Your Competitive Advantage 5: Retain 40% More Talent - Onboarding and Training

Your competitive advantages are the factors that allow you to produce goods or services better or more cheaply than your rivals enabling you to generate more sales or superior margins compared to them. 

Your onboarding and training practices is one of these factors.  If your team is poorly onboarded and trained 40% will leave in the first year and 60% will perform below their capabilities causing significant profit seepage. This means that your profitability and business resilience is compromised so planning these factors beats improvising them hands down. 

Your onboarding strategy will help new hires adapt to their new functional and social responsibilities and the training process will guide them to learn the skills and idiosyncrasies needed to meet the expectations of their new position and a key element of both is positioning them so they can find out what they need to know when they need to know it. 

Onboarding is commonly overlooked and undervalued to the detriment of the new hire and the business.   So here are 7 steps to help you along. 

Steps 1 – 3 are Preboarding:
1. Creating a positive Welcome experience. 
2. Providing an Employment Contract prior to a new hire’s commencement date allowing reasonable time for them to seek professional advice.  This is best practice and a legal requirement. 
3. Having all relevant policies and procedures ready to discuss on the new hire’s first day, including a document detailing the company onboarding and training processes. 

Steps 4 – 6 are Active Onboarding: 
4. Organising introductions to relevant strongly associated co-workers and nominating a ‘buddy’. 5. Prioritising to meet with the new hire to take them through their job descriptions, key performance indicators, channels of reporting and the prepared policies and procedures.  6. Being tolerant of a new hire’s potential physical or mental malaise during their induction remembering that change can be stressful. 

Step 7 is post-Onboarding:
7. Conducting a 3-month performance appraisal. 

The onboarding process occurs over a minimum period of 3 months.  Every new hire needs time to adjust and adapt to change so patience is critical and the key to capatalising on the investment you have already made in them. 

Follow these steps and you will be sure to improve your retention rates and accelerate the performance and productivity of new hires giving you the competitive advantage your business needs.  Remember we all seek a sense of belonging, value, and contribution.