Many years ago, early on in my business, I read a book by two brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, called "The Power of Moments." It was a marketing book. I was looking, obviously, for tips on building the business and marketing myself and my services. And this book is all around these small moments in people's lives—small or large moments—and how you, as a marketer, can create them. But there is a part of the book that was not about marketing, in the moment, that has stuck with me all of these years. And that part talked about these huge moments that we all know happen in our lives: you get married, you graduate college, you have a baby, you move, and you get a new job. And that really hit me, thinking about what happens when we start a new job. That is a huge moment in our lives. And yet, the organizations sometimes that we're walking into do not treat it as such. That book, that section of the book, just really ignited something in me around the importance of onboarding and how that first impression that we make, and how we honor what is a big moment in someone's life, is so, so important. My name is Sabrina Baker. This is the HR Connection, the podcast built solely for those managing HR in a 1:500. We are talking onboarding today. Let's do it. I'm going to guess that if you clicked on this podcast to listen to it, that I don't have to convince you that onboarding matters. You're not here because you need to be convinced that it's important, or that it's a moment in someone's life that we should honor. You're here because you know it matters, and you want to think through how to make that mean something in your organization. You already know that a new hire who does not ramp quickly inside of a small business is a massive problem. You know that early turnover is really expensive. When someone leaves, in the first 6 months, you're absorbing not just the recruiting cost of replacing them, but the cost of the time that the team spent onboarding someone who didn't even stay. You know all of this, but what you're dealing with is something very different. You're dealing with a business where the manager is also the trainer, the trainer is also the subject matter expert, and the subject matter expert has 17 other things on their plate on the day the new hire walks in. You are dealing with a structure where onboarding happens, but because it's not defined or nobody knows what it should look like, everybody does something different, and some managers do absolutely nothing. There is a vibe of everybody just figures it out here, and the problem is some don't figure it out. And here is the part that is really specific. We always talk about why small business is its own discipline and not just smaller HR, and here's a reason why. The margin for error in a small environment is very small. In a large organization, one bad onboarding experience can just be absorbed. It can just—you can just figure it out. In a small business, one bad onboarding is visible and felt by everyone. The team feels it, the new hire feels it, everybody feels that this is not a good start. So that's what this episode is going to be about. It's not going to be to convince you that onboarding matters. It's going to start to talk about how to build something that actually works when you have a small team, very limited resources, and managers who tend to execute on instinct rather than a true process. This is our onboarding process. So when we deliver to you frameworks on this podcast, it is what we use. This is not a nice-to-have. This is what we use inside Acacia and with our clients. Do we always convince the client to do it this way? Absolutely not. And I know that's a struggle you may have as well. But we at least give them the framework and let them pick out the pieces that they feel work best for them. So we're going to go section by section through onboarding. We're going to talk about pre-boarding. We're going to talk about day one, the first 30 days. I'm going to bring up some common mistakes, and then what a simple onboarding system actually looks like. And then, maybe most importantly, I want to talk about where you, HR, if you're in HR listening to this, where you sit in all of this. Because I think that is the part that most small businesses get wrong. They assume HR just owns all of it, and that just cannot be the case in a small environment. Let me spend a few minutes on why—a few more minutes on why this problem is really different in small business, and give you something. If you're—if you're having a hard time convincing leaders that onboarding is important, let me see if I can give you some framing, some words that you can use to hopefully make them understand why there needs to be more structure around this. So here's a sentence that I will sometimes say, or a few sentences that I will sometimes say to leaders when I'm trying to convince them that we need to put in a better process, a better system, and that while it may feel like more work initially, it's going to pay off in the long run. This is—this is what I tell them. Every dollar spent on recruiting a new hire is an investment that does not pay off until that person is productive. Onboarding is the bridge between the investment and the return. A broken bridge means you absorbed the cost and missed that return. You know, we always talk about putting things in ROI, putting things in business terms, and this does it. So I'm just going to say it for