Welcome aboard! Onboarding Model

Here’s one of my articles published last month (May 2010) in Training Journal. You can also get a PDF to download if you prefer to read it in all its published glory on your shiny new iPad. Comments very welcome.

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First impressions

Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?

"On my first day I arrived and was immediately drowning in rules and policies, all apparently about what NOT to do. The HR person taking us through didn't seem that confident and just rushed through a seemingly endless Powerpoint presentation which sent most of us into a state of paralysis. I'm still not clear what I am actually expected to DO in my role."

"Our manager said we didn't have time for the usual induction and we got straight into the job. I had to learn by trial and error, but I got there in the end."

"Well I'm not sure whether that trainer just got out the wrong side of bed today, but I hope the other people I meet aren't as cynical and depressing. Otherwise I don't think I'll be able to last long. It's certainly not the impression I got from the interview."

As organisations, and as individuals, we never get a second chance to make a first impression. This is especially true when we find ourselves in a vulnerable position such as entering a new job role. We become hypersensitive to the information and actions we see around us. We are more likely to jump to hasty conclusions, real or imagined, in a desperate attempt to reach certainty of mind.

Cognitive psychologists have observed this behaviour as "premature cognitive commitment" and it is very difficult to shake these initial impressions once set. From an organisational perspective, this means we run big risks if the onboarding experience that new staff receive is poor and open to interpretation.

Onboarding sets the tone for how employees perceive an organisation in terms of corporate culture, communication and values. However, for many staff entering a new work place, the experience can be an inconsistent, sobering and unnerving affair.

It is no great surprise then that many new joiners don't stay the course. It has been recorded that 90 per cent of employees decide whether to leave their new employer within the first six months (recently voiced by Gretchen Alarcon at Oracle).

Measuring time to full productivity of new staff reveals it can take anything between six and twelve months to reach the required performance levels. Such high levels of staff attrition are extremely costly to an organisation. Then, when a staff member leaves, all of that early investment in that individual - from recruitment, selection and induction to salary - is lost before they can add any real value.

There are many reasons why these onboarding problems occur. However, at its heart usually sits the tumbleweed of absent or poor communication. This can undermine efforts at each key stage of a new employee's journey into a new organisation. Any mismanagement of messaging, inconsistencies or simply an absence of support can derail a new joiner.

These first few months are a particularly delicate time yet, when handled well, can provide a superior foundation for long term employee engagement, more than any subsequent corporate cultural change programme.

Communication. Communication. Communication.

In general you can't communicate too much. Yet it is far more common for us to stay silent for long periods and allow perceptions to stray. Communication is the golden thread on which all engagement activities hang.

In onboarding terms, successful communication will produce three key outcomes for each individual:

• Congruence - aligned messages are easier to assimilate and understand in the minds of those new to your organisational culture.
• Competence - building the skills and knowledge of the new joiner throughout their onboarding experience reduces the overall time it takes for them to reach full productivity.
• Confidence - a new joiner that feels well informed, knowledgeable and ready to apply their skills is well motivated to perform at high levels at the earliest opportunity.

Achieving these outcomes will go a long way towards reducing, if not removing, those premature cognitive commitments. But how can we structure an onboarding experience that is effective, but also cost efficient?

Technology as a catalyst

In designing a successful onboarding strategy, it is essential to harness technology to deliver an experience that is aligned and supportive with an organisation's values and culture. It must also deliver more productive employees, quickly and at lower overall cost.

Not only can technology help communicate more information in a timely and accessible fashion, but it can also be used to avoid information overload - another common problem for new staff. Technology genuinely offers a win-win opportunity to positively impact your staff, your top-line productivity, as well as your bottom-line.

Let's take a look at some of the key stages of onboarding and explore how improved communication through an appropriate application of technology can achieve a more effective experience for your new employees.

1. ATTRACT

This stage covers all recruitment and selection activities, including the public presentation of the organisation's ‘employer brand’. Communicationneeds to accurately represent the organisational culture, the nature of the job roles available and working conditions.

