If you’re invited to a party, is your first question "Who else is going to be there?” If your partner suddenly calls you into the kitchen to help, does your anxiety go through the roof at the thought of being thrown into the middle of cooking without knowing why you’re chopping those carrots or what stage of prep you’re at? If so, then you understand the importance of onboarding. Starting a new job is already stressful enough. You're surrounded by new people. You're doing things that you know how to do, but you're being asked to do them in an unfamiliar way. To get the most out of new employees from day one, they need to be ushered through a well-designed onboarding and training program. Here’s what that looks like.

Two Sides of a Coin

Onboarding and training are two distinct but related stages of the hiring process. While training acclimates new employees to their job duties and teaches them how to do their jobs, onboarding integrates them into the group and explains the why of their job and of the business as a whole. During training, employees learn the specifics of their job duties, including the tools and skills they will use on a daily basis. The onboarding process is more oriented toward culture, values, expectations, and building relationships. Together, they integrate new employees into the full experience of working for you.

Even experienced hires need onboarding and training. It’s not enough for them to know, generally, how people in your field or industry work. They have to learn your business’s work, your processes, and your culture, all in a short period of time. For employees at every level of the company hierarchy, at any stage of their career, onboarding and training ensure that every hire is set up to succeed from day one.

While onboarding and training acclimate employees to different aspects of the job, there are some guidelines that apply to both. You’ll want to set goals, provide feedback, and provide a mentor or a buddy to help them along the way. What kind of goals you should set are determined by the parameters of the role. Review and assess progress toward these goals at the 30, 60, and 90 day mark. These assessments aren’t meant to be punitive; recognize that training and onboarding are learning processes and everybody learns in different ways. Regular check-ins are to answer questions and devise different ways of learning if a new employee isn’t catching on.

Feedback is important not only during these check-ins but every time you see the new employee doing something right or wrong. Recognize a job well done when it aligns with the goals you’ve set out. If a new employee makes a mistake, focus on the behavior and not the person and direct them toward resources that will help them get it right next time.

A mentor or buddy can help here. It might be intimidating for a new hire to admit to the boss that they don’t know how to do something, but they might feel comfortable confiding in a peer. A buddy can also nip shortcuts or missed steps of a process in the bud, ensuring new hires learn the right way of doing things.

Link Goals to the Job Description

Onboarding and training begin long before a candidate is hired. Once you’ve recognized a need, the next step is to determine the parameters of the role. For each task, duty, or skill, think about what success looks like and what kind of training and support will be needed to move a new employee toward success. To that end, we’ve developed the PRO Job Description, a proprietary method for designing roles that outlines everything an employee needs to succeed. You can read more about it in the How To Hire Handbook, available here [add link to purchase the book].

Optimized Onboarding

Onboarding is all about acclimating a new employee to your culture and making them feel like they’re a valued member of the team from day one. Before day one, let your whole team know well in advance that a new employee is arriving. Prepare them to introduce themselves to the new team member. Have someone show them around the office. Plan a special event like a catered lunch. Make them feel welcome.

Go further than simply introducing them to their team. Give them a broad view of the company and how different departments work together. It’s not uncommon for a member of one team to have no idea what another team does. Employees on the production floor might not know what employees in the office do; product developers might have no clue as to how marketers spend their day. Break down those barriers to create a more cohesive team.

Onboarding is also a time for housekeeping. This is when you’ll introduce new hires to the employee handbook. They’ll learn how to access their email, electronic communications, and any other software they’ll need, who to talk to about vacation days or payroll questions, how to clock in and out, what kind of breaks they can take, building security, cybersecurity and password protocol, and so on.

Optimized Training

Everyone learns differently. Make sure your training materials include opportunities to read, listen, view, speak, and do. In pedagogy—the study of how skills and knowledge are conveyed through education—this is called multimodal education, a researched-based teaching method that recognizes the cognitive differences in every learner.

Most people will show a preference for one kind of learning over another, but everybody learns better when they engage with the material across different modes. When building a piece of furniture, for instance, some people want to read the instruction manual. Others want to watch someone else put it together, while another group would rather jump in and figure it out. The best teaching methods combine these different approaches.

A learning management system or LMS is the most efficient way to deliver training materials multimodally. An LMS makes it easy to organize, update, and present training materials through written questions, videos, and audio clips, making training relevant and engaging for all kinds of learners.

Training should also be done alongside a peer mentor who can guide the new employee through their job duties. The most effective way to teach by doing is for the new hire to first watch the mentor complete a task, then complete a task under supervision with corrective feedback if necessary, and then on their own.

 Set Your Employees Up for Success

This may seem like a lot of work and a lot of hand-holding, especially when your hiring needs are urgent. After all, you hire experienced workers so they can start contributing right away. Hiring the wrong person can be a costly mistake. Even worse is hiring the right person but not properly integrating them into your team and teaching them how to apply their skills to your processes. We’re here to guide you through the entire hiring process: identifying a need, designing the role, writing the job description, interviewing, onboarding, training, and continuous improvement.