you one more time. Every dollar spent on recruiting a new hire is an investment that does not pay off until that person is productive. Onboarding is the bridge between the investment and the return. A broken bridge means you absorbed the cost and missed the return. So there is an ROI—there is a huge ROI—to employees ramping as fast as they can, but ramping well. It doesn't matter if they can do the tasks but do them wrong. It matters if they ramp well. There is an absolute ROI, productivity cost to that. There's also, you know, this human dimension that I think gets lost in the operational conversation. Because, of course, we want them to be productive, and we want them—we want our return on investment in all of the dollars we spent getting them here. But think about what I said in the—in the opening of this, what it feels like to start a new job. For most people, this is not a minor life event. Think about the last time you started a new job. You were probably anxious. You may have lost sleep the night before. You know, you made a decision. You may have sat down for a while and talked to your family about whether this was the right move. You negotiated an offer. You know, some people move across the country, across the world, for their jobs. You give notice somewhere that you may have been comfortable. Like, this is a big deal. It is not something that somebody just decides on a Wednesday to do on a Thursday. So they are walking into your workplace with real anxiety and real hope. Think about times in your life when you have been both anxious and hopeful. That's what's happening when they walk into your workplace. They want to believe they made the right decision, and they are looking for evidence that they did. And if they arrive and there's no plan, no clear first day, no one whose job it is to make sure they succeed, then that evidence they get is the opposite. They start to really quickly worry about whether they have made the right choice or not, because we are telling them, "You're not important enough to prepare for." That message lands really hard, and it sets a tone that the rest of the onboarding then has to work against instead of build on. I have a companion piece to this on YouTube right now, a video out, um, that talks about the first week. I'm going to go into it a little bit here, but, um, if you have a CEO maybe who you are having a hard time convincing that onboarding is important and should be a priority, then I'll make sure that YouTube video is linked, um, and you can, you know, use that. I think that the YouTube channel is a CEO-to-CEO space, and I think it's great for HR practitioners to maybe be able to share it with their leaders to say, "Hey, here's, you know, somebody else who's saying this is really, really important." Here's where I want to start. Onboarding has three specific jobs. They are: get the employee productive as fast as possible; build enough clarity and confidence that they are not spending mental energy on confusion or ambiguity; and reduce the avoidable mistakes and early exits that happen when neither of those first two things occur. So those are the three goals of onboarding. And I want you to hear what's not on that list. It's not a culture tour. It's not a welcome experience designed to make people feel good. It's not a compliance exercise, though compliance, of course, is part of it. Those things can happen inside a good onboarding process, but they are not the goal. The goal is a productive, clear, confident employee who has enough structure to do their job and enough support to ask questions when they do not. So the first phase of onboarding in our model is pre-boarding. And this is what happens before day one. So I look at pre-boarding as what happens between offer acceptance, they have signed the offer letter, and their first start date. Usually there is a time period because maybe they have to give notice. So it could be a two-week time period. It could be less, could be more. But whatever that time period is from offer acceptance to start date. Sometimes what happens, a lot of times what happens, is nothing in this phase. They sign an offer, they get a start date, and then they're expected to show up. Maybe they get an email like the day before telling them where to go and, you know, maybe some important things about where to park. But really there is this radio silence that happens between offer letter and start date. And I think that we are missing a window there. I think that there is something really important we can do in that two-week time frame, whatever the time frame is, to make them feel really, really welcome. The first thing, really, is not something that you send to them, but the most operationally critical thing is that we have to immediately start getting equipment and access set up. I can't tell you how many small businesses we have come into who have no proper process for getting equipment and access set up. And it's one of the first things that we do. Because nothing is more diminishing than going to a new hire's first day, walking in as the first day of a new hire, and finding out that you have no equipment and you have no access, and people are training you on systems that you can't even get into. It is really, really defeating. So if you do not have a really good process for informing whoever handles your IT that you need a computer and you need access and here's all the things that they need, then that's the first thing