New Employee Onboarding Process Explained

What is onboarding? What is the purpose of it? Have a little bit of an idea to post that in. And some of the terms are interchangeably used. I'm going to use some of these words interchangeably. Induction orientation, training and there are differences in each of those much like I do with systems. I talk about systems globally because it helps to simplify because that could be SOPs, procedures, how to manuals, work instructions, flowcharts and I just call them systems step by step procedure. Similarly onboarding, there are different components to it, but what is the purpose? I can see Miki's said here's how we do things here. What you need to know how we're going to work together. Our rules and policies. Bang on. Welcome to the new team member intro to the business and processes over the next three months. Bang on. So a lot of it has to do with getting to know your team, getting to know where someone fits in your organization, understanding who they're going to be working with, setting appropriate standards and expectations and getting them to know their job. So I've already hinted at some of the elements there. Getting to know your standards and expectations. There'll be an element of and getting to know your business. We're going to introduce company values, we're going to talk about policies and a staff handbook and then how to do their job. That will be very specific SOPs understanding what their job is. That's position descriptions. So a lot of these things you'll see will tie together to really set that expectation when they come on board. So the next question and I'll type that into the chat is why do you think onboarding matters? And if you just want to type that in and I can see and get rid of that neuter assistant, we'll just get that one out. But why does it matter? Set the expectations and the boundaries. Perfect first impressions matter. Andrew said maintaining consistency need to set up success and explain how and why things are done. Or bang on. It just sets the stage. We know that habits are hard to change so we need to plant the right habits early on. And systems and processes are a way to make the potentially invisible visible by going this is documented and this is how we do things. Here's a staff handbook. Here's what our expectation is around the leave policy. If you want to take some leave, you give us two weeks notice so we can plan and get it on the calendar. Calendar. Unless it's unplanned leave, it's expectations around security and professionalism and a bunch of things like that. It's Very hard as we said to change habits once we get going, but it's much easier at the start. The other purpose of onboarding is to figure out if we're a good fit. Not only onboarding, when I think about it, it's this three month process. It's 90 days at least here in Australia when someone comes on board that's it's almost like a trial period to determine is the person as we expected them to be and same for the team member is the company as they expected it to be in their particular role and how can we make sure within the 90 days? Hopefully we filter the best candidates and the low quality candidates as part of the recruitment process. But when it comes to onboarding, this is your last line of defense. You want to make sure that it's the right person and they stick around. So we need to have a very clear systemized way to do this. Now probably the next question and a few comments in here. I think Namiki added about feeling welcomed and setting oriented, knowing where to find stuff, all spot on. Jonathan mentioned about the need to set up for success. Okay, so I think we're all on the same page that we know what it is and why it's important. It's probably important to also understand the cost of getting this wrong. In that book Onboarded he referenced and I'll put a link to it I already have in the resources to a Forbes article that talks about what is the cost of a MIS hire and he said it's about 50% of the annual salary for a junior person and about 200% of the annual salary for an executive and leadership team members. And there's a bit of a variance in between that is the more junior person the less costly it is, the more senior the person more costly it is. And there's a variety of reasons. There's obviously the time and effort to actually pay to recruit and interview and takes up key leadership team members to do. There's also once someone gets started and managers and supervisors and buddies working with that team member to get them up to speed, the cost and investment upfront is quite significant. It's also one of the reasons why I think onboarding and creating an onboarding system is so important because we can systemize that very time consuming component where it's 80% of it is covered by the system which means.

Only 20% then needs to be looked after and managed and customized and tailored by a manager. That's the aim of the game. We want someone to go into this onboarding machine and Then over the first week, month, two months, three months, have a sequence that they go through which gets them inducted, ticks all of the boxes, make sure everybody has this consistent experience so that they're well set, so that it doesn't cost us so much. There's an interview I did and I can find the link for it. Maybe angel or Ivan can and we can post it in the chat with a lady called Maddie from Express Real Estate Management. I recently posted it on YouTube. They re engineered as part of this process, their onboarding process. Before they started, their turnover of staff was 114%. In the real estate age, in the real estate space, more than 100% of the people that were walking in the door were working out of the door by the end of the year. And they managed to, in a very short space in time, by rebu building it, drop it down to 56%. So not only did it make the onboarding infinitely easier and set the right expectations, but onboarding heavily will influence how long someone actually sticks around. Why do people leave? They leave because they don't feel like they're supported, that their expectations weren't met. There isn't the right coaching, they're not valued, they don't see good development prospects, they're stressed out about their position or there's a lack of leadership. A lot of these things will contribute to people leaving. So the cost for them leaving is actually quite astronomical. For Maddie, for their size of their business, they calculated just the changes in onboarding save them many hundreds of thousands of dollars just on onboarding costs. So there's another study I saw where organizations that have effective onboarding procedures improve the productivity of team members by up to 70% in that first year. Because a lot of it has to do with those first 90 days getting everybody up to speed and rethinking about how the onboarding process works. We used to do it where people would join up with the company and then they'd spend two weeks consuming all of this information, like working solid nine to five, watching a bunch of videos. It was in one ear, out the other ear. It was 14 days before they actually got to do anything. And they had a rough idea and then that ended up extending out to a month because after they did the core training, then there was specialist role training and it just wasn't effective. The aim of the game is how can you take a team member who doesn't yet know anything about your business and get them productively adding value to your business in the shortest possible time? It's actually one of the reasons why systems and processes are so great, because it's the thing that brand new team members cut their teeth on. They cut their teeth on the first basic underarm systems so that they can start to get some wins and feel like they're adding value and gives you a chance to determine if they're a good fit. Just a heads up, that clip was taken from a session in our Systems Champion Certification Program, which is the world's first and only program for systems champions to help you build a systems culture and develop an AI first approach and roll it out inside your organization. To find out more, head over to systemology.com systemschamp and I'll see you in there.