How To Improve Your Onboarding Process

The real problem with onboarding and as a business community we end up in this situation is that no one owns onboarding. Is it hr? Is it the owner of the business? Is it the system? Is it the manager?

Hello, it's David. And today I have the great pleasure of interviewing Brad Giles. He is the author of the book Made to Thrive and and also another one called Onboarded. Onboarded is actually the one I'd love to dive into today. Long story short, though, Brad is a serial entrepreneur who's recognized as a BRW Fast 100 founder. He was also an EY entrepreneur finalist, and he's been heavily involved in the EO world as well. He's the host of Growth Whisperers, a podcast, and the founder of Evolution Partners, which is a strategic planning and coaching firm. So let me welcome Brad. I appreciate you making some time and very much looking forward to hearing the wisdom that you're going to share with us today.

Thanks, David. It's fabulous to be here.

If I'd love to just jump straight into it, I know we've got some limited time and you cover some really great things in the the book that go into a lot of depth. My goal here is to give almost like an overview of your work from Onboarded. But maybe just to start, if you could just talk us through a little bit about onboarding and why you see it as a really poorly addressed area. For a lot of small businesses onboarding.

It'S. It felt like I spent two or three years on this project. It felt like for a very long time it was this neglected area that, that no one was really focused on but had a incredible upside with very little effort. As someone said once, it sounds too good to be true. Well, that may be a bit of an extreme, but a lot of people put a little bit of effort into orienteering, telling people where the bathrooms are and how to get paid and things like that, but not actually teaching the person how to succeed. If you ask almost anyone, they've got a bad onboarding story. And I know that because I was deep in the rabbit hole writing the book, as I said, and everyone I was talking to had their own story. From the largest companies or organizations to the smallest. It's not just a small business issue. All of them have challenges with onboarding. So why is it an issue? I think busy managers, number one, the managers who hire people see the hiring process as well, I've got someone that's now I've got to get back to work. Or if they're good, then they'll work out, but it's very different from the new hire's perspective.

Definitely with, you know, there's some great work like Top Grading as a book where they go deep into the recruitment process and a lot of people heavily front load that process, thinking, well, if we just get the right person on board and then there isn't as much thought, particularly in small business when it comes to onboarding. How do you help business owners to see the cost for not getting this right, to prioritize it? Because they might just go, well, I'm really busy and this sounds like a lot of work and a lot of investment that needs to go up front to get this onboarding process right, let alone the cost of the managers and the team members working with that team member over a period of time. Is there a way that you kind of articulate what the cost is of not getting this right?

Yeah. So I will start by saying I'm not a HR professional and this book wasn't written for HR professionals. This book was written to be a business case for small to medium business owners to say, this is why you should invest in this area that you don't care about, which you possibly could perceive as the most boring area in business. But this is the inordinate returns financially in terms of productivity, in terms of culture, in terms of retention. There are so many, many, many areas that are outlined in there. And as you rightly said there, Top Grading was written by Brad Smart. And the endorsement on the back cover of the book is by Brad Smart, which I was delighted to have because he's the guy who wrote really, in terms of hiring what many of us would say to be best practice. Jack Welch from GE brought in Brad Smart when he realised that the only way he was going to get all of his businesses to be number one or number two in their market was to have the teams full of a players. So then the question became, well, how do we consistently have a system around hiring A players 90 plus percent of the time? And that's all good and well, but then we think about it. We think about it through the lens of what are we actually trying to do. Top Grading advocates two or three interviews and deep reference checks and what they call the talk method and all of that, which is fabulous. But what we're saying is that we're going to be completely confident that this person is a successful fit if we spend a few hours with them, which is kind of preposterous. And the analogy that I use is your favorite sporting team who brings on a new player into the team from outside, how long would you think it would take for that new player to be a fully integrated part of the team? I mean, you wouldn't think that they would join and then be fully integrated. You would think before they knew the plays and the culture and the behaviors and everything else and the expectations of the coach, you would think it would be, be at least a few months. And so that's the kind of analogy that people go, yeah, why don't we do that in business? And so it is this, this period. And of course the law actually says that we have a probation period in business as well, where there's this period of a few months in pretty much all countries around the world where we can say, okay, we're not, we're not fully committed and you'll be able to let a person go if they're not a successful fit. So for all of those reasons, onboarding is an opportunity to create a great impact within an organization.

