Your onboarding process is make or break territory. A good plan unlocks capability and allows new hires to demonstrate performance within their first few weeks. Less-than-ideal plans slow-ramp team members for months on end, and ultimately hurt team and organisation performance.
As organisations seek more agile teams, leaders need to demonstrate performance gains in months not quarters. Even in our most complex technical environments onboarding timeframes are compressing from six months to six weeks. Onboarding processes that help our frontline teams to hit the ground running are no longer a luxury, but a must-have.
Planning is key
Like the Scouts motto - “be prepared” - onboarding starts well before you hire. It’s imperative you know why you are hiring and what you’re intending to achieve with a role. If you can’t articulate this and trust more senior people in the business to do the same, take a pause and write it down. Alignment before you hire is critical to success for you and your new hire.
Once you’ve found the right candidate and you’re bringing them in, the classic 90-day plan is an excellent starting point. To build this you need to understand the skills, expectations, and stakeholders that matter to the role.
By the end of their onboarding period your new hire should feel comfortable and confident, know what the role is (yes, this means KPIs and clear expectations), and how to do it. Further, they should be able to do things independently. Your seniors want their time back and so do you. Independence also reflects in their performance, are they on track to become a core performer (or better)? Or are they coasting and needing significant levels of support?
With the right 90-day plan your hire should not only hit the right marks, but you should also have an understanding of their strengths, growth profile, the niche they fit in the team, and where their future trajectory lies. These things aren’t nice-to-haves but must-haves in our modern landscape.
Trust your new hire
This is the biggest fumble I see leaders make with new team members. You’ve hired them based on their match for a role, so don’t suddenly let your anxiety become a barrier to them doing their job. If you can give your new team member opportunities to meaningfully contribute early on, the faster they’ll onboard, and the faster you’ll be able to trust their output.
In a past company I had the opportunity to command an incident in my first two weeks there. While I had experience at leading incidents, the level of trust I felt I had only weeks into the role was incomparable. I felt like I was having an impact already. As a leader now, it’s the same feeling I want my new team members to walk away with.
This said, trust isn’t blind, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t offer support or keep an eye on how things are going to ensure the right outcome is achieved. Helicopter parenting isn’t the vibe though, so don’t let it creep in. These opportunities shouldn’t be manufactured or hesitant, and you shouldn’t ask your new hire to jump hoops for them.
Doing this in the right way lets your team members feel a sense of belonging, empowerment, and confidence. This brings only net positives and lets them trust you sooner as well.
Foster connection
Connection is the secret sauce to making team members feel at home early on, both in terms of your connection to them as a leader, and their connection to the team and stakeholders around them. As leaders our job is often to bring the right people together in the same space, and doing that as part of onboarding is just as important as when we do it to resolve escalations.
In the first few weeks have your new hire connect through donuts, meeting rhythms, and pairing sessions with people across the business. Don’t only make this people on your team, give them access to people across their region, as well as cross-functional teams your folks work with regularly. Those go-to people who aren’t officially in the org structure? Make sure they know who they are.
Having an assigned peer buddy in their region is also an easy way to give them someone to ask the awkward questions to that they might be uncomfortable asking their manager, or bothering busy seniors with. The more connection you foster early on, the more comfortable your hire will be by the end of onboarding to navigate the organisation and drive outcomes.
…
Great onboarding is equal parts clarity, trust, and connection. Do those well, and your new hire’s first 90 days become a multiplier for everything that follows.