Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires with Leadership Tulsa. What we’re wanting to do is equip you as a business owner or business manager on how to make sure, how to ensure that you are bringing in the right employees. Oh, it’s so frustrating when we get employees in that look so good in the interviewing process and all through the thing and then in the first two weeks we’re looking at and going, “Who are you? You are not the person that I interviewed, you were some totally different alien person.”
So, what we’re doing here is putting together a system, starting out with your recruiting, then going to the interviewing and the hiring and the onboarding and so on, putting together a complete system for you through the filter of your culture, through the filter of your core values. We want to make sure that we are hiring through that filter, rather than just hiring in a hurry because we’ve got to get somebody in the seat.
So once again, Clay Staires with Leadership Tulsa talking about onboarding. In our last podcast we talked about pre-day one and day one of the onboarding process. In this podcast we’re going to be talking about the first week and then what we want to do each week through the first month or two. So if you remember on day one, our primary focus here was to make this person feel comfortable. We want to welcome them and make them feel comfortable like, “I made an awesome decision to be in this company.” At Leadership Tulsa, we help companies do this time and time again across the country to put together this system. So, day one the person walks away going, “I’ve got the best job ever.”
This is exactly where we want them. As we move from this place of, “This person doesn’t know us at all,” to this place of, “They trust us and they are a trustworthy employee.” What this path looks like we have to build the relationship first. As you build the relationship, then you can begin to challenge that relationship. But if you challenge the relationship greater than– If you put a stronger challenge than you have relationship, then what will happen is that will break trust with the person. So day one we begin to build the relationship. Then as we get into the first week what we’re doing now is we want to move this new employee from a consumer, as quickly as possible. We want to move them from a consumer into a contributor.
So in our first week, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be teaching them about the procedures, going through the tools, introducing them to people. We’re going to show them how our culture works, what does it look like to do work here at this company. We want to make sure that in the first week they know who their mentor is going to be. And again, as we found out, most employees, about 60% of employees, want their mentor to be their manager, not some buddy system of guy to the next cubicle, but actually their manager. They want their manager to be their mentor.
We’re also going to be modeling the culture all through the first week. Consistently, we want to be pointing at the map of expectation and advancement. Here’s what we’re expecting, here’s how you advance, here’s how you improve. Usually, what I try to do in the first week as well is make sure that this new employee gets a phone call from either the owner of the company or somebody high up in the company to say, “Welcome to the company, it’s great to have you. I just heard that you were hired. My name is Bob. My name is Sue and I am the CEO. I am the CFO. I just want you to know from the top, from the leadership team, we’re happy that you were here welcome aboard. Is there anything that we can do for you?”
Just a short phone call that we’re going to give to this person, it will totally surprise them that they are getting a phone call from somebody high up, especially if they get a phone call from the owner of the company. They will just say, “This is an incredible place to work.” Which is exactly where we want them to be.
Also, I find it very important and as I work with clients, as Clay Staires Leadership Tulsa, as I coach my clients, I think it’s very important that you evaluate this new employee starting day one. That’s right. At the end of the first day before they leave, you give them an evaluation of how you feel like they did. We’ll talk about that later on when we are talking about evaluating through the lens of culture. But I love having that evaluation definitely at the end of the first week.
You want to evaluate that person and let them know how did they do the first week and I always include in that evaluation, a stretch goal. “Here’s how you did the first week, Here’s what I want to see improve next week.” Because I know personally by the end of the first two weeks I need to make a call on this person. Am I moving forward or am I going to promote them to customer status and let them leave the company.
We need to make this decision in the first two weeks. At the end of the first week give them an evaluation and at some point, you have to find something that they need to improve on or you need to give them a challenge for the next week. Also what’s going on all during this first week is a lot of on the job training in their department. I strongly suggest that you have a checklist depending upon what the job is that there is a checklist of skills that they need to learn to succeed in this job. All that’s going on during the first week as they walk through their checklist.