I definitely couldn't agree more. I think it's a very overlooked area that plays a real pivotal role in planting the right seeds and setting the right expectation and saying, this is how we do things here. Right from day. When and we touched on the idea of Brad Smart and top grading goes really deep into the recruitment process. And they've got, you know, a couple of different levels depending on how senior the positions are that you're looking to recruit for and all those things. And sometimes like I, when I looked at it, I, I thought some of this is for larger organizations like the depth in which you go through. So it's kind of like finding the balance between, you know, taking the best bits of what works for, you know, best practice here, but also getting it to the right level for small business where we don't over engineer this because we understand limited time, limited resource. So with that framing and that in mind, when we think about onboarding, I'd love to get your perspective of, well, for a small business, anyone between, let's say. Actually that's maybe the first question to ask. At what size organization should you be thinking about building an onboarding process? Is this like when you've got one or two staff from day DOT or at what point should you give this some attention?

Yeah, I'm in a. There's two, there's a couple of points there. I'm going to answer that question after I quickly make this statement. Yeah, top grading is about 2 or 3 inches thick. And everybody has the same reaction. What am I supposed to do with this now? About six months ago, Brad Smart and Chris Merceau, the president of Top Grading, was released a new book called Foolproof Hiring. So that's a cut down version, it's more digestible. It's a pretty good read and pretty good book. So you can take that away. Now to your question. Let's reverse engineer that question. If I'm a new hire, if I've just started, whether you're a one person or two person business, at what size business am I joining where I need to understand how to succeed. I put it to you that it's even more important in a smaller business because there's less people to learn from around you if you're a 1, 2, 3, 4 person business. Because that's essentially what we're saying where the onboarding process should be owned by the new hires manager and it not HR and it should explain or help the person to understand how to succeed. That's the essence of a good onboarding process. And that's around three areas. It's around the technical and process aspects of the business. It's around the manager's expectations. And I forgot the third one which is said about 300 times in the book, but there's three, there's three main areas of expectation. Yeah, yeah.

And the, I'm imagining this system will grow and evolve over time as well. Like there's almost like the minimum viable version of this system that you'd put in place and develop to get up and running and get some traction and then you'd learn along the way and you add bits and change bits and tweak things. If, if we're thinking, hey, having this from day dot. And then thinking, well what are those essential core elements? And also thinking in terms of when you think about onboarding and in the book you talk about, well, there are almost these stages. That's what you're going to need on day number one, you know, a 30, a 60 and a 90 day kind of check in period and what the objectives are. As you're going through that onboarding process. I'm wondering if you.

Yeah.

Give us a little bit of an overview of what you think goes into this process.

Yep, absolutely. So as I said, the book is a bit, is, is intended to be a business case. To answer the question how do we reduce onboarding debt? So you've probably heard of sleep debt where if you don't sleep enough, it's okay for a few nights, okay for maybe even a week, but then after a few months or years you, you gain long term and major health problems. It's the same in a business whereby if you don't onboard well for a few people, it's probably okay, but when that aggregates, these problems build up. So that forms how do we reduce onboarding debt to make new hires more effective faster? That's the question. That is the essence of the book. As I said, that's intended to be a business case that concludes with these two tools. So the two tools are what's called the role scorecard. So what is. It's, it's. It's probably best described to be similar to a job description, but more specific. A and then B is the onboarding sprint plan. So the role scorecard answers the question, what does success look like in the role? And then the onboarding sprint plan answers the question, how will we get the new hire to understand how to succeed in the role? And so the intent and the examples that I provide in the book, and there's a subsequent book called Onboarding for Managers, is that it should be around 15 hours commitment in total for the manager across 90 days or 100 days. And so what I've tried to do is to say, what's the minimum to your, to your point, what's the absolute minimum that a very busy manager needs to invest to make sure that the new hire understands? So there's, I think there's a couple of hours, two hours allowed to write the role scorecard. And I've seen people do that, for example, in as little as 20 minutes. So that's not overly cumbersome. And then to build the sprint plan, and then there's 13 weekly meetings over the first quarter to get the person to understand, to recalibrate, to check up on them. So that's broadly the commitment that we're advocating.

