Speaker 1: Onboarding is kind of a weird word. Not a lot of companies have onboarding programs. How many of you actually have an onboarding program in your organization? So a few of you, right? Okay. Well, regardless of whether you think you do or not, every organization has an onboarding program because every organization that has new employees coming in has those new employees that are having new experiences, they're learning new things, they're meeting new people. The question that you need to ask yourself is whether the experiences that they're having and the things that they're learning are helping to engage them with your organization or not. So that's really what onboarding is. Onboarding is a strategic system designed to decrease staff turnover by increasing staff engagement. And because it's such a weird topic, everybody always asks me, like, Emily, how did you get into onboarding? And the reason why I got into it is because my first job, when I was onboarded onto my first job, it was a bit of a train wreck. I started out, I went to the University of Pittsburgh, don't kill me. And when I graduated, I came back to my hometown, Charleston, and I started with a marketing agency. And it was a very small firm and we had a problem. We had a problem because we had, at this time it was the year 2000, we had a fax machine. It was a PR firm and we had about 300 media phone numbers in that fax machine. It was regional, statewide. We were moving our office from one location to a new location down the street. The problem was, at the time, this is when fax machines were really big, if you unplugged the fax machine for more than three minutes, the database was wiped out. So this was kind of a pain, right? It was a big question. So when I looked out the window and saw the CEO of my company running down the street with the fax machine, I probably should have known at that time that this organization didn't have the resources to onboard me appropriately. And I was right. But I really got into onboarding when I worked at Dixon Hughes Goodman. We have Fred Dillon over here from Dixon Hughes. Fred, I promise I'm not going to tell any stories on you. I've already made him that promise. But I got really into onboarding when I saw firsthand the effect that retention could have on a business achieving its ability to achieve its strategic objectives. So I was working at Dixon Hughes. This is circa 2008, 2009. And I worked with the recruiting team really hard to find new hires. So we hired 23 new grads that year. And these are rock star hires. We spent a lot of time on campuses around the state trying to get those new hires, the best new hires, to come and work for us. How many do you think were still at the firm in 2011? 10, 5, 6. So out of 23 people that we hired, only 6 were there three years later. So this is, you know, how is a business supposed to achieve its objectives if you're constantly in that cycle of hire, lose, hire, right? And Dixon Hughes is, you know, a fantastic place to work. A lot of the people who left, left for very legitimate reasons. We actually had one girl who got recruited to be a model in New York City. So I mean, I don't blame her. I would have gone too. So there's some legitimate reasons why people leave. But it still doesn't change the fact that when you spend a lot of time trying to get people to come on board, you know, you want to keep them. It's really, really important if you want to keep your new hires, that you keep the promises that you made to them in the recruiting cycle. And I want to tell you a story real quickly about my friend Robbie here, who you can, there's a little bit about his resume up there. By all accounts and purposes, he is a fantastic recruit. And he was recruited by a lot of organizations. He ended up settling in Washington, D.C. at the headquarters of a nonprofit that if I said it right now, you would all know who I'm talking about. But I'm not going to say it because his onboarding experience sucked. And the reason why is because he showed up all excited because they had made him all sorts of promises about how great it was going to be to work there. And when he showed up, his boss was like, I'm so glad that you're here. I'm going to L.A. for a conference. I'll be back next Wednesday. So he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing. He didn't introduce him to any of his colleagues who, when they saw him walking down the hall the next day, didn't know whether to introduce themselves to him or like throw him out of the building. Right. So you have all of this excitement that he had walking into his first day. And she just blew it. The carrot of having a job isn't enough. Most employees, the good ones that you want to keep around, actually need to have some sort of purpose for the work that they're doing. Right. And in order to give them that purpose, you have to be around. You have to be around to talk to them and train them. You have to be there on their first week on the job. When you get new hires that are cut any higher, really, but new hires in particular that are coming into your organization, you want to know how to motivate them immediately. And he's got a great little formula here. And it's MAP. And MAP stands for mastery. They want to be technically good at what they're doing. They want to have autonomy, want to leave them alone enough so that they can actually feel like they're doing it on their own. And this P, this purpose, right, they want to be connected to something larger. They want to feel like what they're doing matters. And I think that where companies go wrong is that you spend a lot of time developing your strategies, developing your strategic plans, and then none of that trickles down to the new hires. So they're thirsting for context, right? It's really hard to have somebody do a great job if they don't know why they're doing it in the first place. So that's one of the most important things that you can do to live up to the promise that you made in the recruiting cycle is actually tell your employees the purpose of what they're doing. Connect their job to the bigger picture. That's how you get them engaged. It's like this balloon, right? So if you pump your recruits full