There is also a clear need to positively position the organisation to attract talent that may be in short supply. However, the organisation's story must be authentic. A new joiner will soon discover if the brand doesn't match their experience – here are a few tips to ensure this doesn’t happen in your organisation:

• Offer a careers portal giving visibility to employee practice, a summary of your organisation's activities, the range and variety of job roles available, and (through job board functionality) access to vacancies and the application process.
• Applications can be filtered through immediate exercises that test applicants' basic abilities and attitudes to the job role. By ensuring that applicants fully understand the role and culture, there are fewer losses later in the recruitment/induction process.
• Selection exercises at interview stage can simulate the working environment. They can provide valuable direction for both applicant and employer on the level of subsequent training and development required to reach the desired levels of competence and productivity.

2. ENDORSE/REINFORCE

Upon selection and acceptance of the role, new joiners often experience a chasm of silence between receiving their offer letter and their first day at the organisation. This can dent a new starter's confidence and lead to a reappraisal of their decision to join.

A pre-joiners portal (sometimes linked to the original careers portal with access to additional secure areas) can continue engagement and provide important stimulation and reinforcement as soon as the job offer is accepted.

A successful example of such a portal is being used by Sky with significant business results – it also won ‘Most Effective Training Programme Award’ at the recent Customer Contact Association Global Awards.

3. CONNECT

Social media tools can be used to safely connect with existing employees and other new starters irrespective of their geographical location. These tools can be embedded within the portal and/or provide links to existing tools which may be linked to a recruitment strategy. Common social media services that may already be in use include Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin.

Used correctly, social media can provide a mechanism for new employees to contribute and demonstrate their value to others already in the organisation. Likewise, existing employees and, critically, members of the management community can reach out and engage with new incoming team members.

This approach can help new starters operate more effectively as they’ll have an increased understanding of current projects that they will be working on. It will also help new team members to understand commonly used jargon amongst colleagues and start to expose them directly to the culture of the organisation.

4. INDUCT

Induction from the first day onwards can be radically re-designed and shortened if pre-joining learning activities are put in place. There can be significant savings in overall training time, of 50 per cent or more, where the induction experience focuses on application of knowledge and skills already acquired.

By extending the use of an online portal to include additional learning activities, further flexibility and personalisation of the induction experience can be achieved. This allows those, able and willing, to fast track themselves to a proven level of competency much faster than previously. While those needing additional support can be given the attention they need from the organisation's training and coaching staff.

5. SUPPORT

Since communication is more effective when spaced over time, providing ongoing access to learning and performance support via the online portal will help cement new knowledge and skills. It will also increase accuracy on the job and accelerate the acquisition of practical and positive work experience.

6. RETAIN

The cumulative effect of aligning all of these stages is to give the employee a highly congruent, contextualised and personalised entry into the organisation which will build confidence, competence and loyalty. While many factors affect an employee's motivation levels and loyalty, clear, regular communication and clarity of purpose will keep their focus through the initial months until they are fully embedded in their new company.

Onboarding directs the conversation

Communication has always been about a conversation rather than a one way transmission. In today's highly interconnected world, we are all becoming used to, indeed expect, a two-way interaction. As we've seen, the technology and tools are there for us to harness.

Do try and use the techniques above to reach alignment across all key stages of your induction process to help yield significant cost savings, more robust employee engagement and productivity. This will in turn lead to reduced levels of attrition.

Put simply, employees are more confident and competent in their chosen role and are appropriately motivated to perform in line with the corporate brand and mission if they experience a good onboarding process. Going forward this can only be achieved by putting communication and technology at the heart of your onboarding strategy.