I love the two chunks there. And that, like, helps to really get down to the simplest essence. Like, I think the job scorecard, that position description, having that up front when someone comes on board, clearly articulates, well, what are you here to do? And then the second part, the sprint, that speaks to the way that we think about things. And a sprint, you often have this linear order in which things get done. And it sounds like there's a series of meetings where you can kind of tick off those boxes as you move through it. I'm wondering again, I know the book is more about building the case for it. You obviously also would have seen some of the businesses you work with where they've got great onboarding processes. And like, some of the things that we think about Things like talking about what the company does and, you know, the mission and sharing the org chart and explaining what everybody else is doing and then helping them to understand where you fit into this bigger picture. There's going to be some additional materials. Sometimes there's just obviously materials that are required by law and forms to fill out and how to get paid and some policies. And here are some systems and processes related to the tasks that you're doing. Are there other things in there, whether they're uncommon or things that. Yeah, uncommon. In a lot of onboarding processes that you've seen that have made a big difference, or are there certain elements where you just. Like in that sprint, it's really important that you have these couple of steps.

What you've just described in large part is an induction. So I want to start by explaining what's the difference between induction and onboarding and training and orienteering, because all of these words are kind of thrown together as if they're the same. I think we kind of know what training is. Training is learning a new skill or habit. So orienteering or orientation is knowing your way around. This is the exits, this is the bathrooms. This is where we go for coffee at the coffee shop up the road, whatever that might be. So that's orientation. And then you've got induction. So think about being inducted so that you end up with something virtually like a license to operate. So this is your login for your computer. This is how this happens. This is the org chart. It means that you can start to operate. But starting to operate from an induction is typically what you would do on the first day. And that's not onboarding, because onboarding is about success. So that at the end of 90 days, we can classify them confidently as either a successful fit or an unsuccessful fit. And so, yes, the induction is a very important part of the whole process. But then let's take an example from the book, which is a sales manager. And one of the components of a sales manager might be training. So training the staff. Now, in the interview we may have said, have you done training of staff before? Yes, I have. But have they done our sales training? Or have they done it our way? Or have they done it in a way that's going to help them to succeed in the role and understand around that? So when we begin to think about that, it creates the job to be done. Now, one of the concepts in the book is from a psychologist in the 1900s called Herman Ebbinghaus, and it's subsequently been implemented throughout and proven throughout psychology and what happens with the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is when we're taught something a day later, we forget about 50%, and then that gradually declines to about 10% after seven days. So what that means is that after seven days, we forget 90% of the things that we're taught. And so we wonder why it's a struggle for our poor old school teachers to get the kids to understand some of these things. It's the same in the workplace. It's a human nature and biology thing. But the good thing about the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve is that if you reteach the same content, the same content through a different context, a week later, that raises up. And so the way that we overcome this in terms of teaching is across the first four weeks, we get what we call the learn stage, where they're learning the expectations. Going back to the example of this sales manager, this is how we train, and we do this and we do this, and then this is how it worked before, and this is what a good training looked like here. And then after about a month, what tends to happen is we've overcome the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve. So we switch, we kind of change to a new stage in month two. So what does that feel like? If you and I are role playing and I'm the manager and you're the new hire, both of us are starting to think we've been playing this onboarding. We're kind of, we're kind of okay to keep going now. We don't necessarily, like, this is getting a bit boring or I kind of. That's exactly what's meant to happen. Because then we switch from the learn to the apply stage. Understand and apply. And so in the middle, what we're, what we're saying in the second month is we're kind of switching from a teacher to a mentor, where we're saying, okay, so you did your first training with the team. How did it go and what did you learn and what could you do better? And a lot of those types of things. And then we're switching to embed in the third month, where we're switching from mentor to coach or leader as a coach, so that we can embed the leader as a coach concept moving forward so that I don't need to micromanage the person. I can ask them the right questions, but I can recalibrate them as necessary. So it's quite a long winded answer to what you're saying there. But it's. Onboarding isn't induction. They're very different things. A and then B, we want the, we want to overcome the forgetting curve to get the person to understand how to succeed. And that's what the type of thing that we're documenting in the onboarding Sprint plan.

