Is your onboarding process more like waterboarding?

The idea for this video came from a conversation with a client. While I was talking to my client, I was asking “During your onboarding process didn’t they show you which tools they wanted you to use for this?” My client kind of snorted and said “Onboarding? My experience was more like waterboarding.”

For those of you not familiar with the term, waterboarding is a form of torture. You don’t want your onboarding to be torturous, so let’s talk about how to make it better.

What is onboarding? Onboarding is your process of orientation for your new employees. It’s bringing them up to speed on company policies, procedures, reporting, product knowledge – anything they need to be a success. This training a really key thing that’s happening. You’ve spent a lot of money to hire a new person so you want to make sure that they’re going to be able to do the job.

So how do we make onboarding easy?

First off make sure there’s somebody in your organization who is responsible overall for the general onboarding -for bringing them on board, having them learn about the company, having them learn about benefit – all those basic things you need to know. Things like where the bathroom is, hours of work, how they get paid, who they talk to about human resources issues, etc/

You also want a second person (may not be the same person) responsible for specific job orientation and training. Things like how do they do their job, how do they build their skills for the job, what kind of training library do you have, or other courses do you have that they can access to get better at what they’re doing.

It helps to have a good quality orientation process library so that you have a library that every employee can access. This orientation library should have general information for new hires, information on company policies and procedures, safety, bullying and harassment, how they’re supposed to deal with media, etc.

I strongly recommend you look at creating a video how-to library or at least some sort of a process documentation system. so let’s talk about some of the tools you can use for this. There’s a ton of tools out there and it really doesn’t matter what you use as long as you make sure that it’s in place and it’s going to have all the processes. Here are some to try:

• Process St. – Process Street is built for specifically for documenting processes It gives you a really easy way to add videos and screenshots and documentation all into one library.
• Notion – I often use Notion. Notion is like a wiki plus database system and works great for creating documentation.
• Microsoft OneNote – OneNote also works very well easy to grab and embed you know screenshots and document your process.
• UseLoom – I use UseLoom for capturing videos of processes where I need to share processes with other people online where I UseLoom allows me to really quickly do a video capture of how to do something. I can throw the UseLoom links into these other tools like Process Street, Notion or OneNote

Once again it doesn’t matter which tool you use but these are just a few tools to look at.

So what if your employer doesn’t have an onboarding process? You’re gonna need to create your own process in this case.

• Start asking what do I need to know you?
• Find out about breaks, vacation policies, who do you call if you’re sick.
• Find out if there are any policies and procedure manuals and read them.
• Find out who the company’s safety officer
• Know who the human resources officer is so you find out about the human resources and benefits
• Make sure you know who you report directly to and who their supervisor is in case you might need to talk to someone over their head about something
• Make sure you have a clear job description so you know what you should be focusing on. You might need to infer this from what people are asking you then maybe put it in bullet point format and take it to your supervisor at some for feedback

If you need help developing your onboarding system I’d be happy to consult with you.

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