I want you to do. Another thing that's going to happen in pre-boarding, of course, is paperwork. So you can send them paperwork. You, you decide, you know, based on your industry, hourly versus salaried mix, do they fill it out before, do they fill it out, uh, morning of. That's, that's completely up to you. I'm pretty sure that it falls under the de minimis rule, meaning that it, the paperwork is not considered so much work that you'd have to pay them for their time, but that's for you to, to look at. We typically do send the paperwork ahead of time. Sometimes people fill it out, sometimes they don't, and that's okay. Obviously you have the I-9 that you have to do your part of before. But paperwork should not be an hour or two of their first day. You want to be able to get that done as soon as possible, get it out of the way. That's kind of the administrative stuff. The, the bigger stuff that I think happens in pre-boarding, the more im-important stuff, is that they get a welcome communication from their manager. Now, typically they would have already met them in the recruiting process, although I have certainly seen it be where the recruiting process is done by people and they don't meet their hiring manager until later. But they need an email. This is not a generic HR email. This is not a templated email, but it is a personal note from the person they're going to re-report to. It doesn't need to be long. It doesn't need to be pages and paragraphs, but it does need to be specific, covering a couple of things. First, I am looking really forward to having you here. I'm really looking forward to that. Second, here is what your first day is going to look like. And third, here is who you should ask for when you arrive. I know a lot of times we have HR maybe send out an email that says, "Here's where you park. Here's, you know, how you come in. Here's who you ask for." Have that come from the manager. And hopefully, in my preference, the manager is the first person meeting them on day one, the first person greeting them and taking them to wherever, even if it's just a handoff, but that that is who they're going to see when they arrive. And that goes in the manager email. So I'm looking forward to having you here. Here is what your first day is going to look like, a full agenda for the first day, and then here's who you should ask for when you arrive. And of course, if there's any other details that should go in that, that's fine. The next email that should come to them is an introduction to their buddy. In our onboarding process, we actually have when these things should go out based on the time between offer and start, but, uh, you can choose whatever makes sense for you. So you want them to have a buddy. I think buddies are important. I'm going to talk more about this, but I think that buddies should be introduced before day one. So a short email or message from the buddy that says, "Hey, I'm going to be your buddy. Here's what my role is as your buddy. Um, here's why this is important, and here's when we're going to meet," which is going to be on our first day. The, the buddy, if the manager can't be the one to greet the new hire, then the buddy can be. But the buddy should definitely interact with them on their first day. So you want to have, um, some kind of buddy email. Whoever buddy, the buddy process is big, and I will get into it, but, you know, I think it's big to decide who gets to be a buddy, train them on being a buddy, all of those things. But definitely you want to assign a buddy, and you want to have an email that goes to the new hire from the buddy before their day one. So they're essentially getting two, potentially three emails. One could be their, like, paperwork email from HR. One is from their manager saying, "I'm so excited. Here's what day one looks like." And one is their buddy saying, "Um, here is your, here, here's how I'm going to work with you. Here's my role in your, you know, onboarding here, and here's when we are going to meet." Okay. Let's move into the first day. So the first week is really what the YouTube video is all about. Um, but let me get into kind of first day first. Um, and then that goes into more of the first week, if you want to watch that, because I'm not going to really cover that whole first week necessarily on this one. Although I will give you a little, uh, a few tidbits on what we do. So the first day has one job, and that is to remove friction. You are not trying to inspire anyone on day one. You're not trying to transmit culture. You're not trying to train them in all of the things they need to do. You are trying to make sure that this person who just made a significant life decision does not spend their first day feeling like an afterthought. If pre-boarding was done correctly, then day one is mostly execution. The equipment is there, the paperwork is done, the new hire knows where to go and who to ask for. The first day then becomes about people and clarity, not logistics. Now, I'm going to tell you this. The first 30 minutes matter more than anything. This is not, um, a tour. It's not a compliance video. It's not a stack of reading material. It should be three things in the first 30 minutes. First, they need to know exactly who they report to and how that relationship works. Not the org chart version, the real version. So this is why I say, ideally, they are meeting with their manager first thing. How often will we meet? How do you prefer to