“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.” – Benjamin Franklin

Every for-profit company on this planet shares a common goal: maximizing profit. One of the key pieces to realizing this is to cultivate an efficient and productive workforce. An often overlooked area that can fundamentally change an organization’s productivity metrics is to have a flawless onboarding process for newly hired employees.

Why is an onboarding process so important?

• 17% of employees leave their new job between the first week and the third month of a new job
• Like we discussed in last week’s Prescriptive Profits, turnover and retention can be some of the biggest costs for organizations
• Along with the average cost of recruiting an employee being just under $5K, it makes financial sense to nail the onboarding process

Training and development of your employees can have an enormous impact on their productivity. No one likes attempting to do something that they have no prior knowledge or training on. This particular situation is extremely frustrating and can be demoralizing.

What makes up a great onboarding experience for your employees:

   1. Structure

In order for approaches to be successful and adaptable, there needs to be a structure. The onboarding plan should be consistently reviewed to identify areas of improvement based on the success of previous hiring groups and their feedback on the process in general.

Additionally, as your business grows and changes, roles and responsibilities will likely change as well, therefore, the onboarding program needs to be updated accordingly.

   2. Get started 

Once the prospective employee has signed their offer sheet, it is best to get the process started. This will help keep the individual engaged throughout the process, especially if there is a gap between signing and their first day.

Utilizing automation to keep the initial paperwork process moving forward is a big cost savings and allows for the employee to hit the ground running on day 1.

   3. Get current employees involved

If your onboarding process does not involve people the employee will be interacting with in their day to day and week to week role, your process needs to be revised.

A strong onboarding process involves interactions with colleagues via shadowing during the onboarding process, access to leadership to feel a sense of belonging and investment from the company with mentoring throughout their first year.

Why?

The easiest place to see a direct benefit of a great onboarding experience is with revenue generating teams. Examine two examples of what different onboarding processes can look like:

Onboarding experience #1: 

In this example the onboarding experience is comprehensive. Ample time is spent training the new employee on the entire sales process so when they are cut loose, there are no obstacles.

This approach allows for full productivity so their day can be completely devoted to revenue generating items and is not interrupted to learn new processes or get trained on pieces that were originally overlooked.

Onboarding experience #2: 

In this example the onboarding experience is brief and the majority of the learning is done independently. This approach allows the individual to start revenue generating activities quickly and have prospects entering into the pipeline within the first month.

However, when the prospect gets to the sales process, the rep often requires their manager’s help with the majority of the meetings and is constantly having to ask for help or direction on the next step in the sales process.

This leads to stagnation in the deals they are working on and frustration as they don’t have full ownership of the deals they have closed.

Unfortunately, due to the frustrating start, they end up leaving the company at the end of their first year.

The onboarding process is a classic example of injecting time, resources and money into an area upfront in order to have greater returns on the backend. By implementing a thorough process to make employees feel welcome, provide appropriate training and have the right leadership involvement early and often, you can achieve greater retention and employment lifespan that will yield a much more profitable business.

And as with anything that we discuss on Prescriptive Profits, the onboarding process needs to be consistently reviewed for best practices and areas of improvement.

Continuously inspecting what you expect will lead to faster ramp-up times for employees and improved retention rates.

Let’s get to work.

Prescriptive Profits #32