Phases of sales cycle for HR

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onboarding is kind of a weird word not a lot of companies have onboarding programs how many of you actually have an onboarding program in your organization so a few of you right okay well regardless of whether you think you do or not every organization has an onboarding program because every organization that has new employees coming in has those new employees that are having new experiences they're learning new things they're meeting new people the question that you need to ask yourself is whether the experiences that they're having and the things that they're learning are helping to engage them with your organization or not so that's really what onboarding is onboarding is a strategic system designed to decrease staff turnover by increasing staff engagement and because it's such a weird topic everybody always asked me like Emily how did you get into onboarding and the reason why I got into it is because my first job when I was on board on to my first job it was a bit of a train wreck I started out I went to the University of Pittsburgh don't kill me and when I graduated I came back to my hometown Charleston and I started with the marketing agency and it was a very small firm and we had a problem we had a problem because we had at this time this year 2000 we had a fax machine and it was a PR firm and we had about 300 media phone numbers in that in that fax machine it was regional statewide we were moving our office from one location to a new location down the street the problem was at the times is when fax machines were really big if you unplugged the fax machine for more than three minutes the database was wiped out so this was kind of a pain right with this big question so when I looked out the window and saw the CEO of my company running down the street with the fax machine I probably should have known at that time that this organization didn't have the resources to onboard me appropriately and it was right but I really got into onboarding when I worked at Dixon Hughes Goodman we have Fred Dillon over here from Dixon Hughes Fred I promise I'm not going to tell any stories on you I've already I've already made him that promise but I got really in the onboarding when I saw firsthand the effect that retention could have on a business achieving its ability to achieve its strategic objectives so I was working at Dixon Hughes this is circa 2008 2009 and I worked with the recruiting team really hard to find new hires so we hired 23 new grads that year and these are rockstar hires we spent a lot of time on campuses around the state trying to get those new hires the best new hires to come and work for us how many do you think we're still at the firm in 2011 10 5 6 so out of 23 people that we hired only 6 were there 3 years later so this is you know how is a business supposed to achieve its objectives if you if you're constantly in that cycle of hire lose hire right and Dixon uses you know a fantastic place to work a lot of the people who left left for very legitimate reasons we actually had one girl who got recruited to be a model in New York City so I mean I don't blame her I would have gone to so there are some legitimate reasons why people leave but it still doesn't change the fact that when you spend a lot of time trying to get people to come on board you know you want to keep them it's really really important if you want to keep your new hires that you keep the promises that you made to them in the recruiting cycle and I want to tell you a story real quickly about my friend Robbie here who you can sitt there's a little bit about his resume up there by all accounts and purposes he is a fantastic recruit and he was recruited by a lot of organizations he ended up settling in Washington DC at the headquarters of a nonprofit that if I said it right now you would all know who I'm talking about but I'm not going to say it because his onboarding experience sucked and the reason why is because he showed up all excited because they had made him all sorts of promises about how great it was going to be to work there and when he showed up his boss was like I'm so glad that you're here I'm going to LA for a conference I'll be back next Wednesday so he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing she didn't introduce him to any of his colleagues who when they saw him walking down the hall the next day didn't know whether to introduce themselves to him or likes throw them out of the building right so you have all of this excitement that he had walking into his first day and she just blew it the carrot of having a job isn't enough most employees the good ones that you want to keep around actually need to have some sort of purpose for the work that they're doing right and in order to give them that purpose you have to be around you have to be around to talk to them and train them you have to be there on their first week on the job when you get new hires that are cut any hire really but new hires in particular that are coming in new organization you want to know how to motivate them immediately and he's got a great little formula here and it's map and map stands for mastery they want to be technically good at what they're doing they want to have autonomy want to leave them alone enough so that they can actually feel like they're doing it on their own and and this P this P times up this purpose right they want to be connected to something larger they want to feel like what they're doing matters and I think that where companies go wrong is that you spend a lot of time developing your strategies developing your strategic plans and then none of that trickles down to the new hire so if they're thirsting for context right it's really hard to have somebody do a great job if they don't know why they're doing it in the first place so that's one of the most important things that you can do to live up to the promise that you made in the recruiting cycle is actually tell your employees the purpose of what they're doing connect their job to the bigger picture that's how you get them engaged it's like