In this solo presentation, Matt Vaadi shares his personal experience of a chaotic first day at a Fortune‑500 firm to illustrate the cost of poor onboarding. He defines onboarding as a multi‑month, ongoing process distinct from the one‑time orientation that merely covers paperwork and building tours. Vaadi outlines three essential onboarding pillars—required documents/tasks, socialization into the company culture, and education/training for productivity. He cites research that formal onboarding can make employees up to 200 % more productive. Practical guidance includes building a simple training calendar and task checklist (using Word, Excel, or Trello), establishing regular check‑ins at 1 week, 30 days, 60 days, and 90 days, and conducting surveys at 6 months and 12 months to gauge retention of early learning. He emphasizes setting clear program goals (e.g., improving retention, engagement, productivity) and continuously iterating the process. The talk concludes with resources such as a blog post on a new‑hire scavenger hunt and a call to connect on Twitter for further HR tips.
Chapters
Alright, so I want to talk a little bit this morning about employee onboarding. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I remember back about 7, 8 years ago, I started up with a— oh geez, it's even longer than that now— but I started up with a Fortune 500 company. On my first day, I walked in, I got into the lobby, I was super excited to start my new job, and I had No idea who I was looking for. I had no idea what my first day was going to entail. I didn't provide any information about myself for the team to understand who I was. And ultimately it wound up being exactly what you'd expect. I walked in, my computer wasn't ready, my desk wasn't ready. I sat around, I kind of, hey, why don't you hover over the shoulder of this guy for a little while, watch what he does and get a feel for this. And maybe hover over the shoulder of this person for a little while. We'd really love to get you started on this, but your computer's not ready. And, you know, maybe you can start this training tomorrow once we get these 3 things knocked out. It was a cluster, and I still remember it to this day. It was painful. So do your new employees have that same experience? If they do, they'll be remembering it and they'll be talking about it down the road. New employees know within the first 10 days if they'll be looking for a new job in the next 18 months. And just think about that. In the first 10 days, people know if they'll be looking for a new job in the next 18 months. So my question to you is this: Do you know what employee onboarding is? And do you have an effective employee onboarding plan in place? If not, let's talk about it at a high level and then get into some of the details of what you can do to more effectively onboard top talent at your company. An employee onboarding plan often gets confused with employee orientation. They're very different. Employee orientation, think, uh, showing you around the building, meet the team, complete all your documentation, all that fun stuff. While employee orientation is a part of employee onboarding, it is not employee onboarding. Employee onboarding should be an ongoing process that lasts anywhere from 30 days to 6 to— some folks say as long as 9 months to 12 months. I would say focus on that 90 days to 6 months if you don't have a formalized plan in place, and then you can continue to work on improving it over time and expanding it out over a longer period of time. But there's really 3 main components when you look at employee onboarding. There's documents and tasks that you need an employee to complete. Just as part of the, you know, back to those sort of orientation level things to get people acclimated to your organization and an understanding of just the crossing the T's and dotting the I's. And then there's socialization, getting them to become a part of your team and getting them to understand your culture and your organization and fit in and make friends and become a part of a work group. And then there's also the, the education and training component. Of onboarding. So you want people to get as productive as possible as quickly as possible. As a matter of fact, organizations with a formal onboarding program, employees are 200% more productive than organizations without a formal onboarding program. So what can you do to start to formalize your onboarding program? Well, some, some quick initial things you can do is make sure you've got an employee training program in place. So this can be as simple and crude as going online and pulling down a Word, Microsoft Word calendar, filling in, hey, these are the 5 trainings we want somebody to complete week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4. So you can make sure that the end of those weeks you can check the boxes and you have those particular pieces of education done along with here's the documents and tasks that need to be done, a checklist for those. And you can organize this in any way you want. There's obviously some great systems out there that can help you with it. There's very simple ways, just crude checklists that can be held in Excel or Word, or even Trello is a great free resource that I've talked about in the past that people can use to maintain these lists. And they even have an awesome sample onboarding set of boards on Trello. So check that out, Trello.com. But then beyond that, you want to also have some check-in points. So a 1-week, 30-day, 60-day, 90-day check-in with an employee to gauge their temperature along the way. And, you know, that 90-day should be more of the formal performance assessment, whereas 30- and 60-day, you're asking some more generalized questions. Tell me about how you feel about your first 30 days. Where do you see your biggest challenges in the, in the months ahead? What can we do to remove barriers from you being excellent at your job? Those are the types of questions you want to get to the bottom of in those first 30 to 90 days. And most importantly, what you want to do is survey these individuals at the 6-month and 12-month period to see what they remembered from those first 90 days. So if you're going to go ahead and educate and take all this time into properly onboarding an employee, see what's actually sticking down the road. So you can do this through surveys. What do you remember from your first 90 days? What can you share about this? And and then you'll gain more knowledge and understanding over time about what works and what doesn't work. So an employee onboarding program should be something that lasts for several months and is an ongoing process that's constantly improving. But take some initial steps today to create an outline of what your program's gonna look like and what your goals are for the program. Once again, we've talked about this in several other videos. You have to have a goal for this. Is this to improve employee retention, improve improve engagement, to improve productivity, because that's what you get from an awesome onboarding program. So reach out to us if you have any questions about more specific things you can do to set up your employee onboarding program. Check out our blog post on the new hire scavenger hunt. That's a really popular one. You can check out at ergpayroll.com or some of our other videos about employee training programs that you can weave into your onboarding program. And you can find me @MattVady on Twitter. And check me out there. I'll be dropping some, some HR tips and knowledge from time to time. Appreciate you joining me today. Thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon.