How to roll out knowledge to contact centres

Just published on the popular Trainingzone site. Comments welcome.
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In a real-time business environment, how do you ensure staff are kept fully up to speed on new products and services, while also keeping customers happy? Lars Hyland outlines ways in which technology can improve knowledge, learning and communication in the pressurised environment of the contact centre.
It's hard to keep up, isn't it? Product cycle times are shrinking, in some industries down to a matter of weeks, with the frequency of product and service launches growing each year. Customers are demanding ever more variety and choice, with competition fierce for their money and attention.
Large organisations often struggle to communicate in as timely and consistent a fashion as they would like. Meanwhile, marketing pushes ahead, sometimes leaving sales and service staff struggling to service the resulting enquiries.
With the advent of the internet and the seemingly unstoppable race towards real-time communication, the stakes are raised even higher. So it's not surprising to read the results of the Customer Contact Association's 2009 membership survey indicating a strong trend towards customer self service. Essentially, this means providing the customer with information and services to answer their basic queries and conduct interactions with an organisation, without picking up the phone.
Interestingly, the expectations were not a huge reduction in call volumes, but more of a shift towards agents handling more complex (and emotional) calls. These are more demanding and support another expectation that contact centre staff need to be much less process driven and become knowledge workers who can flexibly address a wide range of issues for the customer.
So how do you keep knowledge workers knowledgeable? That requires a learning culture, regular and effective communication, as well as efficient performance support tools that staff can reliably trust and use with confidence. Let's take a look at how learning technology can be applied to deliver a more agile and dynamic customer service culture.

Build and maintain a product knowledge elearning portfolio

Every product and service your organisation offers to the market can be effectively explained using engaging interactivity, covering the key features and benefits, presenting how they sit within the wider portfolio. There is a commitment required to maintain and update this suite of knowledge modules, but when structured in an easy to access and intuitive fashion they can provide much improved consistency of understanding across your workforce.
The process needs to be fast, flexible and fit with the speed of product development and launch in your organisation - internal processes must be aligned with the e-learning for it to be engaging and responsive.

Virtual practice builds confidence and competence

Simulating customer interaction can help agents and advisors practice and model best practice behaviours. There are often significant constraints that will affect the call outcome based on what can be said, when and how. There is a fine balancing act to be struck between inflexible scripted responses and offering more flexible, "human" conversation, while remaining compliant.

Compliance/regulatory training can be automatically tracked and audited

Keeping compliant is a significant undertaking with high administration costs. Learning management systems automate the collection and reporting of completion data for later auditing purposes. Going beyond the letter of the law it is possible to have employees understand the spirit of the regulation to which they must comply. For example, no-one would argue with the need to protect data and treat customers fairly, but sometimes the regulation can overshadow the core message. Good e-learning design can address this.

Give customers and staff a shared learning experience

In the true spirit of self service, it makes sense to offer a similar experience for your customers and staff that ensures there is a shared understanding in place. A higher budget is often spent on 'superficial' customer communication and marketing than on staff training, often leaving the customer wanting more detail to inform their decision.
Staff also need detail and knowledge in order to serve customers well. Perhaps sharing these budget pots in a more balanced way will result in high quality learning and communication deliverables that will enable customers to self-serve, and contact centre staff to be more enthused and self-motivated about the products and services they offer.
Note that elearning content doesn't just have to sit inside an LMS - it can be on the external website, directly linked to applications your staff and customers use.

Less learning more often - focus on performance support

Product knowledge dates quickly. Pulling staff away from their jobs to sit in training sessions that do little to inspire, much to confuse, only for them to forget most of what was presented is not a productive use of time. Building learning opportunities into the everyday work flow is an essential part of a modern day contact centre environment. (See Less Learning More Often article for more on this).

Start staff learning before they arrive

The pre-induction learning portal is proving to be an excellent tool to dramatically improve new staff engagement and productivity from their very first day. The Aberdeen Group Report on Effective Onboarding Techniques and Strategies made this one of its key recommendations for organisations looking to reduce training costs and improve employee engagement.
As we move out of recession, there will be further pressure to retain talented staff at all levels. There is much evidence to show that staff decisions to stay with an organisation for the long term are strongly influenced by the experience they receive within their first three months of employment. The pre-induction learning portal is an excellent way to bridge the chasm of communication between accepting a new role and arriving on the first day.
Brightwave and Sky, the satellite television and media communications provider, worked together to build a highly engaging pre-induction experience that includes many of the recommendations made above, to good effect. Up to ten hours of learning covering product knowledge, compliance topics, as well as sales simulations, have led to staff arriving confident and competent. This has reduced induction training by one week and measurably improved sales and customer service performance. The portal also won the Most Effective Training Programme award at the recent Customer Contact Association Global Excellence Awards. It's a best practice model well worth replicating.