So the purpose of onboarding is to help the person succeed in the role and increase the likelihood of that. So I mean, the aim of the game is how do we make team members productive and adding value to the business in the shortest possible time and take them from a brand new student who doesn't really know anything to having a level of understanding and competency through, through doing some of the tasks to really valuably contribute to the team. Because it's quite expensive at the start when you're onboarding and inducting new team members because that's when they're going to make the most mistakes, that's when they're going to need the most training, that's when they suck up the time of the most valuable team members. So it's a very important period and if we can shorten that learning curve and get them to productive and feeling great about the work that they're doing in a shorter space in time, that ends up being a huge win for the business. So just so I'm clear on the difference between induction and onboarding and orienteering. You see onboarding as about making sure that the team member achieves success over a period of time or within that first 90 days, let's say.

Well, yeah, pretty much. Onboarding is about helping the person to understand how to succeed around the three areas that I mentioned and got wrong earlier. Technical and process expectations, cultural expectations and their manager's expectations so that, so that they can succeed in the role. When we think about how do we get the person to be more productive quicker, we think, well, can't I just put him in a room and then I'll just meet with them for half a day and then I'll download everything onto them and then they'll be productive quicker. Well, that doesn't overcome the psychology and the biology of the, of the situation that we need the person to learn like that. And broadly the data says, and that's outlined in the book, people typically take nine months on average to hit maximum productivity. That then waxes and wanes depending on other factors. What we're doing is we're compressing that from nine months down to three months by having a 90 day process getting them to understand that with focus and clarity.

I think, and correct me if I missed the mark on this, but it feels like then Onboarded, as you said, builds the case for the business owner. So basically this says, hey, you need to get your onboarding process down and here's why. And then the onboarding for managers, your other book really then speaks to the managers and says, great, now and here's how we do it. Like you'll meet with the team member with this particular cadence and you want to cover these sorts of things and this is what we're trying to accomplish within that first 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. Is that a good distinction between the two?

Yeah, it's the same material but written for a different audience. So managers are not necessarily interested in the research study that I did for this book. I, I did a research study with a thousand CEOs and hiring managers and all of the data. They're more interested in a shorter book that is much more, much more focused on the day to day task at hand. So whilst Onboarded is the business case, it is intended to say to the business owner, this is why we need to do it and this is how we do it. Onboarded is a narrative story about a manager and each chapter is written in two sections with the story and then this is why this is happening in the story and this is the data that supports that. So it's quite simply a cut down version that is written for a different audience containing the same information and the same tools.

Yeah, yeah. I think one of the reasons that I was so keen to chat with you today is recognizing how important onboarding is. In my book Systemology I talk about like one of the early principles that we put forward is the idea of you can get some tremendous wins just by making what you're currently doing repeatable. A lot of people try and re engineer process and rebuild it and then key stakeholders that business owners need to get involved and before they know it, this processes, you know, so challenging for them to get to completion. We just say h, how about we, if you don't have any process yet, figure out who does it the best. Let's capture what they're doing, let's make that the baseline, bring everybody up to that standard. So we, we talk about identifying, you know, thinking the 8020 and capturing the most important with the exception of onboarding. And I call it out in the book and I say it's probably one of the only processes, particularly for small business where I actually think re engineering or building this from the ground up is a great idea because so many people get it wrong because it's so important to get right because you're planting all of the right seeds. And when we think about it from process perspective, where a lot of the clients, they, they're trying to build a process culture, the best way to build it is as some new team members come on board right from the start. We get it right at the start because cultural change after the fact with team members that have been with you for years is really challenging. But it's much easier with brand new people to say, hey, this is how we do things here. So I'd love to get your perspective on one. Yeah. Your thoughts on the. And we've kind of touched on the importance of it because that's why you wrote the book about it. But if you've got any thoughts on, you know, a lot of the work that we do around process, how you might think about embedding process thinking into the onboarding process. If someone was building their onboarding process and induction and orienteering from the ground up, what are some tips they might be able to do to try and interweave systems thinking into their process?

