly out of their comfort zone, tackling ambitious goals with the support of committed colleagues. Impact and connection work together. Work (challenge-led, meaningful work) should be fun to attempt and rewarding to achieve. Starting meetings this way during the early days helps lay the right foundations.

Use these meetings to help calibrate the 30-90-180-day goals and focus on hearing any problems the new hire raises. These issues can be good indicators of either institutional issues holding back progress or an early warning of the candidate's suitability. Either should produce action from you to help. In addition, your 30-90-180-day goal planning makes difficult conversations a little less uncomfortable should the work not be going as planned.

Consider insecurities

People starting new jobs inevitably worry about three key things:

1. Am I good enough for the job?

2. Where do I go for help when I need it?

3. Will I even like my colleagues?

Fitting in, finding encouragement and overcoming Impostor syndrome are common themes for new starters, and your planning for onboarding should try and cover all of them. For example, whilst you can't pick new friends for your new hires, you can put in place processes that make it easier to find them.

How about a guide to coming events? A tongue-in-cheek email covering a team's insider jokes? A work social or a Slack channel set up as a welcome wagon? Think more than just a work buddy, a social buddy who makes introductions that cover and go beyond just job title, introducing the human beings, as well as the function they perform in the business.

And it's easy enough to go further still - podcasts or video interviews with team members about more than just the work. Introducing future colleagues as whole human beings via an informal video interview is a great way to overcome fear number 3 on the list above. By the time your new hire starts, they will know all about the people they will be working alongside.

Video messages are a great way to address our impostor syndrome when taking on a new role. Using the time between offer and hire get the hiring team to make a short video about why they chose the successful candidate and what work they are looking forward to getting to share. This video need not be long, it is solely intended to break down the current boundary between selector and selectee, to move that power dynamic onto a different footing.

Seeing the team as pending co-workers and collaborators rather than judges is a powerful transition tool, and having these people talk about how impressed they were with a candidate helps break down pre-start nerves.

Buddies

Make your buddy program work by concentrating on building actual networks of buddies and training buddies rather than just nominating someone randomly to partner with a new starter.

Starter buddies can be far more than an afterthought. These people can be the conduits of new relationships and collaborations inside the business. They can instigate, encourage, and deepen understanding of how work really gets done in your world. This level of impact is only possible if you take enough care in buddy selection and training.

In my experience, most businesses don't do more than pick the name of a likely close colleague. Instead, think about good influences, the network of connections you would like your new starter to have, and the range of people you would be excited for them to collaborate with - then find people who are able and willing to spend time building these connections. Get this person involved in the introductory calls between the new starter and the future collaborator - this way, you can avoid initial awkwardness and make those first meetings far more impactful.

Building these connections early on can be valuable enough to warrant bringing the team together in person, even if the business is hybrid or remote. Proactive organisations build quarterly new hire events. Everyone who has joined (or is about to) in the quarter is invited to a collaborative and social get-together on-site. These events combine work and social time with a whole range of existing employees and create cohort groups of starters, ensuring belonging early on.

Once your new hire has started, make part of their onboarding include developing a broad perspective on the organisation. In addition to the job-related initiatives and metrics, have new starters meet with others across the business, sitting in on meetings as observers with the goal of understanding how work gets done and where their experience might suggest improvements.

Professionalising onboarding

The drive for impact and connection is why innovative remote businesses are appointing Employee Experience managers as professional buddies, connectors, and problem solvers. These organisations, often with large, globally diverse teams, can put a dollar value on lost time during onboarding and recognise that a professional experience manager can smooth processes, build momentum, and accelerate belonging.

Like many of these innovations, this one is copied from sports teams (true Talent-First businesses), where player liaisons have been helping talent make a smooth and swift impact for years. If you're looking to truly invest in belonging and impact across the business and in translating onboarding to commercial advantage, hire a professional to lead the process.

Start small

Onboarding development can be as significant a project as you can handle. The key stages listed above are a jumping-off point to create something valuable. Not all of them need to be done immediately, but each one adds to your team's ability to perform at a high level even when scaling up and dealing with dozens or hundreds of new hires.

Remember that onboarding does not take care of itself. Crafting onboarding excellence takes plenty of time and commitment, but the ROI on more effective performance, better retention and fewer miss-hires can be considerable.