Serving a wider community

In a globalised and outsource driven economy keeping a consistent level of knowledge amongst suppliers, resellers, customers and your own internal staff can only be managed using technology. E-learning is a cornerstone of that strategy and, with the right design, deployment, and content management practices in place you can keep pace with the rate of change we are all experiencing.
In many respects as we hurtle forward, we need to manage knowledge in new ways. In the future it is less about "know-how" and more about "know-now". That means searching, finding, and acting at the moment of need. Hold on to your hats, it's only going to get faster.

Summary points

• Current trend to customer self-service will lead to a shift in agents handling more complex (and emotional) calls – a positive learning culture with regular and effective communication is essential to keep contact centre staff knowledgeable
• Give customers and staff a shared elearning experience - engaging elearning helps build and maintain product knowledge
• Simulations can help improve customer service and interaction
• Help staff understand the purpose of compliance and regulation with good e-learning design
• Less learning more often – focus on performance support
• Get staff learning before they arrive - the pre-induction or onboarding

Onboarding staff in the 21st century

The British Computer Society (BCS) and IT Training Magazine have published my article on how onboarding new staff can be transformed in terms of overall time to full productivity and dramatically reduced training costs. As the economy picks up the quality and efficiency of induction will matter more than ever. What do you think?

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How we work and who we work for is changing rapidly. In an internet-enabled, networked age where we can communicate with anyone, anywhere, in real time, the way in which we acquire knowledge and develop new skills is transforming.

To cope with the pace of economic and social change we must re-evaluate how we train and support our people. The onboarding experience is the crucial start to reaching a desired level of competence and confidence needed to deliver a valuable contribution.

However, this is often sadly neglected. New joiners arrive in their new workplace to discover they are expected to fend for themselves - their manager is too busy fire-fighting, work colleagues are stretched enough getting through the day, let alone having time to 'handhold' someone new.

The induction training is not scheduled for a few weeks, by which time its value is greatly diminished. Furthermore, what about the increasing number of staff working from home or on the move? How do they become integrated into the organisation's culture?

It is no great surprise then that many new joiners don't stay the course. It is recorded that 90 per cent of employees decide whether to leave their new employer within the first six months (recently voiced by Gretchen Alarcon at Oracle).

Measuring time to full productivity of new staff reveals it can take anything between six and twelve months to reach the required levels of competence and confidence to deliver at expected performance levels.

As a result, staff attrition is extremely costly to an organisation. When a staff member leaves, all the investment made in that individual - from recruitment, selection and induction to salary - is lost before they can add any real value.

In areas where there are naturally high levels of staff turnover, such as contact centres and retail, this can amount to large sums of money spent on training and re-training without ever truly improving overall performance.

The Call Centre Association (CCA) claims a failure to retain employees is costing firms up to £1 billion per year and generating employee turnover rates up to 30 per cent. The current economic climate may have dampened these costs temporarily, but with increasing employee mobility, they will rise if not managed more effectively.

Employee engagement

A positive onboarding experience can seriously improve employee engagement. The government (see MacLeod Report commissioned by Lord Mandelson) has recognised the importance of improving employee engagement and its positive affect on productivity. Here's a definition of engagement taken from the report:

'Engagement is about creating opportunities for employees to connect with their colleagues, managers and wider organisation. It is also about creating an environment where employees are motivated to want to connect with their work and really care about doing a good job… It is a concept that places flexibility, change and continuous improvement at the heart of what it means to be an employee and an employer in a twenty-first century workplace.' (Professor Katie, CIPD, 2009)

The report also shows the difference employee engagement can make to the bottom line:

• Engaged employees in the UK take an average of 2.69 sick days per year; the disengaged take 6.19 days. The CBI reports sickness absence costs the UK economy £13.4bn a year.
• 70 per cent of engaged employees indicate they have a good understanding of how to meet customer needs, only 17 per cent of non-engaged employees say the same.
• Engaged employees are 87 per cent less likely to leave the organisation than the disengaged. The cost of high turnover among disengaged employees is significant.

