Speaker 1: Today, we're going to talk about onboarding and how to build an onboarding program that fits your organization. We'll start by first mapping out different onboarding experiences. We'll then identify the onboarding activities and tasks, incorporate those into a program, and finally talk briefly about automation and self-service options. As a bonus, I'll talk about a few assets I think are critical to the onboarding process. To start thinking about the whole experience, I put together two journey maps that incorporate some of the best and worst stories I've heard around onboarding. I'll start with the negative experience, and then we'll flip it around and map out the ideal onboarding experience the same way. Let's take this journey from the viewpoint of both Sally, our hiring manager, and Maya, our new hire. We'll talk about their emotions and experience as they progress from before day one all the way to the first 90 days. In our first example, before the first day, what are Sally's emotions? She's frantic and stressed. Maybe she hasn't done this before, or it's been a while and she's digging through old onboarding emails and asking around for help for what she needs to do. Meanwhile, Maya is full of anticipation, but uncertainty because she doesn't have any information for her first day. She's reaching out to her primary contact, which was her interviewer, and ends up deciding for herself what to bring, when to show up, and what to wear. Moving to day one, Sally's feeling even more unsupported and now frustrated. She scrambled to get onboarding tasks finished, shifting meetings to try to find time with the new hire, and resorting to forwarding email directions to Maya throughout the day. Maya started her day waiting in the lobby for an hour, trying to figure out her own access to tools, and getting random direction from Sally, who's jumping in and out of meetings. What started as feelings of excitement have quickly turned into confusion. By the end of the first week, Sally's starting to feel guilty for not onboarding well, and disappointed with herself and the company for how this all played out. Maya's confusion has turned into boredom at her desk, and feelings of guilt as she can't figure out how to contribute and sees her manager running around working so hard. At the end of 90 days, there's just uncertainty and helplessness. Maya, well, she's having buyer's remorse that's coupled with frustration. And guess what? She's looking for another job. The truth is, recruiters that have lost out on candidates know that this onboarding experience actually happens a lot. I've experienced this myself with recruiters reaching out to me two to three weeks after my start date to see how things are going and if I want to reconsider their offer. Just think of how vulnerable you are to losing good people even before they have a chance to get going. Well, let's flip the script and envision what a great onboarding experience looks like. Let's start with pre-day one again. Sally in this experience is feeling prepared and anticipation herself. She has an onboarding team that's reviewed their tasks and her responsibilities. She's also gotten updates on the pre-day one tasks that are already done. Maya, well, she has the same anticipation, but it's now coupled with a sense of readiness. She already feels welcomed with communications, a care package, some prep work and reading, and an agenda of everything she needs to know for day one. Moving on to day one, Sally feels organized and connected not only to how Maya is doing, but to the onboarding team and what they're executing on. Maya has the same excitement, but this time it turns into inspiration as she learns more about the company vision, mission values, and where she fits in the big picture. By the end of week one, both are feeling supported. Sally feels like she's really helping Maya to get going and Maya on the flip side is feeling productive with what she's able to do even in the first week. By the end of 90 days, Sally's confident in her new hire and encouraged on her trajectory. Maya is confident as well in her role. She feels like a valued team member. She also understands her growth areas and is eager to learn and grow more in the company. Wow, so that's a totally different experience and that's the mindset we want to have as we move into the next activity of identifying all the activities and tasks that we would like done as part of our onboarding process. Now instead of just throwing out random ideas, let's approach this in three main categories. Let's brainstorm these ideas starting with the initial setup items. So how do we get our new hire on the books and into our systems? Then let's shift to their work. How do we get our new hire operating at full capacity in their new role as quickly as possible? Finally let's talk about culture. How do we best inspire and integrate our new hire into our company? We'll talk about these at a high level first and then I'll share a collaborative way you can brainstorm these tasks and activities with an onboarding team you'll put together. Starting with setup, let's break this down further into administrative items, technology, and the workspace itself. Things to think about on the administrative side are the legal documents like the I-9 and W-4, employment agreements, benefits enrollments, and getting all the HR information in a central place. Include any compliance deadlines for these as well and I would run this by an employment lawyer to be sure you're covered. Next you'll need to set up the right technology. Let's include the access and configuration for any apps and tools they'll be using. We'll need to think about the different types of tools from HR to operations, all their role specific access, and of course making sure they know who their support contacts are. And finally in this category let's talk about the office and making sure their workspace is ready for day one. It could be simple things like just giving directions to find the place and maybe sending them an entire remote setup with a chair, desk, and monitor before they even start. Okay let's shift to their work and items related specifically to their job. To get up to speed they'll need to understand the organization as a whole and where they fit inside of it. We should have some learning sessions on how the company is structured and how knowledge is distributed across the organization. When getting them up to speed in their role let's think about how their tasks and responsibilities ramp up over time. This is where the hiring manager really needs to get involved. We'll talk about this in more detail later but in the meantime let's add instructions to their team, the meetings they need to attend, and getting ready for their first one-on-one. Finally they'll need training around the tools they're using and the processes and methodologies used by the company and their team specifically. Finally let's talk about culture. For this we'll talk through all three pillars of