A great person attracts great people and knows how to hold them together.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All employees create a personal curve of achievement. Some get off to a fast start and then falter, whereas others get up to speed at a good pace and still have the resources to build momentum. Employees engage the organization in a virtuous cycle of productivity and personal growth. Getting off to the right start, as opposed to just a fast start, can make the difference.

Sirota Consulting has been conducting employee research on behalf of companies for the past 40 years, and has discovered some surprising facts when it comes to new hires.¹ The good news is that approximately 90 percent of employees are engaged and motivated when they start a new job. But track employee engagement over time, and a different story emerges. New employee engagement levels often drop dramatically—as much as 20 percentage points—during the first six months on the job. Sirota found that just 10 percent of companies are able to successfully maintain engagement levels over the course of the first year. That means that in most companies, much of the positive energy and enthusiasm that employees arrived with on day one has dissipated six months later. In order to help guard against this erosion of engagement during the first year, analytics must play a key role in ensuring that the new hire experience is successful and leads to positive outcomes for the employee and the organization.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Every organization has a unique workplace culture and values. Some companies are more aware of what makes their culture unique, but each workplace has something about it that feels distinct. It might be the passion of employees around a common cause, an intellectual curiosity that’s embedded in everything the organization does, the efficiency by which things are accomplished, or the close bond of employees in the company.

Take a company like Constant Contact where the culture is uniquely open, friendly, and collaborative among employees. People are willing to help one another with almost anything, collaboration is valued, and there’s a belief that life is too short to work with difficult people. In order to maintain these values, hiring becomes a critical enabler of this culture. If people who are hired are difficult to work with, don’t enjoy collaboration, and aren’t very willing to help, the entire culture will break down. As a result, successful onboarding becomes a must as new employees learn what’s important to the company, how to navigate its resources, and how to become a productive member of the team.

Regardless of your unique culture, one of the keys to successful onboarding is to ensure that each new employee understands and is aligned to the mission and values of your organization so he or she can be effective and get things get done within your four walls. Analytics can play a role in ensuring that you onboard effectively and efficiently.

ONBOARDING PROCESS

Once the right candidates have been hired, they need proper onboarding to ensure they are aligned with the primary business goals and the overall mission of the company, as well as your organization’s culture. New hires need to have the best first impression of you as a manager and of your overall organization. Depending on the role and position of your new hire, full onboarding should be accomplished within the first 3 to 12 months, assisting him or her with resources, tools, and clear guidance.

We define talent onboarding as an ongoing talent management process that consists of introducing, training, mentoring, coaching, and integrating a new hire to the core values, business vision, and overall culture of an organization in order to secure new employee loyalty and productivity. And research shows that when organizations have effective onboarding programs, the three-year retention rate of employees jumps by 58 percent.²

The Onboarding, Culture Fit, and Engagement pillar can be used to enhance a new hire’s first impression and create business value from your onboarding activities and efforts. Taking the time to develop a robust onboarding program will enhance employee satisfaction, increase loyalty, and accelerate time to productivity through an acclimation process. Similar to the customer welcome program that some companies use to introduce new customers to their business, first impressions really do make a difference, and new hire onboarding is a key component of the talent management process: This is her introduction to your organization during the period when she is still thinking about the decision she made to join your company, and, if done properly, it can improve ramp-up time.

This requires mastering data intelligence to optimize the mentoring, learning, and reinforcement to drive the satisfaction your new hires need and to help your organization address vital talent management questions, including:

• How can a business improve time to performance?
• What are the key drivers of time to performance and productivity?
• What is the impact of talent onboarding on employee commitment, productivity, and enthusiasm?
• What is the impact of talent onboarding on employee satisfaction?
• What is the impact of talent onboarding on an employee referral program?
• What is an appropriate talent onboarding budget?
• What impact does talent onboarding have on employee turnover?
• What is the impact of talent onboarding on employee loyalty?

With talent retention as a focus, onboarding should be a great experience that provides new hires with all the information they will need for success. Onboarding analytics should help to quickly address the aforementioned questions, generate enthusiasm, and introduce new hires to the materials and resources needed to accelerate and optimize their time to performance, securing overall goodwill, commitment, and loyalty.

STAGES OF ONBOARDING

Over 75 percent of top-performing companies put new hires through a formal onboarding process.³ The process can take many forms—classes, activities with departmental and cross-company colleagues, online and written information, and more—and is experiential. People learn their jobs largely by doing, and they learn the best ways to be effective in a company largely by doing as well. A formal process, moreover, assumes that consistent information spreads through the organization. For this reason, getting current employees engaged in the onboarding process for new hires reinforces your employer brand with existing staff.

During onboarding, you’re still trying to acquire the hearts and minds of your new employees. You’ve worked hard to land a talented employee, and that person is with your organization, but not fully of your organization. Engagement is the goal during onboarding. Fortunately, in the early days, a new employee is immersed in all the reasons he took the job—and good onboarding experience reinforces those reasons.