As you correctly said, start with your next hire. I've seen many, many, many teams say, this is awesome. Let's start with roll scorecards and let's build a roll scorecard in the next 90 days for everybody in the business. And it fails 100% of the time because it's, it's working on a big system that has no, that is, is, is, is too big to take on in one chunk. So we're more, let's, let's say perhaps in six or 12 months we would have done that. But let's start with the next hire, learn and grow from that. So start with the role scorecard for the next person and then the next one and the next one, and then simply beyond that, the managers who are the most senior people in the organization, depending on the size of the organization, and then work your way from there to the role scorecard. The other thing is that once you've got it, a good role scorecard and a good role scorecard has numbers on it, for example, sell 5 million widgets by October 2024 or whatever that is, it's got very, very specific numbers and what the person is fully accountable or fully responsible for so that there's no misunderstanding. And so once we've got a good role scorecard, that's when we can use the second part of the process, which is performance reviews, whereby the manager and the person whose role scorecard it is or who's being reviewed can have a conversation being assessed from each Side around red, amber, green around each of the components of the role scorecard. It really forms the scorecard for that role.

Yeah. So let's say from a systems perspective, if we were trying to build that up, I could imagine including some training and videos on how an organization thinks about systems as part of the orientation and that initial training, I think that would be part of it. Then thinking in terms of the scorecard and are there numbers that you can really get down to where. When we know that this is important to the organization because we're measuring it and recording it. So it's thinking about, well, what are some systems and process related metrics potentially that could be built into a role so that the team member knows right from the get go that this is key because then obviously that will feed into the performance review when we look at it where hey, this was your target and this is how you went fantastic. Or we need to focus more on this area. Are there any other suggestions? Again, I'm really trying to narrow in specifically around systems and process and building a systems culture. I don't know if you've seen any thoughts or any tips on how managers might be able to coach their team members for that.

I think, I think it's very important that we have a system that doesn't lose the human element. I absolutely subscribe to your philosophy around the importance of systems, but the data says when a new hire joins an organization, the new hire wants to learn from their manager. So the worst thing that you can do is put them in a room by themselves with two days of videos. These types of things are quite important. But especially I will sound like an old person now, especially in this world of Gen Z and the younger generation who, who are looking for something in particular from the workplace. But it's a, it's a human thing. New hires, they want to learn and understand and they want to communicate with their manager and build a relationship with their manager. And the byproducts of that are quite important. And so if we, if we take that as being important and read, then we can come back to a system that is every role needs a scorecard and the scorecards have to be measured as appropriate in some kind of performance management cadence. The less often probably the worse. So if you're only doing an annual performance review, no one enjoys it. So the more often the better. Within context or within reason and then being able to ensure that it's, it's delivering the outcomes that the new hire expects. Because the cost of retention, we can't lose sight of the, the new hire because the cost of retention is enormous and that's outlined in top grading, as you mentioned earlier. The numbers in there are kind of quite staggering around retention. So I don't know if I've answered your question.

You definitely hit on a couple of points and some things that also marries with the way that we look at things. I think a lot of people in the past, if you ask them to talk about, well, what's a systemized business? McDonald's will come to mind. And McDonald's is a 60 year old if not older business that's been systemizing since day dot and it's a hamburger business and they're looking at the finished product of where it is today and they think, oh, that's how I need to systemize. That's not necessarily how they got started. So it's something that needs to grow and evolve and you can over document over systemize. And a lot of people listening to this aren't running a hamburger store. So they don't need to go into that level of detail. It's the really the challenge is to find that balance and to appreciate the hires that you've got. And they're coming with a certain amount of intelligence and like you said, they are getting schooled underneath the manager. So it's trying to get across the key thoughts or ideas that you want the manager to coach and train for in that first 90 days to say, well, we have a systems approach and it's never your fault if something goes wrong. The first thing that we do is we look towards the system and we say, well, where did the system break down? It's really trying to distill what those thinking points are that help to build a systems culture and then embed that into that onboarding process that the managers can then supervise and tie that down to the performance report and that scorecard as well to get down to actual numbers rather than just keeping it as, you know, airy fairy topics that we try and cover in onboarding that talk about a value that no one really knows how that relates to the action that I need to take on a day to day basis.

