In part 1, we reviewed some of the reasons why it’s so important to have a solid, consistent onboarding process. In part 2, we’ll talk about a specific element that you can add to your process that will go a long way toward getting massive value out of onboarding and springboarding your new employee toward success early on in their tenure with you.
To start, let’s take a step back and look at how the hiring process should ideally go. First, you have this document called the job description. In this document, we have a basic description of what the job is all about, and it should include a list of skills and competencies an applicant would need to have to be successful in this position. So, a job description, in its simplest form, comprises a checklist of the knowledge, skills, and abilities you’re going to measure an applicant against. This measurement is essentially the interview process. You’ll gather information in an interview, from references, and perhaps from assessments that are required as part of the process. However, as anyone who has ever hired someone before knows, it can be difficult to measure people against your checklist in the interview process. There are a few reasons for this:
- Perhaps your checklist isn’t very good or is outdated.
- Your process for doing the evaluation might be underdeveloped or inconsistent.
- You have a process that can be manipulated by the applicant.
- People haven’t been effectively trained to interview, so they’re not asking questions that get at the right information.
- Most importantly, you’re not actually able to watch the applicant do the job.
No matter the reason, you’re likely gathering incomplete information about how well someone matches up against the job description prior to hiring them. That’s why it’s so important that the hiring manager actively assesses the new hire against the checklist during the onboarding process. Let’s discuss how this might look.
Employee development is essentially a six-step process:
1) Instruction: Teaching the basics to someone who is brand new to the task.
2) Guided practice: Once they’ve been taught, they get a chance to practice what they’ve learned, to embed the learning.
3) Mentoring: Now that they’ve got some learning and practice under their belt, they are given the freedom to do some things on their own – typically the basics. The mentor comes alongside for the more challenging things and tends to stay close at hand, in case help is needed.
4) Delegation: Once the mentor gets a first-hand look at the progress of the employee, there will often come a time when the mentor deems the person ready to take on the responsibility of the task(s) alone. While there may still be some checking in and general monitoring, the person is the one taking ownership of their own task at this point.
5) Empowerment: It takes a lot of trust and experience to get to this level. This is when a supervisor realizes that the employee is really an expert at the task or skill and is allowed to truly own it with little to no oversight. The employee is often skilled enough to train others on the task and is often becoming creative in the execution of the task.
6) Evaluation: This often is a final check-in to make sure the task truly is cemented and/or to see where the person stands on the next task they should be trained on. The results of the evaluation will then set up the cycle of development for the next task.
So, let’s go back for a moment to where we started with this blog post. You’ve got a focused list of skills, abilities, areas of expertise, competencies, etc., that you should have available for each job description. Once an applicant has been hired, it’s important to revisit this list. A lot of organizations leave value on the table in the onboarding process because they don’t systematically go back and assess the new hire against this list of skills and competencies. In fact, doing this is a vital step in the onboarding process. For some, it can be the difference between success and failure. For others, it can be the difference between hitting the ground running and unnecessarily struggling in their new role. The best practice here would be to meet with the new hire on the list of skills and competencies in hand that they will need to be able to do well to succeed in that job. It’s vital to have a conversation with the new hire and rank where they are on each of those list items according to the 6-step development process mentioned above.
As a case example, maybe you’re hiring a new therapist in a mental health clinic. Let’s say we need them to be good critical thinkers, have experience with individual therapy, experience with group therapy, knowledge of the ethical code of conduct for that state, and have experience entering billing information into a software program that allows insurance companies to be billed for the therapy services provided. At this onboarding discussion, you quiz the new hire and discover that she has a moderate level of knowledge of the ethics code and deem she needs Mentoring in this area. She has never done group therapy before but has some academic experience with theories and models, so you believe she needs Guided Practice here. She has done several years of independent practice with individual therapy, and you believe she can effectively be Delegated to for this competency. She worked for a non-profit before and has never utilized billing software, so she will certainly need Instruction before she is able to use the software. You discuss some complex case examples with her, and she does a great job integrating the information that you’ve given her in the examples to think through treatment, considerations, diagnostic issues, and unique ways to support this person, indicating that she is a strong critical thinker, likely allowing you to Empower her to continue to operate skillfully and independently in this area.
So, what’s the end result of this conversation? You essentially now have the outlines of the training plan that you can develop into 30-, 60-, and 90-day goals. You don’t have to worry about her being tossed into a task that is going to bog her down. You don’t have to worry about micromanaging her in an area where she is particularly strong. In effect, you’ve gotten a snapshot of the skill level at the time of the hire and can create a laser-focused plan to help her feel like she is succeeding early and that she is rapidly (and consistently) gaining experience in areas that she will need to master in order to be successful. Employees value clarity, they desire to feel successful, and they appreciate when an organization systematically facilitates this. This best practice does not take a lot of effort, but it does take intentionality – and the payoff can be huge.