Monster and Benchmark Partners created a five-step outline for a strong onboarding experience, one that engages the new employee closely with the organization, monitors progress, and helps form the bonds of trust that are the cornerstone of retention. Analytics can be an enabler to building an effective onboarding program on this foundation.

EARLY EMPLOYEE NEEDS

Based on research and working with clients for more than 40 years, Sirota Consulting has found that the key to successful onboarding is making sure your employees are having the right experience at the right time during the different stages of onboarding. Sirota found that employees have four unique needs during the course of their first year.⁴ Figure 7.1 illustrates each need unique to the early tenured employee.

First, new employees need to feel welcomed. New hires want a few basic things. They need information, introductions, and a place to call their own—a desk or workspace with tools and resources. If you don’t meet these needs in the first few days or weeks, new hires often become anxious and feel overlooked.

Second, new hires need to feel they are getting the support and training they need to do their job. If these needs are not being met during the first month on the job, your new hires may start to feel disoriented and overloaded.

Third, new hires need to feel connected to their boss, their team, and their colleagues. This can take time, but if your new hires are not feeling a sense of connection to the company by the three-month mark, they may start to reconsider their decision to join.

Finally, new hires need to feel like they are competent, capable, and growing. Few things are more engaging for today’s employees than a sense of growth and development. If your employees are not starting to experience a sense of personal development, mastery, and growth by the six-month mark, they will likely start to feel frustrated and demoralized.

When these critical needs are met, new employees are not only more engaged, but they are also likely to perform better.

OPEN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK FOR EFFECTIVE ONBOARDING

An effective and consistent onboarding program must be grounded in solid analytics. Let the data inform you as to which approach works best at each onboarding stage and the elements that are critical for your onboarding program. The intelligent use of analytics can also help you understand how each new employee is progressing through your onboarding process as well as predict which aspects of your program predict future employee success. Through the use of our OPEN onboarding analytics principles (orient, provide, engage, and next), you can make sure to measure each step of the onboarding process.

Let’s take a look at each area of the OPEN analytical framework.

TIME TO PRODUCTIVITY AND OTHER OUTCOME MEASURES

Besides measuring the perception and activities of new hires during the onboarding process, you need to analytically tie your onboarding programs to outcomes. In other words, a successful onboarding process should predict, in part, whether a new employee will be successful over the long term with your organization. Outcome measures will be different depending on your organization and the roles for which you are hiring. Additionally, these measures must be tied to critical business outcomes that specific departments or roles are trying to achieve. For example, salespeople have an outcome of sales revenue, engineers may be tied to quality output, and customer service reps may be tied to customer resolution rate. These are some examples of outcome measures to model against onboarding programs for specific roles. Table 7.1 provides a sample of possible outcome measures for different types of roles.

A type of role that’s especially important to tie onboarding to outcome is your sales staff. Refining the onboarding and training process for sales staff may be one of the most difficult challenges onboarding managers face. Although the onboarding process may be relatively short compared to the overall time workers spend with the company, the knowledge, skills, and experience new workers gain during onboarding will impact their professional development in the future.

To help make crafting the onboarding and training process smoother, you need to invest in sales analytics that will enable effective measurement of the success of your onboarding program. You must tie your onboarding program to the metrics that give managers insight into their sales representatives, such as sales conversion rate, prospect connect rate, total talk time, meetings per month, and so on. These are some metrics that can help companies determine whether their current onboarding and sales training generate the results they are looking for when molding workers into star performers.

CREATE AN ONBOARDING PREDICTIVE MODEL

After you have gathered your early employee performance metrics for the business-critical roles in your organization, use a predictive analytics expert (internal or external) to help you create a statistical model that helps explore whether aspects of your onboarding process can predict critical early employee performance outcomes such as those in Table 7.1. Some examples of onboarding process measurement inputs can be found in Table 7.2.

Working with your predictive analytics expert, you can use statistical modeling to see which onboarding combination of activities is most predictive of getting a top performer up to speed. You’re likely to find that it may differ depending on the type of role, the career level of the employee, and the department in which he or she is working. Regardless, armed with this data-driven, predictive model approach, you’ll be able to evolve your onboarding program to make sure it meets the needs of each employee type.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER

Let’s bring to light how analytics can help the onboarding process with a day-in-the-life story of people leveraging analytics to make better decisions when it comes to onboarding new hires.

Imagine the company headquarters of a medical supply company, Health4U, which has become a major medical supply player in just a few years. That kind of rapid growth has been great for shareholders, but has left some shortcomings in the company’s approach to talent development that it has been working to address.

The first character in our story is Adam. He was put into the role of onboarding program manager six months ago due to high turnover that was being seen in the first 90 days.

During that time, Adam has been steadily building and improving the new hire program. It includes a Day 1 Welcome Experience where each new employee is assigned an onboarding buddy for the first six months. Adam has moved away from the standard curriculum that all new hires go through and toward a tailored approached to training both to roles and to experience. This is supported by a virtual community of new hires and a role-specific simulated project or challenge that all new hires go through.

