Properly introducing new employees to your company is a
complex, yet critical process to ensure new hires become productive members of
your team. The concept of employee on-boarding has been around for quite some
time. However, that does not make the process any less painful or challenging.
Properly introducing a new employee to a company is equally important to the
success of both the employee and the company. When you are training a new
employee you want to:
- Ensure the new employee feels welcome and comfortable in
their new workplace
- Minimize the amount of time before the new employee becomes
a fully productive member of the company
A complete on-boarding program should include information
about:
- Company and department overviews and functions
- Job expectations and goals
- Company policies and procedures
- Administrative housekeeping and paperwork
While these goals may not see so challenging at first, these
goals are commonly bogged down by countless amounts of paperwork and confused
presentations of complicated, everyday business processes. Even though
companies have the best intentions of getting their new employees started on
the first day, most new employees end up spending their first day, and
sometimes their first week, filling out countless amounts of paperwork. By
ensuring all performance expectations and business processes are clearly and
fully communicated, employers can greatly minimize the learning curve.
According to the IDC, US and UK employees cost businesses
around $37 billion every year because they do not fully understand their jobs.
The IDC quantified the astonishing financial losses of businesses that occur as
a result of employees misunderstanding or misinterpreting company policies,
business processes, job functions, or a combination of the three in their white
paper, “$37 billion: Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding.”
Completing an effective on-boarding process can not only take weeks off the
learning curve and ensure your new employee is a fully productive member of
your team in no time, but it can also reduce these costs associated with
learning on the fly and future misunderstandings!
By documenting your business processes with Visual Process
Management (VPM), you will already be on your way to more quickly trained
employees. Here are the most basic steps to ensure a better experience for new
employees:
Step 1: Clearly define the organization’s structure.
Provide your new employee with an organization chart that
explains the company structure and the team’s structure within the company.
Check out these tips to make better org charts.
Step 2: Outline the responsibilities of your new employee
and the team.
Create mind maps that describe the high level
responsibilities of the team as well as the specific team members. Most
importantly, create a mind map that explains all the responsibilities of your
new employee. This provides an easy reference for who does what. I recommend
using checking out the job maps created in VPM best practices.
Step 3: Document business processes your employee and team
are expected to execute.
Describe each team member’s workflows using flowcharts. Each
flowchart should clearly show who is responsible for this process and should
provide just enough information such that if a the employee responsible for
this process were absent, another employee could step in. If you have gone
through the VPM process, this should sound familiar!
Step 4: Ensure all documentation is located in an easy to
find location.
Store all of these visuals and documents in a centralized
location so that any team member (or you) can easily access the information at
any time. The location could be your SharePoint site, your network drive, a
team website, or any other centralized sharing application of your choice.
Visuals certainly help in all the above steps.
What challenges have you found as a new employee or as manager training new
employees? Please share in the comments below!
