How Reimagining Your Onboarding Process Will Revolutionize Your Team

If you want to shape your new hire into the kind of person that truly cares about your business, engages with their work, and serves your customers with the right mindset, it is crucial that you set them up for success within the first couple of weeks of your new hire’s employment. This blog article will share the method we use at Daringly Great Consulting to thoroughly onboard employees in a way that gets them to care about and understand what it is we do. This technique is helpful whether you’re considering your first hire or if you’ve hired before but want to learn how to implement onboarding best practices. If you fall into either of the above categories, you may also be interested in our FREE new employee onboarding checklist.

We’ve broken down how you can implement this new hire orientation method into three parts. At Daringly Great, we spread these across a couple of weeks while fitting training in-between. Depending on your situation, you may find a different timeline works better! While this should be done live, virtual onboardings work too. The goal is for this experience to be interactive, engaging, and not rushed! Set aside enough time to do this properly now, and your efforts will pay off in the future.

“People ask me, ‘What if you spend all this time and money on training and someone leaves?’ I ask them, ‘What if we don’t spend the time and money, and they stay?’” - Thomas Crosby, CEO, Pals Sudden Service

Part 1: General Company Overview and Administrative Work

You may be accustomed to spending the first part of onboarding dealing with paperwork, brief introductions, and a quick explanation of what the company does. This blog article won’t get into paperwork details, but we will introduce you to a better way to explain your business. Visuals like diagrams, timelines and hierarchies are useful throughout the whole process- we recommend large sheets of paper and sticky notes or whiteboards. Explain what your vision, mission, values, and objectives are. The employee should have an understanding of why they’re important, how the company plans to achieve them, and how they themselves can help exemplify these. You may want to map out a timeline of your goals that explains what’s happening today and what they can expect in the future. This can be broken up into quarters or by year.

This is also the time where you may want to introduce them to your workplace procedures. Do you have regular meetings? What happens in these meetings? Do you operate using a certain methodology (like scrum)? Familiarize them with the platforms your company uses to collaborate or manage tasks.

An important part of this orientation experience is for them to understand why their work is meaningful. This will give them purpose and help them visualize their role in the big picture.

“In addition to teaching new hires about the mission, vision, values and culture of the organization, proper onboarding ensures that new employees fully understand their roles and how they relate to the organization’s big picture operations,” said Hyatt. “New employees learn what’s expected, how to deliver, and how and when they will be evaluated.” Amber Hyatt, director of product marketing at SilkRoad

Part 2: Business Ascension Model and Digital Marketing Funnel

This is the part of the new employee orientation where you introduce how you bring in new customers and how you serve them. Visuals are essential here- this section can get complicated! Explain what the funnel and business ascension models are (if they’re unfamiliar with them) as well as what your assets are and how they fit into it. Even if they don’t directly work with some assets, familiarizing them with these is valuable as it helps them to understand the big picture. If your company utilizes the funnel in a unique way, share this with them as well.

Throughout this process, it can be really helpful for new employees to relate these concepts back to experiences from their own lives. Ask them questions about how they’ve participated in a marketing funnel in real life, using specific experiences to help make these concepts more concrete. They probably had no idea they WERE in a funnel in the first place. Think about places like Starbucks, Hulu, or even Sephora. I like to start with something they bought in the last week and walk them through the customer acquisition and retention process that was happening without them even being aware of it. This can also be a fun way to get familiar with your new co-worker!

Guide them through your customer lifecycle, showing them what each state of acquisition, fulfillment, and retention look like for your company. Share a general overview of the important activities in each category, and touch on the areas that their role is involved with. This may be a good time to introduce your new employee to your customer persona(s).

Part 3: Going Forward

Remind your team member of your core values and how your company implements these. Ask them what their interpretation of these values are. Carrying out their work with the right mindset from the beginning is a large part of initiating their employment on the right foot! This may also help them to relate their own goals and values with those of the company and strengthen their commitment to these values.

If you have time, reviewing what they learned the day before is worth it. It reinforces the importance of these onboarding topics and helps them to recall these later on.

Why Is This Onboarding Method Worth My Time?

Onboarding a new employee with this method can feel lengthy. It’s not as simple as giving them a handbook, their email login information, and a list of tasks. Trust us when we say that the benefits of using this technique with your next hire will far outweigh the cost. This may require you to change your mindset about the hiring process. This isn’t just a period where you tell new hires how to do their work- your employees are investments who will help you build your business, and an effective onboarding experience is imperative to aligning the trajectory of their goals with those of the business.

“Here’s what it is that I think we do differently, or what we emphasize more: in a lot of companies, it seems like if there are online forms to check off and documents that get passed around from HR to the hiring manager to the new employee, they think onboarding has been accomplished. While getting those kinds of logistical things automated can help you get your new employee up to speed and productive more quickly, it won’t necessarily help you with retention.

If you want them to stay, if you want them to become engaged, you need to make sure you do the “feeling” part of the process, and you do that by showing them how they will make a difference, giving them examples of how their fellow employees make a difference, making them feel welcome as with our Sponsor a New Hire program. It’s those kinds of things that lead to not just better retention, but a more inspired workforce.” Cheryl Hughey, Southwest’s Director of Onboarding

By being clear and detailed about what your business is about, your new hire’s role, and your expectations for them from the beginning, your employees will be excited about how they can contribute to the business as it grows. Taking the time to slow down and set your employee off on the right foot is a critical step in reaping these onboarding benefits, allowing you to build a team that rockets your business to success.

Click here to instantly download our FREE New Employee Onboarding Guide.

Inside, you’ll find expert tips on onboarding best practices as well a checklist to help you prepare for your next new hire!

Do you have any questions about what makes up a successful and thorough onboarding process? Do you have any pro-tips about what has worked for you?

1. Comment below and let us know your thoughts- we’d love to hear them!
2. Click the share button below and send it to two biz besties that you know would also love this post.