communicate? When I have a question, do I Slack you? Do I walk over? Do I wait for our one-on-one? These are major logistics that they need to know. They are operating instructions for the relationship that determines whether this person succeeds. We have a getting to know you that we do. We have it, uh, of course the leader and the employee does it, but really we do it with all of our staff and the new employee. And it asks these kinds of questions around, "How do you like to communicate? How do you like to, uh, you know, what motivates you? What shuts you down?" And then it has some fun questions on it, like, "Do you like pickles on tuna sandwiches?" And we think that that document, it's so easy to fill out and it seems harmless, but it tells you so much about an individual and starts helping you understand, especially if you are their leader, how you're going to work together and how you're going to communicate, and really sets that tone rather than just letting things unfold and then having to, to course correct later. The second thing they need is they need to know what success looks like this week. So not in year one, not in quarter one, just this week. What does I had a good first week actually mean? Most new hires, most leaders actually have no idea. And so they spend the week kind of guessing and inferring and feeling maybe like they're behind before they even got started. So the manager in their meeting states this explicitly in the first 30 minutes. This is what we're going to do this week. These are the things that I think should be accomplished this week. It's not a performance checkup. It's not a performance standard. It's just a map of this is what our first week looks like. The third thing that has to happen in the first day, of course, and really in their first few hours, is that they meet their buddy. That person whose job it is to answer the questions the new hire is afraid to ask anyone else. We have definitely set times throughout the first week that the buddy meets with the individual. And we want that absolutely happening on day one and then throughout that first week and really that the first 30 days. So that, that program is really important and I think crucial. That buddy is the person that they can ask all the things to that they couldn't ask somebody else. I think buddies have to be somebody not on their team. Um, it has to be somebody kind of cross-functionally maybe that they're going to work with. But I do think that that's absolutely crucial. The rest of that first day is introductions and orientation, but intentional introductions. The five to ten people whose work actually intersects with theirs. It can be a tour. You can give a tour if you need to. Um, but it's not just this general tour of, you know, this is Sarah and this is her first day. It's really intentional, um, introductions. I told you that we have that getting to know you document. I'll link that in this so that you can see exactly what it is. Um, but we have that getting to know you document. And we have in the first day, we have our new hires go through it with at least one or two team members. And then by day three, because we're a small team, they've gone through it with everybody on our team. But I would say if you're in a larger organization, within their first week, you can give them the opportunity to go through a document like that with the people they're going to interact with the most. It doesn't have to be everybody in the organization, but the people they're going to interact with the most. I'll tell you that does a couple things. One, it allows them to start to meet people and get to know how they work and get to know how they're motivated. It also then frees up the manager during that time because the new hire is occupied. The new hire has somebody else that they're talking to in that moment, and the manager can then do their day job. They can do, do the things they other need, they need to do without feeling like the new hire is right there. So that's the first day. Again, I map out the entire first week on the YouTube video. I'll have linked, um, for you. But let's then go into the first 30 days. I think onboarding lasts 90 days. I'm just going to tell you that right now. And some people scoff at me, and some people say that's way too long. I don't think it's 90 days to ramp fully. And, and I, I will say this is probably different for every business. I don't think it's 90 days to fully ramp. They are certainly doing the job earlier than 90 days, but I think it's 90 days to fully understand the business, their role, their future, all of these things. And the first 30 days is probably the most crucial of that, where they are still doing a ton of training. If the first day is about removing friction, the first 30 days are about building clarity. So that is role clarity, relationship clarity, performance clarity. The new hire should come out of those first 30 days knowing exactly what they own, who they work with, and how their performance is being evaluated. And then at each milestone, 30, 60, 90, they should know where they stand. So there are really four things that have to happen inside this window of 30 days. The first one is role clarity. That goes beyond the job description. We've talked before about our skills framework. Our skills framework says for every role what they have to have coming in. So this is when we hire you, we expect you to come in with these skills. And then what we're