A simple and proven onboarding system for your employees

Each manager is responsible for onboarding new employees. He brought out one, two, three… How many are possible?

It’s good if you work in a large company, and the top management has already taken care of this a long time ago and built a system for you, but what if not? I share my experience in creating an induction system.

First, a little introductory information: international logistics and customs clearance, outgoing calls, closing deals at the negotiating table or over the phone.

How to grow an expert from a specialist without relevant experience? Not easy, given the complexity of the product and the specifics of the field.

Folders on Google Drive, dozens of documents with regulations, standards and internal documentation – all this is very convenient until there are, say, 70 files. After pioneering Google Drive, it became clear that it was not suitable for our task.

I will publish templates for all documents in cartwhere I created this reading for you

You can structure the material in any convenient format. In our department, each block consists of a video lesson with theory, a text reflection of the main details, and a test at the end.

Show the experience of your colleagues: ask an employee in the planned position exactly how he acts in a particular process, how comfortable he is and how he got to this point. Illustrative examples will serve as a kind of template, the use of which will help reduce the mistakes of new guys to a minimum.

All that remains is to check the clarity of the material and the use of the given tools.

An effective principle for checking the completeness of teaching materials is to put yourself in the place of the learner and put yourself through the process for which the material was written. If you manage to reach the final result, everything is fine.

If the “result” is slightly different from what is usual, I do not recommend trying to improve it to perfection, since almost every recruit will have his own questions, and they do not always overlap with each other. It’s good if you have to induct several people at once. This way, the process of editing and finalizing your materials will be significantly faster.

I am a supporter of the interactive learning format; dry theory, in my opinion, is rarely effective.

Therefore, managers who come to our sales department are susceptible to a combination of the cyclic repetition method and the Shewhart-Deming cycle (PDCA). Each day of adaptation begins with a kind of lecture, at the end of which I answer the guys’ questions, sometimes I additionally provide video materials, after which I let them go “into battle,” and after lunch we summarize the results and discuss mistakes.

It will be effective if you can at least loosely link each new block of theory to the previous one, so that you can start presenting the material with questions from the previous days, they will perfectly consolidate the material. It will also be important to have several tests, including practical ones.

For example, at the end of the test week, my manager performs three tests: for understanding the product, for understanding the regulations for working with CRM, and for creating commercial offers to clients (for us this requires some skills)

The aforementioned PDCA stands for Plan Do Act Check. It’s cool, if you’re hearing about it for the first time, the implementation results will pleasantly surprise you. The point is to identify a plan of action, take it, look at the intermediate result and make adjustments, “sharpening the saw.”

Implementing this method into your onboarding system is easy. Its use looks something like this: at intermediate sections based on the results, we find shortcomings, give comments on how to eliminate them, and at the next meeting we check that the comments were taken into account.

So, summary

We compiled a workday map for the position for which we are hiring an employee, prepared methodological materials for each business process in which a potential candidate will participate, divided it all into blocks, organized it in Google Classroom and compiled a Gantt chart for the adaptation period.

I don’t claim to be the truth, but at least in my product and department the system is bearing fruit. Thanks to her, it was possible to reduce the period of initial adaptation by half: from two weeks to a week, and this is for employees without experience in the field.

I'm sure you will do no worse. I will be glad to discuss any questions on this topic in the comments or my cartwhere I write about team building, sales management and building business processes.