When Adam came into the role, there was really no data on the effectiveness and impact of the former onboarding program. Adam had always believed that you can’t manage what you don’t measure, so, as a first step, he worked to establish the right set of key performance indicators to focus on. These fell into four categories:

1. Onboarding program effectiveness
2. Speed to performance
3. New hire engagement
4. Business performance

He uses the data to monitor progress and also communicate the value and impact of the changes he has been making. These have been positive across the board, but Adam knows there’s opportunity for further improvements.

One of the beneficiaries of Adam’s work is Steve, who has just been hired as a new product manager at Health4U. Steve was recruited from one of Health4U’s competitors—he has high expectations that the culture and environment of Health4U will be a step up from that of his former employer. The onboarding program can make or break that impression.

The morning of the first day includes a highly motivational event about the future of Health4U and how Steve can contribute to it. After going to lunch with his new coworkers, Steve takes a handful of tests that assess his level of knowledge coming into the role.

After each test, he’s able to see how he did. He’s coming into the job with quite a bit of relevant knowledge and experience. Results from the tests are automatically fed to Health4U’s learning management system, which automatically passes him out of some of the required new hire training.

Adam is able to look at pretest scores of new hires by individual and in the aggregate. This is one measure of quality of hire that he passes back to the talent acquisition function.

As Steve goes through his new hire training, he completes periodic evaluations. Adam has it set up so that Steve does not need to complete an evaluation after every single session; rather, he’ll complete one evaluation per week that covers the range of sessions and modalities over that week.

Adam receives automated reports that inform him that there are still improvements to be made in the quality of classroom instruction and in providing better context and examples of how the new hires will be using what they have learned on the job.

He reviews the low instructor scores with the delivery manager and works with the course developers to add more role-based examples to the content.

After 30 days, Steve is asked to complete a New Hire Onboarding Survey, which asks him about his experience with the company and the training he has received thus far. Steve will get similar checkpoints at 60 and 90 days. To ensure that these are deployed consistently and to minimize administrative effort, a simple data feed from the human resources information system is imported into the survey software, which includes:

• The start dates of new employees.
• Their contact information.
• Key demographics, such as job type, department, and tenure in the industry.
• Their manager’s contact information.

Natalie is Steve’s manager. She’s the director of product strategy. And when it comes to onboarding, her primary need is for new hires like Steve to ramp up faster.

An onboarding feedback report is generated for Natalie (and all other managers with new hires going through onboarding).

Natalie is able to compare feedback from Steve and her other new hires to feedback received by other Health4U managers. She sees that her new hires are looking for her to be more involved in the onboarding process. They want more recognition, constructive feedback, and coaching. Before this report, Natalie wasn’t aware of this disconnect, so she immediately sets up recurring weekly meetings with each of the new hires in which they will discuss their progress and set expectations.

When Steve and the other new hires fill out the 60- and 90-day checkpoint surveys, Natalie is already seeing her scores improve.

Adam is able to see the feedback across departments and notes that manager support is a critical need during onboarding throughout much of Health4U. As a result, Adam provides a training session for managers to help them understand the difference they can make. He also institutes regular checkpoints with the managers as a part of the onboarding program.

After Steve has spent three months on the job, he, Natalie, and Steve’s peers complete a 360-degree multirater assessment, providing feedback on the competencies that Steve has demonstrated.

Steve and Natalie receive a report with the 360-degree feedback. It shows that Steve demonstrates great initiative and has useful new ideas, but he could work on collaborating better with others and adapting to change with a more positive attitude. They agree to focus on developing these competencies over the upcoming months.

Adam is able to look across the 360-degree feedback for all new hires. He uses this data for a couple of different purposes:

• Determine common competency deficiencies across the organization that could be addressed as part of the onboarding program curriculum.
• Use manager feedback to inform measures for both speed to competency and quality of hire (which is then fed back to the talent acquisition function).

Adam has established a quarterly process in which he presents an executive report on the effectiveness and outcomes of the onboarding program. The purpose of this is not simply to justify that it’s making a difference. Instead, Adam aims to show that he’s a good steward of the investment by measuring and continually improving results. Additionally, he uses it as an opportunity to discuss areas in which collaboration with the business units would substantially improve results.

The accountability that he has demonstrated and his focus on aligning with business needs has led to Adam’s having a great partnership with leadership in the talent function and the business.

In our example, each of our three people at Health4U has benefited from the use of onboarding analytics. Adam has a scalable approach to tracking important metrics, gathering feedback from new hires, and reporting for himself, managers, and executives. The learning helps enable him to improve and optimize the onboarding program on an ongoing basis. Steve thought it was great to be able to skip training that he was already comfortable with. The 360-degree feedback will be instrumental in his success in his role. Natalie was able to become a better manager by receiving timely information on the perceptions of new hires. By seeing how she compared to other managers in the company, she was able to prioritize the areas she needed to focus on to improve the experience of new hires.