How Hiring Managers Can Make — or Break — Your Onboarding process
Because onboarding is so important, Dr. Bauer urges companies to consider the roles their hiring managers play in orienting new employees. “If you think about it, the hiring manager is the person who sets the stage for success or failure. He or she sets the culture and climate within the unit, assigns tasks, sets the tone for communication and cooperation, etc.,” Dr. Bauer says. “If they are doing their job well, they are paying attention to the special needs of new employees. If they are not, they can expect too much and provide too little support early on. While new employees may overcome this, it will take them longer and they may miss key pieces of information about the context that are never truly addressed.”
Unfortunately, a lot of companies fail to leverage hiring managers to create strong onboarding processes. According to Dr. Bauer, research shows that one of the most common failures is poor follow up. “I encounter a lot of individuals who see new employee onboarding as concluding after the first week or month. If you believe this is the case, it wouldn’t make sense to follow-up with them because they are all set,” she says. “However, research shows that this clearly isn’t the case and that creates a huge opportunity for an organization to create a competitive advantage by doing it better than those around them.”
Similarly, some companies don’t even make onboarding a valuable part of the hiring manager’s job. Instead, these organizations use the “pile on” method”: they just pile onboarding on top of all the hiring manager’s other duties. “If we are to see truly transformative changes in how hiring managers help new employees, organizations are going to have to make [onboarding] a major priority,” Dr. Bauer explains. “A few minutes or hours spent early on when a new employee starts pays great dividends down the road. Proactive organizations encourage managers to invest this time and even make it part of their performance evaluations to do it well.”
Dr. Bauer warns that companies who do not take the proper steps to create hiring-manager-driven onboarding processes may end up with “haphazard practices” and uneven results.
So then — what should companies and their hiring managers do, exactly, to create better onboarding experiences for new hires?
The 4 C’s of Onboarding
Drawing from over 20 years of research that she and many others have conducted in the areas of onboarding and new hire success, Dr. Bauer has concluded that companies must pay attention to what she calls the “4 C’s on Onboarding Success.” The “C’s” are:
- Clarification: The onboarding process should help a new employee understand their job and the internal workings of the company as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
- Compliance: The onboarding process should help employees grasp the basic organizational requirements and routines.
- Culture: Each company has its own unique employee culture, and the onboarding process should help new hires learn about this culture and understand how to work within it.
- Connection: New hires need to create relationships within the company and learn about key information pathways between people, mechanisms, databases, and so on. The onboarding process should introduce new hires to these important people and pathways.
“When summarizing thousands of new employees using a statistical technique called meta-analysis, we found that these were the key drivers of important outcomes like higher self-confidence, feelings of acceptance by the group, role clarity, and performance,” Dr. Bauer says of the “4 C’s.” Organizations need to make sure that their hiring managers serve as “the key linking pin” that unites the “4 C’s” into one smooth, cohesive onboarding process.
Are You Supporting New Hires or Undermining Them?
Again, this seems like an obvious statement: hiring managers should support new hires, not undermine them. The problem is, many hiring managers don’t realize when they’re undermining new employees. “I’ve seen and heard managers say, ‘I don’t want to see this employee until she/he is fully trained.’ That isn’t meant to be personal but it is undermining the value the employee brings on day one as someone who will be a contributing member of the team,” Dr. Bauer says.
The difference between supporting and undermining new employees is a matter of trust and confidence. New hires should feel valuable and be given the chance to contribute from day one, even as they are being trained. “I’m not saying you should hand over the most high-profile projects to this new person, but putting them in a corner until they are useful is not helpful either,” Dr. Bauer says.
Measuring Hiring Manager Performance
Earlier, I mentioned what Dr. Bauer calls the “pile-on” method, where organizations simply tack onboarding onto a hiring manager’s duties as a kind of afterthought. One key to good onboarding, as Dr. Bauer notes above, is making the onboarding process a critical and important part of the hiring manager’s role. The most successful organizations build onboarding responsibilities directly into the hiring manager’s performance metrics.
But how exactly can companies measure the hiring manager’s onboarding performance? For starters, organizations can simply ask: “They can ask new employees whether the manager did key things, shared key information, and ask them to give feedback about how well the manager did,” Dr. Bauer explains. “This is really going straight to the source.”
However, Dr. Bauer does not recommend using feedback from new hires to immediately judge hiring managers. Instead, organizations can use this valuable information to ensure that hiring managers are onboarding new employees properly. “In other words, ask employees if their manager has met with them to set expectations within the first week. If not, send the manager a quick note suggesting they do that sooner rather than later,” Dr. Bauer says.
For more in-depth information about Dr. Bauer’s insights into the role of the hiring manager in onboarding, see the full white paper.