Six Weeks to Success: Clear Roles & Responsibilities
Setting the Foundation: Onboarding Excellence
Humans are social creatures. We like to spend time with people we trust, people who understand our life and work, and whom we believe are committed to helping us succeed. This is why onboarding is so essential in the workplace. Onboarding means so much more than simply helping an employee become successful by providing them with all the information needed to be effective in their role. Onboarding ensures new employees integrate smoothly with colleagues, provides the spoken and unspoken norms and expectations to be a great team player, and allows the opportunity for new employees to share their values, stories, and needs to allow for a truly inclusive environment. While there are many factors that go into successful onboarding, by remaining centered in equity, providing a clear action plan for the first 30, 60, and 90 days, and by determining the rituals of check-ins and 2x2 feedback, new employees, managers, and teams can build a lasting foundation for success.
Revisit Goals and Expectations
By having a strong scorecard in place, new managers can easily provide the roles, responsibilities, goals, and key metrics necessary to the position, as well as ongoing feedback and realignment to ensure new employees have a clear vision of the role. The strongest organizations also align their scorecards to check-ins, quarterly PKR reviews, and annual performance reviews, so that these initial conversations become ritual throughout the employee lifecycle. As a manager, revisit the goals and expectations before the new hire officially starts to ensure you have clear activities and actions aligned to the most critical components of the scorecard and have meet-and-greets calendared to build relationships that will be critical to achieving goals and objectives. By ensuring clarity early and often around key priorities, new employees will have a better sense of the expectations of their day-to-day work.
Provide the Organizational Context for Success
One of the most important aspects of onboarding is providing new employees with an organizational context for success. To do this, you need to provide information on what their role entails, the goals and expectations of their scorecard, and how they will be held accountable to their work. Additionally, by providing an inside view of the company culture, how their position is situated in the company, how their work will impact the company’s goals, new employees can better understand the impact of their work and the people they will be working with on a regular basis. Beyond the common handbook, make sure your new employees have access to readings, videos, and trainings that have become core to the culture, and share concrete examples of the written and unwritten values, principles, traditions, and expectations core to success at the organization.
Stories, Safety, and Access: Ensuring Early Engagement
While working through this complex information, ensure that new hires have plenty of time to ask questions about their role and how it works from people beyond their manager through coffee chats, meet-and-greet happy hours, or work-sponsored meal breaks. Helping your new employee to engage with team members one-on-one will allow everyone to share their stories and experiences in a safe and neutral environment, ensuring your new hire will feel more comfortable asking questions and will have a better sense of what’s going on in the organization.
Additionally, ensure safe spaces for employees to share any accessibility needs, learning preferences, communication styles, or other information that will ensure that they can do the work at their best. A tool such as the research-driven, practice proven StrengthsFinder from Gallup allows us to coach and manage new employees based on their strengths, and encourages deeper conversations about how they perform best at work. Want to learn more about StrengthsFinder and my work at Gallup? Reach out to me to find the best solutions for ensuring engagement across your organization.
Activities and Actions for Learning On-the-Job
The strongest onboarding finds a balance between activities and actions. Activities include readings, trainings, job shadowing, listening tours, or other passive learning opportunities that provide insight into best practices from a learner-lens. Actions include on-the-job learning that allows the employee to begin implementing their job duties while providing psychological (and sometimes physical) safety to begin the work while receiving in-the-moment feedback, asking questions, and determining strategies for ongoing improvement. Balancing activities and actions allows new employees to implement what they learn from their co-workers and managers into their own daily workflow. At Leaderscript, we recommend planning for the first week to be a 90/10 balance of activities to actions, moving to 70/30 in week 2, 50/50 by week 3, and 80/20 by week 4 with a continued 95/5 ongoing. For most non-profits and educational organizations, this breakdown may be too slow; for some business enterprises with high-risk legal components, this breakdown may be too fast. We encourage you to think strategically and realistically about the balance of activities to actions and provide a clear roadmap for your employee from the outset.
Ritualize Check-Ins and Two-by-Two Feedback
After the first day of work, it is important to give your new employees their very first two-by-two conversation. This provides a chance for them to report how their first day went and how they are feeling about the new job. This gives you an opportunity to provide feedback from your perspective, as well. Beginning onboarding with consistent 2x2 check-ins (at least once per week for 20 minutes) also kickstarts a strong relationship built on open communication, clarity, and feedback.
Two-by-Two conversations allow both the employee and the manager to reflect on:
One thing that went well for each of them and one thing that they know they could have done better
One thing that they believe the other person did well and one thing they could have done better
We highly recommend sharing your guide or tool, as well as the agenda, for this meeting before the first day or early in the morning so that your new employee is prepared for the conversation and can identify the things that went well or not-so-well on their first day of work. This meeting is also a great time for them to ask questions and for you to review the next day’s agenda.
Friday: Resources and Tools - Creating the Onboarding Roadmap
A well-planned onboarding program allows for both parties to grow together throughout the process of getting acclimated with each other, which leads to better experiences for everyone involved in the company. Join us back here on Wednesday for a slew of tools and resources to ensure onboarding is the start to a beautiful work experience - for you and your new hires!
