How to Successfully Onboard New Employees
Hiring and training is an expensive endeavor. Just think about the time and costs that are involved with developing a highly-qualified employee. It starts with your company’s recruiting efforts, then you need to screen through an endless list of applicants, then you spend time interviewing multiple candidates, then your company completes all of the required administrative steps to makes the offer and add the employee to your employment records, and then you incur training expenses to get them up to speed on the job. And you can only hope that your new employee will develop into a qualified long-term employee for your department.
Onboarding an employee is like fishing. It starts by fishing in the right places and you need to use good methods to attract the right kinds of fish. You see there are many types of fish in the lake however, most are not the type of fish that you are looking to catch today so you avoid hooking them. But then finally you hook the perfect fish!!! I mean this fish is exactly what you’ve been looking for months! So you tactfully reel the fish in and you get your fishing net out and you net the fish and unhook it from your fishing line. You take some pictures and admire this fish for a few minutes but then, when you go to put it in the bucket, it slips out of your hands and back into the lake. UGH!
Losing a good candidate during the onboarding process is like losing the perfect fish when trying to put it in the bucket. It can be a little frustrating! So to avoid this scenario from happening to you, have a solid onboarding strategy for all of your new hires.
The Three Keys of Effective Onboarding:
Effectively on-boarding new employees is vitally important for your company’s success and you can’t just leave it up to chance. You really need to have a documented on-boarding strategy and your on-boarding plan needs to encompass three main aspects:
First, provide your new hire with some information about your company. You see your new hire doesn’t even know where the bathrooms or breakrooms are located and they certainly have no idea how your company operates. Providing them with a broader perspective of your plant and your company will go a long way with employee retention. It can take an employee years to learn the ropes and to get comfortable working in your factory, but you can shorten this curve from years, to weeks.
Second, provide the new hire with a cultural acclimation. If you are hoping that your new employee will be jazzed about their new job, then you need to give them something to be jazzed about. Expose them to some cultural experiences and you can do this by including relationship building as part of your onboarding strategy.
Third, you need to provide your new hires with solid job specific training and it is important to do this in very structured way. If a new employee starts working for your company, gets immediately walked to a production line and just handed off to a random employee without a structured training plan, the odds of retention are very low. Successfully onboarding new employees is within your control, but you need a formal onboarding strategy.
T4T's Onboarding Best Practices:
Here are the best practices when onboarding a new employee:
First, provide an initial tour, introductions and have a shadowing schedule for new employees. This will provide them with a nice overview of you company and the culture as they get to meet your team members one-on-one.
Second, for job-specific training, have a documented training plan with training objectives and signoffs for every task. Have your SME train your new employees by explaining each task in detail, and then have the new employee explain it back, then have your SME demonstrate the tasks while explaining them, then have the new employee talk through the task while they perform it.
Third, you as the supervisor should check in regularly with all of your new hires to see if they have any questions. Being accessible will really help the new employee feel welcome.
Successfully onboarding new employees doesn’t need to be a large-scale company initiative. It is actually something every supervisor can do on their own. Treat the new employees like part your company family and they will be with you for years to come. When you implement an onboarding strategy, you will immediately see shorter learning curves, improved retention rates, lower defects and higher productivity!
Remember - don’t train employees until they get it right, train them until they can’t get it wrong! Tools for the Trenches on-line training is the most effective training available for Manufacturing Supervisors. Check it out and you will agree!
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