Ensuring that the early onboarding experience is a positive reinforcement of someone's decision to join will make a dramatic difference to these metrics.

Technology, more specifically e-learning, plays a central role in offering a more seamless, continuous support mechanism that simultaneously accelerates learning, releases managers from basic training obligations and significantly reduces time to full productivity.

The pre-induction portal

The provision of online learning and assessment can be used at all stages of onboarding new employees, all managed through a single learning portal. This portal, alongside the corporate website, actively reinforces brand values and culture.

Here are examples of how e-learning can be used to improve efficiency and effectiveness for each stage of onboarding:

Recruitment - potential applicants complete short scenario-based assessments that provide more accurate impressions of the job role. The organisation benefits by encouraging those seemingly best suited to submit an application.

Selection - more rigorous assessment and psychometric testing can further filter applicants prior to, or as part of, the formal interview process. Tests can include realistic experiences that represent the job activities.

Pre-induction - successful applicants can receive additional learning opportunities that are completed in the run-up to their first day. With high levels of motivation and enthusiasm these individuals are in a perfect cognitive state to learn more about their new organisation. Learning modules may cover organisational structure, welcome videos, product knowledge, activity or system simulations (perhaps customer scenarios) and mandatory compliance (like health and safety). Such early learning means new employees arrive on their first day with a high level of confidence and active knowledge. This dramatically reduces time required for further induction training.

Induction period - continuing access to the learning portal carries new employees seamlessly through their first few days. Access to social networking tools accelerate contact with other employees, as well as access to additional learning modules on key systems and processes that were not available during pre-induction.

Ongoing development - these learning activities naturally integrate with existing HR systems to ensure a full record on which the individual can build further training and development as their career develops.

Tracking progress - tracking and reporting facilities allow the organisation to monitor new employees' engagement with learning opportunities. The portal can reward those who demonstrate exceptional levels of motivation and attainment, whilst nudging and supporting those who need encouragement. Equally, identifying early on those new employees who are uncertain of their decision or are likely to fail to integrate is valuable for both the individual and organisation.

Unbeatable business case

For those looking to reduce costs and improve employee productivity, overhauling the onboarding and induction experience is a strong candidate.

Sky, the satellite TV and broadband communications provider, has launched a pre-induction learning portal that has reduced induction time from four to three weeks with measurable improvements in sales and customer service targets. High levels of commitment and enthusiasm shown by individuals completing the pre-induction activities have also been sustained into the workplace.

While many organisations may not be experiencing growth or normal recruitment levels in the current climate, this is likely to change over the next twelve to eighteen months as the economy recovers.

Cost pressures, however, will not go away, so introducing a more cost effective onboarding model must be a priority in order to take full competitive advantage when the upturn arrives. When it does, employees will begin to further flex their new-found freedom and the battle for talent will intensify.

Re-inventing the E-learning Experience

I ran a webinar for the Learning and Skills Group earlier this month on re-inventing the e-learning experience. I mentioned this in a previous post, so let me know what you think of the ideas and examples presented.

Lars Hyland Webinar 090709 Re-inventing the E-learning Experience

View more presentations from Lars Hyland.

How can you show that e-learning is clearly adding value to your business? Learning portals provide a focused, engaging and contextual experience for staff that more directly supports their working day. In this session Lars Hyland demonstrates how global media company Sky is revolutionising its induction programme with a pioneering media-rich portal. Drawing on experience from some of the UK's most recognised brands (Bupa, EDF, Vodafone) Lars will examine:

• Using focused learning portals to solve key business challenges
• Improving performance of new starters with a smart onboarding or induction programme
• How cutting the 'time to competence' clearly establishes the value of learning
• Making 'self-service' performance support easy to use, engaging and effective
• Five tips for building an unbeatable business case