As leaders, we often spend lots of time identifying a great candidate, yet we overlook our responsibility to equip them. Finding a great person is only half the battle. An unequipped employee will cost you more time, money, and stress.
Let’s say you’ve hired a new team member — now what?
In this episode, LZ and I are joined by Krisha Buehler, BELAY’s VP of Human Resources. She’ll talk with us about how you can successfully onboard employees so that they consistently and quickly add value to your organization.
Here are some takeaways:
1. Make an extremely detailed training plan.
And we emphasize – extremely detailed.
It’s easy for employees to flounder and fail if we don’t set them up well.
The training plan we use at BELAY lays out a plan for day by day, hour by hour, in a new team member’s first days. Meet in person, if possible. If not, remote is fine. And feel free to use our template to help you get on the right track.
The purpose of developing a plan is to take out the guesswork and make sure every new employee goes through the same, consistent experience when they start with your company.
2. It's critical for new employees to meet the leaders of your organization.
It’s critical for new hires to meet the leaders of your organization as soon as possible. This helps them see your leadership as approachable and allows leaders to communicate the vision and the “why” behind what they’re doing. The more leaders each team member can meet, the more each one will understand the company’s values and vision.
At BELAY, our COO will even take our new team members out to lunch to build this relationship right away.
3. Create a culture of support and availability.
Make yourself available. Don’t create a culture where people feel like a burden for trying to figure out a new job. At BELAY, we prioritize embracing and supporting new employees, and this inclusive attitude is what creates the collaborative culture that we all love.
This is especially important with a remote company. You want new team members to feel like they have somewhere to turn when they have questions – and they will have questions.
Whether it’s someone in HR, a peer, a team leader (or even all three) this helps them feel welcome and secure. No one wants to be the new kid who can’t find the lunchroom on the first day of school.
There’s a lot of time and investment that goes into your new hire to make sure they are trained well and have the resources and people available to feel supported and welcomed.
Give your new employees exactly what they need to succeed from the start!
And let’s be real, training is an ongoing effort. You’re always learning and always training and always developing, and it’s our job, as leaders, to make sure that we are creating an environment and the tools necessary to do so.
This training plan checklist is a replica of the training plan we’ve used at BELAY to hire hundreds of full-time employees during our 10 years in business.