purpose, community, and growth. On the purpose side of things how do we talk through the company history, vision, mission, and reinforce our values? It's always important to meet company leadership or founders and hear how our strategic initiatives and company goals tie into the overall purpose of the company. Moving to community and creating those meaningful interactions. Can we introduce a buddy into the onboarding process? How about some team building events? There's also employee resource groups and maybe an online community platform for an asynchronous welcome across the entire company. Finally how do we kickstart their personal and professional development? When do we get them on their individual development plans? What training do we want them to get started on and when? And also thinking about any mental health and wellness initiatives that you'd like to introduce them to. Now let's talk about forming an onboarding team to brainstorm and list out all these activities. If you're a small company this may be a whole company off-site event. If larger, formulate a team for this exercise that includes different hiring managers, representation from IT that helps with the technology setup, and of course key members from your people team. A collaborative way to list out these items is to get this group together and use sticky notes and pasting them on a whiteboard as a group. You can use the slides we just went through to queue up ideas and facilitate the meeting. Have individuals or paired up teams write down different tasks and activities that they come up with under each category. You can use different colors for each onboarding area and group related tasks together. You can start with one area and move to the next, or break the session up into 30-minute sessions and then regroup and have people walk through what they've added to the board, discuss, and then continue on. Once you have what you believe is a full set of activities, you can then begin roadmapping them in different windows of time, such as pre-day one, day one, first week, first month, and the first quarter and beyond. You can move them from your brainstorming checklist one by one, or move them in groups. You can then also talk about sequencing and placing items top to bottom to visualize in what order things should happen. This activity can be done in person or remote using apps like Mural, and I'll link that in the description below. As you can see, it's a fun, interactive, and visual way to put this together with your new onboarding team. With that exercise complete, you now have a solid checklist of items that you can now memorialize in a playbook with swim lanes that add a layer of responsibility. This is helpful for the time frames we've talked through, but can also extend into the first month, the first quarter, and the first year. As a small company, this may be a sufficient way to organize and execute on those onboarding process, but I would take it a step further and create a detailed schedule for at least the day one and week one tasks and activities. The schedule could look something like this that identifies the actual owners, the delivery method, the time it should occur, and finally, a link to the templates and the assets themselves, so you have a quick way to get to everything you need. An added benefit of getting to this level of detail is that you can easily design automation and can clearly identify what the trigger events are to kick off the automation, what templates and assets should be utilized, and even begin to design self-service checklists that allow the new hire to work through the tasks themselves in one central location. Now there are two assets that I wanted to talk about specifically that I think are critical as part of onboarding. The first is the employee handbook. This document is a real opportunity in the onboarding process if it's done right. I've seen versions that inspire and really guide new hires and accelerate their integration. I've also read through some that cause more confusion because they're so out of date and read like really negative legal documents. But it really doesn't have to be that way. Yes, it'll take time to build, but it's worth it. The best handbooks read like culture guides and give the new hire a foundation of what the company stands for and how they work. As you read, it gives you confidence and sort of this permission to go get it. If you don't have one or your handbook needs updating, I'd highly encourage you to make it a people initiative for the year. I'll link some articles and videos below to help you get going on that project and some inspiration from very unique handbooks that I've read and companies that have generously shared. One more document I want to highlight is what we talked about before called a ramp up plan. And this outlines the expectations and increasing responsibility that the new hire will take on and be measured to as they get to full speed. This asset is very specific to the role and should be put together by the hiring manager and their team. As an example, here's a document we like to use as we walk through the ramp up of an associate onboarding to one of our consulting teams. This outlines the timeframe we think it'll take to get up to full capacity with phases of how they'll ramp up and expectations around their confidence level. And just FYI, the fake it till you make it doesn't mean lying. We view it as finding the confidence inside yourself to take on challenges you've never seen or done before. So using this as a tool, we'll explain the ramp up of responsibilities and expectations. For example, we'll say things like in the first 30 days, we'll expect you to be in more of a supporting role with clients, taking meeting notes, going through our training program, learning our methodologies, and taking on some internal projects with a senior consultant. In three months, you'll be very active on projects. We won't hold back on the issues and challenges that you'll need to take on and figure out, but you'll be supported by a senior consultant along the way. You should be familiar with our processes at this point and have built relationships with our client to be able to reach out and work on deliverables that you'll actually begin presenting in client meetings. In six months, you'll be taking lead on tasks and really driving the work with our clients. You'll be facilitating your own meetings and building deliverables that go through just an approval review from a senior consultant. Finally, in eight months, you're fully ramped up as a consultant. We find that our strong associates start taking on even more responsibilities and are really acting at that next level. There you go. That's our video for onboarding. All these slides will be available in our toolkit that's linked below. This is something that takes a lot of thought and time to prepare up front, but it gives you so much return on the back end once implemented. All right. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the next one.