Growing companies hire new employees who need onboarding, assimilation and training. Ideally, employers tap new team members with the in-demand skills and talents to perform their duties. An effective training program helps these promising new employees fully integrate with the company and gives them the tools for success and career growth.
We’ll explore what an effective new-hire training program requires and explain how to turn new employees into top-notch members of your team.
A poor onboarding process can hurt employee morale, engagement and confidence, leading to missed revenue targets.
These five tips can help you develop a new-hire training plan that will get employees settled and ready to produce top-quality work.
The best way to develop a new-hire training plan is by consulting with current employees who excel in their roles. For the best results, follow these steps:
“Setting up a new-hire training program can be daunting,” said Matthew Dailly, managing director at Tiger Financial. “You need to think about the most important aspects of the job but also the smallest details that they will need to learn to get right. The best way of knowing what new staff need to do is to ask your existing workers. They will make sure you know about everything that goes on in the role and how to set them up for it.”
Create a dynamic process with the following features:
Effective employee training tactics include customizing training to how an employee learns best, providing incentives for getting up to speed, and offering continual learning opportunities to enhance career growth.
Most companies hire for a cultural fit to ensure new employees align with the company’s mission and vision. However, all too often, training covers only basic expectations and administrative information, like compensation and employee benefits. Incorporating team-based training can help new hires get up to speed faster and assimilate into the company culture better than they would with corporate-level training alone.
“Companies often do onboarding on orientation at the corporate level,” said Mark A. Herschberg, author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You (Conosco Media, 2020). “While useful, orientation is also helped by being done at the team level. Helping the new team member understand team culture is equally important. How does the team operate in terms of conflict versus coalition building, or like to communicate?”
Team-level training can help new hires do the following:
People learn differently, so your new-hire training plan should adapt to various learning styles. Conforming to a new hire’s preferred learning method can help reduce the instruction a new hire needs to perform in their role effectively.
“When training new employees, it is important to engage them in a way that best suits their ability to learn the most,” said Jase Rodley, founder and SEO service provider at Dialed Labs. “People can often differ in how they will best get a handle on something.”
You’re likely to see three main learning styles among new hires:
“While not all aspects of training are made to move between [these three learning styles] … it is good practice to give the new employee the best chance of success that you can by providing the method that most inspires them,” Rodley said.
Without good leaders, your staff will have a hard time succeeding. This is especially true for new hires. When promoting or hiring for managerial positions, carefully consider which candidates could best guide and coach other employees. Then, involve them in developing and executing your new-hire training plan.
“The leadership ability of the manager is the No. 1 determining factor of whether a new hire will have a positive or negative employee experience over the long haul,” said Jessica Donahue, owner of Adjunct Leadership Consulting. “Employee engagement, retention and turnover can all be predicted by the quality of leader an employee works for. In this way, providing an exceptional onboarding experience is the first step for a leader looking to retain and engage a high-performing team for years to come.”
Solicit feedback from onboarded and trained new hires to refine and improve your hiring process. As your company grows and evolves, so should your new-hire training plan.
A new-hire training plan is a company’s well-defined process for onboarding new team members and bringing them up to speed. It should do the following:
A comprehensive new-hire training program can help your company in the following ways:
Keep your employee handbook updated so new hires understand their job functions along with the company’s mission, vision, policies, dress code, and code of conduct.
Avoid these common training program mistakes to help create the best onboarding program possible:
Hiring employees can be a complicated process. Consider using the best HR software to streamline employee paperwork and onboarding.
Many of the best employees in any industry are made, not found. But turning an untested new hire into an employee who reliably provides excellent results requires serious work and dedication. With this guide to training programs, all that work can be much easier – and your team can be better, too.
Isaiah Atkins contributed to the reporting and writing in this article. Some source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.