Examining Your On-Boarding

How long does it take new hires to start making a contribution to your bottom line? Days, weeks, months (years??!!)….

This article is for business owners/managers who are interested in ensuring they get good value for money from new employees. Find out how your IT teams (and you) can step up their respective games.

What’s on-boarding?

On boarding is the process of getting your employee set up and ready to start doing their job. As a company owner/manager, you have to put trust in your employess, particularly those in charge of getting your new employess up to speed and making a contribution to the bottom line. 

But when was the last time you reviewed this process? Last month, last year, last never?

That’s not my job…

I hear this a lot

That’s not my job. That’s why I pay someone else to do it. 

That’s all well and good, but the business won’t run itself and sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is needed.

Case in point…

I recently worked with a business to overhaul their development processes. The previous Dev Manager had simply lost the will to care (or never had it). Their on boarding procedure involved sitting new hires down at a desk, being asked to install their dev machine, then configuring the web environment. 

This was typically a 2-3 day process. Read that again.

2-3 DAYS!!

FOR. EVERY. NEW. PERSON 

What could have been done differently?

  • Set up their PC before they arrive. You don’t really gain anything and an experienced staff member can do that amongst their other jobs. 
  • Have a guide to getting their environment running, or BETTER have a unified development environment.

Don’t waste the first 2-3 days of a new hire, they should be making a meaningful contribution from day dot. 

How do I fix it?

It’s important to examine your on-boarding regularly. Times/technologies change and so should your procedures and processes. How do you get this information?

  1. Get a procedure in place – Some companies don’t have a procedure in place to start with. If you don’t have one, get one. JIRA can take care of this for you, and is an excellent tool for managing your projects.
  2. Review and Assess – Once you have a procedure in place, you can start to review it as necessary. This could be done with peer reviews.
  3. Review Performance – This is the most important step. A new employee needs to make a measurable contribution to your company, and you need a mechanism in place for this. Once again JIRA is invaluable for this. 

The most important concept is, measure the performance of the employee in a meaningful, measurable way. 

Don’t assume your on-boarding is working.

Sit down with your managers and talk to them. Ask them questions like:

  • What is the on boarding process for new starters in your department?
  • Talk me through their first 3 days? What are their jobs/responsibilities?
  • How are they mentored/trained in the first few weeks?
  • When do they start contributing? 

If they can’t answer any of these questions, do you really think you (and the new starter) have a good on-boarding process?

Review, repeat…

Don’t assume your on-boarding is working. I’ll say that time and again. Review your processes and how they’re measured on a quarterly basis.