of air, like, you are going to love it here. You're going to have so much autonomy to do what you want to do. Your co-workers are so great, right? So they come into the workforce and they're like, yeah, this place is awesome. Now do you think it's one thing that kind of pops that balloon? Do you think like something happens and they're like, oh, no. It's not. It's the gradual. That's when you lose them. It's when they can't get a meeting with their boss. It's when you don't show up and then you lose them. They become totally disengaged, right? And then you have the turnover that I talked about earlier. So don't take a sales approach to your recruiting process. The best thing to do when you're trying to get new hires to come on board is to talk about the kind of company that you want to be, but distinguish it from the company that you are. So you say we're at our best when we work together. We're at our best when we build and collect on time. We are at our best when we see the best in each other, right? Don't just tell them that you are this fantastic company when they walk in because they're going to have some unfettered reality hitting them pretty soon. There is a period of time when every new employee, I don't care if they're lateral or entry level, when they come in, they are consuming resources. They're consuming your staff time that it takes to train them. They're consuming coffee and your coffee pot, real estate, all that. They're consuming. When do they get to the point where they break even and start contributing as much value to your organization as they're consuming from it? When do you think that is? Six months. It's about 6.2 months, okay? So keep that in mind. Then, statistically, when employees decide whether they want to leave or stay with an organization is somewhere within the first month to first six months. So if they're not breaking even until six months and they're figuring out if they want to stay or not in six months, why do orientation programs last one week? Get dialogue from them. Getting dialogue from them also means that you have to give dialogue to them. This is my grandfather and my grandmother on their wedding day in 1950. One of my grandfather's favorite sayings was, no news is good news. He had been through two wars. He was a pretty tough guy. No news is good news, but that's just not true. For new employees, any new employees, it doesn't just mean Gen Y, all of them need feedback. In that same study of 584 employed Americans, 58% hadn't received any kind of useful feedback from their supervisors in six months. Sigh. So for onboarding programs, you need to sit down with your new employees within the first week and schedule at least quarterly sessions with them so that you have that scheduled feedback. And keep those appointments. Keep those appointments. A lot of managers don't. And the last thing is that you can get all of that right. You can have some amazing career plans. You can have a first rate onboarding program, but what will great employees still demand? For people, people, what will great employees still demand? Managers. Great employees demand great managers. You can have all of your onboarding ducks in a row. You can have a fantastic program, but if they don't have good managers, they'll still leave. No amount of great onboarding will get them to stay, right? So it's the whole saying of people join companies and leave people, so true. So how do you fix that? The best way to do that is, in my opinion, to hold all of your managers accountable for how their employees answer questions in the Gallup Q12. So Gallup actually spent seven years researching employee engagement and figured out that these are the 12 questions that would measure that. Hold your managers accountable for how the people underneath them answer this question. This is how you manage managers. So I mentioned that I was running down the street, my first boss, and I had an onboarding program that just wasn't, it was sink or swim, that was how I would define the onboarding program. But I stayed with that company for about seven years, seven years. So the onboarding was terrible, they would admit it, but I stayed with the company anyway. Why do you think that is? I had a great manager. So just as if you have a fantastic onboarding program but your management isn't there, the flip side is also true. You can have a weak onboarding program and still keep your employees if your managers are great. So my manager gave me a ton. He gave me so much. He taught me everything that I needed to know as a new grad, so I was able to give something back to him. He always wanted to be an author, and as a result of everything that I learned from him, I put it in a book, we put it in a book together, and I was able to publish this book with him. So he gave me as much as I gave him, and it was just, it's really beautiful how it worked out. And in that book, we have a chapter, does anybody know who this is? Gene Kelly, Gene Kelly. In this book, we have a chapter called Embrace Your Inner Gene Kelly, where we talk about how Gene Kelly was really obsessed with little things, like the crease of his pants, the top hat, the look into the camera, the beautiful cane, that sort of thing, and the little things added up to make him look like a great dancer. So one of the chapters in the book is how you can use little things at work, like handwritten notes and things like that, to build up a great reputation. And just yesterday, I got a note from Gene Kelly's widow saying, I want to thank you for keeping Gene Kelly's spirit alive. And it just, when I think about just how amazing it is that Skip was able to, that my mentor was able to give, to spend time with me, and teach me, and be a mentor, and that I was able to give something back to him that has now grown to where Gene Kelly's widow wrote to us. It's just amazing. And I think, I am not telling you guys anything that you don't know, but my final slide is my favorite tweet from Tom Peters, and it said, you take care of the people, the people take care of the service, the service takes care of the profit, reinvest, and bingo. This is how you have a high-performing culture. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.