Don’t Go Overboard When Onboarding

Onboarding new hires is the first step in developing successful employees, promoting long-term retention, and expanding your workforce capacity. But is your onboarding process helping newcomers to sink or to swim? Getting employees “on board” might seem daunting, but here are four tips to avoid going overboard with onboarding.

C1C can help you to develop, document, and communicate a structured onboarding process to make sure you make a great first impression on new employees.

Fit is Mutual

Although it’s pretty common for organizations to think about how well a new employee fits with their organization and role, they can often forget that the onboarding process is mutual. Beyond role-related training and memorizing names and protocols, new employees are also assessing whether the new organization, role, and team members align with their personal goals, values, and expectations from the selection process. For newcomers, this process is critical as these first impressions of the organization shape the way they will interpret their experiences throughout the employee lifecycle. Effective onboarding processes should focus on both role-related training and developing new employees’ sense of fit and alignment with the organization. Developing new employees’ perceptions of fit might not seem like the most critical aspect of onboarding at face value; however, these perceptions of fit and alignment are key drivers of turnover and employee retention starts at day one. In other words, first impressions matter for both the organization and newcomer. The next few tips provide recommendations on how organizations can make a good impression during onboarding. 

No Trial Period

Some organizations consider new employees to be under a “trial period” until they reach a certain benchmark (e.g., 60 days, 6 months) and sometimes make this clear (even if unintended) through their language, processes, or even pay. This distinction might be tempting, especially for organizations burned by high turnover or burdened by high cost of training, but this undermines longer-term employee outcomes such as retention.

In more extreme cases, new employees are put through trials of workplace “hazing” that might include assigning undesirable tasks, shifts, or supervisors, withholding critical information, or even being the target of high levels of workplace incivility. Some believe that hazing newcomers is a rite of passage that will build commitment, but research suggests this is a very risky strategy and further, these experiences can strongly deter certain groups of people, setting the organization up for higher turnover and potentially legal repercussions.

As I noted above, onboarding is mutual, so if you want new employees to commit to you as an organization, then you have to be willing to commit to them too. In fact, newcomers are generally very aware that the organization and team members will evaluate their onboarding progress either formally or informally. Further, studies have shown that newcomers are usually quite motivated to gather information about what is expected of them in order to meet group members’ expectations and reduce the anxiety that comes with a new job. In other words, most newcomers are naturally motivated to “get onboard” and preventing them from doing that fully is more likely to hurt than help their success and the organization as a whole.

Finally, newcomers might consider a “trial period” to be an additional barrier to achieving full membership status within the organizations, and research shows these barriers are especially likely to deter those who are already more uncertain about their fit in roles where they are underrepresented (e.g., ethnic minorities, women).

If you’re concerned that new employees consistently don’t live up to expectations, the first step should be to reassess how you are selecting them rather than develop additional hoops for them to jump through. If you feel like you need help with this, Category One Consulting (C1C) can help you with effective selection processes to avoid trial periods and ensure you have the right people for the job.

Document Information

New employees are presented with an overwhelming amount of information about their tasks, peers, processes, protocols, and paperwork during their first few days or weeks on the job. Even the most highly motivated employee cannot possibly retain or record all of the information provided, and they shouldn’t be expected to.

Organizations should take steps to document as many of their protocols, knowledge, and expectations as they can to provide to new employees, including both formally documented and “invisible” knowledge (e.g., everyone knows that they should give their timesheets to Sally, although that’s not in the employee handbook). Creating and updating guides, templates, and the employee handbook might seem tedious, but they serve many purposes, including to (a) provide content for the newcomer to refer back to after the flurry of onboarding sessions, (b) create updated, standardized expectations across roles and levels of tenure, (c) document institutional knowledge that can survive turnover, and (d) ensure all new employees receive the same content regardless of who trained them. Still seem overwhelming? C1C can help you to develop and standardize these materials to support the success of newcomers and all employees.

Be Prepared

Like each of the tips before have suggested, organizations need to commit to the new employee if they expect the new employee to commit to them. At the most basic level, this means that organizations need to be ready for the newcomer to arrive and ensure that they can become fully functional staff members as soon as possible. For example, I’ve seen new employees arrive on their first day to find that their desk is covered in boxes of old paperwork, their computer is not set up for use (even taking two weeks before it was functional), or the peers assigned with role-related training have nothing prepared. Regardless of intentions, these experiences send negative messages about the organization right as new employees are forming their first impressions and beginning to develop commitment and intent to stay (yes, even in week one!). In contrast, nice touches like having name plates or business cards ready when newcomers start show that the organization is excited about their arrival and committed to them as part of the team.

In such a high-stakes time for new employees, a little preparation goes a long way. C1C can help you to develop, document, and communicate a structured onboarding process to make sure you make a great first impression on new employees.

Each of these tips can help you support new employees through onboarding and set the foundation for the whole employee lifecycle. If you would like additional support with onboarding, feel free to reach out!