And you touched on a couple of good points. The real problem with onboarding and how did as a business community we end up in this situation is that no one owns onboarding. Is it hr? Is it the owner of the business? Is it the system? Is it the manager? The manager is very busy. They probably don't want to take on more. They're flat out just trying to get to the end of the week and get things done. And everyone in the business says to the manager, it's all about productivity and efficiency, make sure that we get the units shipped or whatever it is. So there's no real owner, the managers are very busy. And it's a part time thing where if you've got the average attrition in Australia, New Zealand, it would be 17% for an organization. That means that the average manager is only hiring two, three times a year, something like that. So it just doesn't happen that often that, that it needs to be a focus because they want to get back to work as quick as possible. But then the poor new hire is left not understanding really how to succeed. So what we kind of advocate in the book, or what I advocate in the book is we're proposing that in order to get the approval to try to not create too much of a bureaucracy, but to get the approval to hire someone, we need a job scorecard or a role scorecard. So that's how we get the real the manager to follow the process A and then B, at the end of 90 days, what this process does, and it was really in the research, it was really driven home to me that we want to know with real confidence whether the person needs to be let go, whether this person isn't going to work out. Because what's terribly frustrating is when someone who's kind of borderline sits there for months and months and months and then a year or two later they go, and it's just been tough all the way. So we want to really know. And so at the end of 90 days there are these two terms which is successful fit and unsuccessful fit. And you'll notice I'm not saying good fit, bad fit, intentionally so successful fit and unsuccessful fit. So the process should force the decision at the end of 90 days where they can say based on what I can see in the Sprint plan, within our legal probation period, this person is now either A, a successful fit and we caused them to succeed by way of the Sprint plan, or B they're an unsuccessful fit and we've proven that they won't be able to succeed in this environment again by way of the Sprint plan. So simple, a very simple system. But those two catch alls is what we kind of advocate in terms of a system.

And it is the, in your eyes, the role of the manager to own this process or who, like I know you said, and I can see it like straight away, I can see there's a hole here on who's owning this Is this HR or is it manager or is it other leadership team members or is this joint or if the buck is going to stop anywhere, whom do you think the buck stops with?

The manager 100%. And that's articulated multiple times and reasoning why within the book. But the manager is the person who has to deal with the successes or frustrations of the person not understanding. And the manager is the one who should know the role. They should know if I'm a sales manager managing a salesperson or whatever the context is, this is what success looks like in the role. You can't succeed in this role unless you are competent at using Salesforce or you can't succeed in this role unless you get your reports in by 3pm Monday. Those very simple and practical things are what the manager understands. And all that HR is going to do is ask the manager for some of those things. Maybe not all of them. But I think you take my point because it is the manager who is responsible for the team's performance. And so the manager must understand the team's performance and drive that.

Yeah. For smaller teams and I'm trying to think about how someone might roll this out and those first couple of steps that they take, potentially the business owner reads onboarded goes Yep, I need this. They might create a generic onboarding approach that could fit across the organization by the managers when these new hires come on board. And then there's probably even a step beyond that as the team grows and evolves and this system gets perfected then where the manager then takes that base generic version and then customizes it based on their role, their team member and the differences that are going on inside their department. Does that sound right?

Yeah. Yeah it does. Some things are the same across an organization for sure and some things are different. But moreover, I would be advocating the company sets the standard as to what's a good and not good scorecard and what's a good and not good sprint plan. Because everyone's going to say they're going to go back to their thinking about a job description and job descriptions are so fluffy and job descriptions are so opaque that no one really knows like why should I fire this person based on this job description?

Because.

It includes everything. It's a catch all and there's not really a lot of specificity in most of them. So what is so so so. Yes. And. And saying this is what a good and a bad one looks like in that sense.

My last question is if we think about a good and a bad one and we have this particular role that we talk about as a systems champion like oftentimes that's a really under addressed area in an organization and building out a job scorecard for that particular role do you have any tips on how what metrics or how to identify and uncover what those metrics are that would determine the success or failure of that particular position And I know you don't know too much necessarily about the way that we think about it but I don't know if you've got a process for the way that you uncover what those metrics might be well we're looking.

At the edges and the first question would be what does success look like so if you hired a person into that role and they were thriving and you were like I don't need to worry about this person at all in fact they're almost challenging me what's the first number that comes to mind? Number or metric?

The first one and maybe the metric will change over time but when they first started sometimes it's just about.