Your Onboarding Program is thorough, but is it effective?

So, you’ve got a new person joining your team and you want to ensure they are set up for success. You’ve made a thorough list of all the things that they should get familiar with including your website, your intranet and your policies and procedures. You’ve given them access to the shared folder and suggested the key subfolders that they should spend some time in. You’ve added their names to the appropriate distribution lists and invited them to the weekly team meeting. You've also set up one on ones with yourself as well as the key people they will be working with throughout the organization. What’s missing?

This is a passive onboarding program. The assumption is that the new hire will complete all the items in the spreadsheet and if they have questions, they will ask you. What’s missing is what I call a ‘check for learning’.

What does that mean? Well, for example, asking someone to ‘get familiar’ with your Branding Guidelines in the shared folder is not the same as asking someone to give you a summary of what they have learned. Why? Because people learn differently when they have a purpose. It’s the difference between skimming a page of information vs actively highlighting the key points.

To be effective, your onboarding program needs to include a weekly activity that gives the new employee an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned. It could be a 30 min check-in at the end of the week where they highlight their three major learnings or a quick presentation on one key topic that will be important to their role.

Besides confirming that your new hire is actually completing their onboarding tasks, it also gives the two of you an opportunity to get to know each other and provides a forum for them to raise questions and share observations.

I’d love to hear more about your onboarding successes (or failures, because sometimes that’s the best way to learn!). What are you doing now to ensure the success of your new hires?