Onboarding Is Not Training

Onboarding is not training. I believe that onboarding new employees the right way will save you time and money and increase retention. I began helping companies create onboarding processes for a few years now. Be honest with you, it's kind of a hard sell to business owners like you. For most of them, they feel like, well, they're already doing that, but that can't be farther from the truth.

Too often we confuse onboarding with training. So you might ask, why do we have to actually onboard somebody? And I'd say that's a good question. Onboarding is a slow and methodical process that helps you determine if you've really hired the right person at the same time. It's slow and methodical to ensure that the person you hired knows they're in the right place.

I like to create a 90 day onboarding process where you schedule a series of 5 to 10 minute check ins. These check ins are for a specific reason, and we'll talk about that in a second. Early on in the process, let's say the first week, you may schedule a check in every day. Then as you go a little bit farther out, you may go once a week for the first month and then beyond 30 days, you'll want to schedule a frequency of about every two weeks.

Like I said earlier, these check ins are 5 to 10 minutes at most, and they're scheduled for specific reason in addition to whatever you want to teach the person or orient the employee to. You want to make sure that you create a two way street where you can ask them questions, see if they need any guidance or help with anything, and give them the opportunity to ask questions and maybe even give you ideas that they've thought of since they've gotten there.

One of the things that we should always consider is if we find out that the person is not the right person for the company or they're not the right person for the job, we need to cut them loose, whether it's day three or day 30 or day 50. As soon as we know they're not right for the company or for their job.

We have to terminate them. So as you create your onboarding process, think of this goal. Create it so the new employee knows they're supported and they feel like you want them to win. And as I always say, as you grow, your company grows.  Keep growing!