this balloon right so if you pump your recruits full of air like you are going to love it here you're gonna have so much autonomy to do what you want to do your coworkers are so great right so they come into the workforce and they're like yeah this place is awesome now do you think it's one thing that kind of pops that balloon do you think like something happens and they're like oh no it's not it's the gradual that's when you lose them it's when they can't get a meeting with their boss it's when you don't show up and then you lose them they become totally disengaged right and then you have the turnover that I talked about earlier so don't take a sales approach to your recruiting process the best thing to do when you're trying to get new hires to come on board is to talk about the kind of company that you want to be but distinguish it from the company that you are so you say we're at our best when we work together we're at our best when we build and collect on time we are at our best when we see the best in each other right don't just tell them that that you are this fantastic company when they walk in because they're going to have some unfettered reality hitting them pretty soon there is a period of time when every new employee don't care if their lateral or entry level when they come in they are consuming resources they're consuming your staff time that it takes to train them they're consuming coffee and your coffee pot real estate oh they're consuming when do they get to the point where they break even and start contributing as much value to your organization as they're consuming from it when do you think that is a six month it's about six point two months okay so keep that in mind when statistically when employees decide whether they want to leave or stay with an organization is somewhere within the first month to first six months so if they're not breaking even till six months and they're figuring out if they want to stay or not in six months why do orientation programs last one week get dialog from them getting dialogue from them also means that you have to give dialog to them and this is my grandfather and my grandmother on their wedding day in 1950 and one of my grandfather's favorite things was no news is good news he was been through two wars he was a pretty tough guy and that no news is good news but that's just not true for new employees any new employees doesn't just mean Gen Y all of them need feedback and in that same study of 584 employed Americans 58 percent hadn't received any kind of useful feedback from their supervisors in six months sigh so for onboarding programs you need to sit down with your new employees within the first week and schedule at least quarterly sessions with them so that you have that scheduled feedback and keep those appointments keep those appointments a lot of lot of managers don't and the last thing is you can get all of that right you can have some amazing career plans you can have a first-rate onboarding program but what will great employees still demand for people people what will great employees still demand managers great employees demand great managers you can have all of your onboarding ducks in a row you can have a fantastic program but if they don't have good managers they'll still leave no amount of great onboarding will get them to stay right so it's the whole saying of people join companies and leave people so true so how do you fix that the best way to do that is in my opinion to hold all of your managers accountable for how their employees answer questions in the Gallup q12 so Gallup actually did spent seven years researching employee engagement and figured that these are the 12 questions that would measure that hold your managers accountable for how the people underneath them answer this question this is how you manage managers so I mentioned that I was running down the the street of this this my first boss and I had an onboarding program that that just wasn't it was a sink or swim that was how I defined the onboarding program but I stayed with that company for about seven years seven years so the onboarding was terrible they would admit it but I stayed with the company anyway why do you think that is I had a great manager so just as if you have a fantastic onboarding program but your management isn't there the flipside is also true you can have a weak onboarding program and still keep your employees if your managers are great so my manager gave me a ton he gave me so much he taught me everything that I needed to know as a new grad so I was able to give something back to him he always wanted to be an author and as a result of everything that I learned from him I put it in a book we put it in a book together and I was able to publish this book with him so he gave me as much as I gave him and it was just it's really beautiful how it worked out in that book we have a chapter does anybody know who this is Gene Kelly Gene Kelly in this book we have a chapter called embrace your inner Gene Kelly where we talk about how Gene Kelly was really like obsessed with little things like he's the crease of his pants the top the top hat the look into the camera the beautiful cane sort of thing and the little things added up to make him look like a great dancer so one of the chapters in the book is how you can use little things that work like handwritten notes and things like that to build up of great reputation and that just yesterday I got a note from gene Kelly's Widow saying I want to thank you for keeping Gene Kelly spirit alive and it's just what I think about how amazing it is that skip was able to that my mentor was able to to give to spend time with me and teach me and be a mentor and that I was able to give something back to him that has now grown to where gene Kelly's Widow wrote to us it's just amazing and I think I am not telling you guys anything that you don't know but my final slide is my favorite tweet from Tom Peters and it said you take care of the people that people take care of the service the service takes care of the profit reinvest and bingo this is how you have a high-performing culture thank you