Onboard, On Target
July 07, 2008
Employees come, employees go. True, workforce arrivals and departures are par for the course, but your new hire onboarding program should be anything but. As one company recently discovered, creating an intentional, well thought out onboarding program is well worth the effort.
By Carmen Marston
Undertaking a serious effort to "onboard" new employees was one of the smartest operational commitments the executive team at Zimmerman Advertising has made. We operate in a highly competitive industry characterized by high turnover, and we have an additional challenge that made addressing employee integration and retention important: Even though the hub of the advertising industry is undisputedly New York, we’ve chosen to remain headquartered in South Florida. With more than 1,100 full-time associates and additional offices throughout the rest of the country—including New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco, and Atlanta—our home is still in Ft. Lauderdale. So, enticing top-caliber talent to relocate is something we are thinking about constantly as we grow.
At a senior executive meeting in the first half of 2007, we identified that one of our biggest corporate challenges was human capital. We assigned a task force to outline our current recruitment, training, and retention methods, and suggested solutions. It was from this initial assignment that we ended up with the current onboarding system, which debuted in October 2007.
The task force was made up of myself, a project manager with sole responsibility for meeting milestones, a creative director, and a member of our IT team. We chose to work with Silk Road Technology over the course of about eight months to get the job done. They constructed all of the back-end programming while we designed an interface that would brand our corporate culture from the first moment of contact. We made a decision at the outset to invest the time and effort to make our interface reflective of our brand, from the look and color scheme of the web pages, to the words we used, to the photographs of supervisors and department teams, messages from the executive team, and the automation of myriad legal forms.
Today, our executives agree we exceeded our initial expectations for this onboarding utility and process very quickly. The process of searching for qualified candidates, vetting their resumes, moving them through to interviews, offers, and employment agreements was greatly enhanced and streamlined. Our Careers Website, with Silk Road’s technology, offers a wealth of corporate culture information; our client roster; benefits package; locations; extensive FAQs on topics ranging from work hours to dress codes to our founder and chairman's allergy to perfumes; statements from recently hired associates; and all job openings. This information is available to anyone who visits the site. The time we took to photograph employees and supervisors, and engage their feedback on working at Zimmerman, created an indelible personality that comes through on every Web page.
Interested job candidates use our Silk Road-designed interface to create a job agent that will e-mail them open positions that match their criteria, or they can browse through job listings, searching by specific criteria and keywords. They then upload their resume, and receive an automated response letting them know the system has received it.
The technology provided by Silk Road sends the resume to the talent acquisition team, and the internal hiring process begins in earnest. Once we’ve extended a job offer and the employee has accepted, they are provided with a personal login and password for the same Careers website, where they will then log in, receive a personal welcome message from their new supervisor, and a list of tasks with deadlines, including filling out tW-4 and I-9 eForms, a Workers Comp healthcare questionnaire, confidentiality agreements, drug screening tasks, and information for a personal nameplate that will be affixed to their workstation.
Ultimately, we intend to further enrich our onboarding system to include additional milestone accomplishments at 30, 60, and 90 days of employment. We’d intended to launch with those already in place, but through this process we confirmed the long-held adage that great ideas are easy and execution is the bigger challenge. Another feature I’d like to add to this system that goes beyond those initial 90 days of employment is a formal training program that certifies employees have met a specific set of guidelines and milestones to be certified as an expert in their particular field. Aside from the obvious benefit to our operations, it also offers younger, less experienced employees an incentive to improve their skills and receive recognition.
Retaining employees in today's job environment is of vital importance. The cost of employee turnover—to any business—is extremely high. And the Millennials entering the workforce mean companies are being interviewed as much as they are interviewing these new employees. Human resource studies indicate new employees decide on the first day whether they’ll stay. Creating an onboarding process that introduces new employees to our corporate culture and personality—from recruitment to their first days on the job—gives them a better sense of how they will integrate into our brand and team. Providing material to help them get started in their department makes them feel as if they already understand what's expected of them. Instead of feeling their way along, new employees are able to fit right in.
While our case involves a company with a substantial number of employees in multiple locations, smaller businesses should consider some of the main objectives and methods of onboarding. Just by implementing a first-day orientation and expressing how your firm is different from your competition can make great strides, and it lets people know they are valued and have become part of a culture that cares about them as individuals. Even if you cannot implement an automated system at this time, there are ways to convey that you wish for new employees to become integral human assets to your organization, thereby also helping you to retain their loyalty. These days, no employer can afford to take any employee for granted.
Sidebar: Seven Keys to Successful Onboarding
• Your onboarding efforts must represent and convey your company's specific brand.
• Your onboarding solution must have clear objectives, project management steps, timeline, and weekly meetings in order for an onboarding program to become a reality.
• A successful onboarding process must incorporate your executives and key decision-makers to create buy-in and excitement, and to justify the financial investment.
• Interactivity is key. Create easy-to-follow onboarding steps that do not intimidate new employees, yet require them to complete specific tasks within a specific timeframe.
• Make it easy, fun, creative, and captivating.
• Incorporate orientation and initial training as part of the onboarding process. Onboarding is more than a series of tasks and electronic paperwork.
• Through your onboarding efforts, communicate process changes and enforce continual improvements and adjustments to your changing corporate environment. The system is only as good as those who maintain, use, and enter information into it, so don’t simply launch an onboarding process and leave it alone.
Carmen Marston is executive vice president, human resources for Zimmerman Advertising. For more information, visit www.zadv.com.
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