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BUSINESS AND TRAINING
Unidirectional onboarding sessions, such as videos or
slideshow presentations, are not only outdated, studies show
they do not work. While a small portion of individuals learn
well using this mechanism, far more learn ‘hands-on’ in
an interactive fashion. As a result, the employee should be
expected to interact with various trainers and onboarding
messages, as well as ask questions for clarification or
expansion of ideas.
Evaluate the new employee
You will never know how your new employee is doing or
adapting to their job if you do not follow up in an organised
and quantifiable manner. To do so it is advised to develop a
standardised metrics system, to analyse their integration into
the job.
Accurate metrics — whether they involve sales,
production, repeat customers, rings per minute, and so on
— are important for judging an employee’s improvement
over baseline performance. Any testing system should
involve these hard stats, but most corporate trainers agree
that ‘soft skills’ must also be mixed into the evaluation to
create a more complete picture. In short, numbers just
aren’t enough.
As an example, retail operations under your current
management team may be growing at an unprecedented
rate, but if your team is alienating workers, creating bad
press, and allowing unnecessary expenditures, they are just
setting you and your business up for failure.
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Having a standardised metrics system in place will allow you
to assess an individual’s progress, as well as examine the
process itself in case it needs to be modified.
Hold employees accountable
While new hires are new to the company and must
therefore be given some leeway with regard to how much
they know, and how fast they are adapting to the job,
they are still employees and should be held accountable
for their actions — including engaging in the onboarding
process. You can allow some leeway to grade on the curve,
so to speak, but your new hires should not be allowed
to get away with things that other employees would be
reprimanded for.
In the end, it all comes down to communication between
the onboarder, the new hire, and senior management
so that all parties know where they stand, what the
expectations are on them, and what the ultimate outcomes
will hopefully be. Managed in organised, patient, and open
fashion, a good onboarding process can improve employee
productivity and happiness and ensure long-term financial
success for your business.
Sources
• https://wheniwork.com/blog/11-ways-to-improve-your-
onboarding-program/
• https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/10/employee-
onboarding-process.html PA
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September 2019 Volume 25 I Number 7