Then from the first week all the way through the first month each week we want to make sure that we are evaluating them, and there is a consistent evaluation survey that they are looking at or a consistent scorecard that they are looking at week to week to week. You don’t want to toss in new things you want to make sure they know what you’re going to evaluate them on and they need to know what your expectations are at each of those points of evaluation. It’s a lot of the same thing that we did the first week. We’re showing them the culture we’re showing them how we get work done, at this point they are still just a consumer.
They are there we’re paying them, they’re probably not getting a whole lot of work done. But we are paying them and we are introducing them and building relationships with them and helping them connect to our culture. We continue to point to the map of expectation and how they advance. We continue to do the on the job training in their department. It’s very important that we keep that going, each week. It’s very important. And that you go ahead and just set up that appointment, schedule it. Don’t just try to fit it in, make sure you schedule, “We’re going to meet on Friday.” Or whenever the end of that second week is. Business Speaker Tulsa
We’re going to at the end of the week we’re going to set that appointment, where we’re going to evaluate how they did that week and give them the challenge for the next week. Because what we’re doing, remember we talked about the relationship challenge trust, that’s how we build trust with our employees. We build the relationship and then we gradually challenge, we bring challenges into the relationship. In other words, if you’re going to ask somebody to clean a toilet, it’s probably going to be important for you to build a relationship with that person to a point that when you ask him to clean the toilet they are willing to do it. Business Speaker Tulsa
If you have not built that relationship then the only way you’re going to get that person to clean the toilet is if you make them clean the toilet. So what you’ll have to do is introduce some measure of fear into the relationship. If they don’t trust you, if they haven’t built that relationship with you, then the only way to get them to do hard things for you, is to introduce fear. Business Speaker Tulsa
And as soon as you begin to introduce fear into the relationship with your employees, you’re beginning to move backwards. People will begin to disconnect with you because no one likes to connect with something they’re afraid of. They do it because they have to, but as soon as you leave the room, they don’t do it. If you don’t tell them specifically to do it, they won’t do it. So you have to use more fear. So we just want to stay away from that whole fear thing.
So in this onboarding process in the first 30 days, we’re building relationships. I think it’s really important, like we said on day one, that the manager takes them out to eat. I think it’s important, even in the first week that the manager takes them out to eat a second time, either the manager or somebody as high up as you can get takes them out to eat. Once again, talks to them about the company culture, talks about the core values, talks and about the history. “This is why we are here,” to get that person, the ‘why’ that’s inside of that new employee, the drive that’s inside that employee, we have to get that connected with the company’s drive, with the company’s direction.
And then finally as we get to the end of these 30 days, we’re at the point now where this employee should be in the place where they are starting to contribute. They may not be a full long contributor but they should be at this point contributing. You’re starting to inspect what you expect. Business Speaker Tulsa
That evaluation time that you are spending with him is now a stronger evaluation because you need them to contribute. If there’s a retraining process that needs to go on, that should happen. That should already be happening. If one week you’ve trained them, but they need some more training, then the next week that retraining needs to go on. Retrain those policies. Retrain those procedures as needed. Point to the map of expectation and advancement. Continue to evaluate the end of every single week. This is where you are and this is the challenge. This is the stretch to go to the next point.
So, this is our first 30 days of our onboarding process. I want to encourage you as a business owner, as a business manager that you get this process, actually, a graphic of it, a picture of what this process looks like. You can slap it up on the wall so you can put it into the employee manual, so every new employee that comes into your company knows what this process is going to look like. They can see the road map ahead. Business Speaker Tulsa
At Clay Staires Leadership Tulsa, this is what we do all the time with our clients, is help them put together their road map of onboarding[00:00 just that is developed through the lens of their core values and through their culture. So this is podcast number 15, the second session of onboarding through the lens of your company culture, with Clay Staires, Leadership Tulsa. Business Speaker Tulsa
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