going to train at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. And that is what we would go over early on week one or two with a new hire. Because we want them to understand at the end of 30 days, we're going to have trained you on all of these things. And at the end of this, we expect you to be at the level that your role requires in these things that we have trained you on. In a small business, this conversation is so important because roles tend to be less defined and a little bit more fluid. And so they need to understand fully what they've signed up for. The second thing that the first 30 days has to have is manager check-ins that are scheduled. This is not a my door is always open or we will just schedule things as we have time. Nope. This is a standing touch point weekly where the leader and the new hire sit down and talk about what is working and what is not. The third thing that needs to happen in the first 30 days is that the training is actually relevant. This is where our skills framework document really helps us because we know exactly what needs to be trained on and how we're going to train it. A lot of times the default is just to shadow. So you just follow so and so around for a few days and you'll pick it up. And that is not a training plan. It is more an observation exercise. It transfers knowledge kind of inconsistently, right? It gives the new hire no framework for what they're supposed to be absorbing, and it puts the burden of sense-making entirely on someone who doesn't have that context to make any sense of anything. So if the require, if the role requires specific knowledge or skills, build a list of what those are, sequence them, and then assign owners to each. You as HR do not have to be the trainer of all of this, but you do need to have it documented. So a simple skills framework document with a list, a timeline, and a named owner who's going to train it next to each one is completely enough. What it cannot be, what you cannot have is this, we're just going to figure this out by proximity. We're just going to put them close to somebody and hope they absorb it. And then finally, the first, the fourth thing that the first 30 days needs is early feedback and correction. You don't want to wait 30, 60, 90 days to start correcting things that they're maybe not picking up on. You want to do that early and often. We tell people in our environment, we are high feedback. We give a lot of feedback, and we will give it early and often because our clients expect certain things from us. And if something feels off, if the new hire is misunderstanding the role or they're approaching work incorrectly or they're missing expectations they did not know existed, we want to tell them early on. We want to correct that before it's so ingrained in what they're doing. If you wait until the quarterly review or the 90-day check-in, then that behavior sticks. It's harder to correct. Early correction, it's not punitive. It is the job. This is their training timeframe. This is when they're most moldable. This is when they're most open to the feedback. It is frustrating to be doing something for seven months straight and then be told you're doing it wrong. It's easier for them to absorb it when they've only done it once and then now we're correcting how to do it. So early feedback is so unbelievably important in those first 30 days. All right. So I told you that I think onboarding goes 90 days, and we have specific things that we do in 30, 60, 90. We, we build out every minute of their week one and their week two and really kind of almost their first month. And I can certainly do an episode where I dig into all of that specifically if you would like to hear it. But I think what I've given you so far, kind of that first 30 days, that pre-boarding, the buddy situation, the first day, first 30 days, that's already a lot. And so for somebody who's just trying to wrap their head around it, I just want to stop there. Your role in onboarding is not execution. It is consistency. I think that there are a couple of things that fall under your protection regardless of who owns the day-to-day. So what do you own as HR? First, you own consistency of experience. Every new hire in the organization goes through the same structural process. Not the same conversations. Of course, those are going to differ by role, by manager, by context, but structure, checkpoints, documentation, you own making sure that their experience is consistent. Number two, of course, compliance. This is probably the easiest one. You know the paperwork exists for a reason. You own confirming it's complete and everything is good. They're set up in payroll, all of that. You know, it's not glamorous, it's not fun, it's not sexy, but it is non-negotiable. Three is documentation. You want to document their onboarding process, the pre-boarding checklist, the day one plan, the 30, 60, 90 day skills framework. These are records. It helps you to start a documentation process for this employee. We have a whole documentation episode, but this helps you to start a documentation process that shows they went through these trainings, they went through these conversations. So at the time of a check-in when they should know these things, you can prove that you actually trained them on it. And then the last thing that you own is a repeatable experience, meaning that the framework shouldn't be so complicated that it's hard to repeat employee after employee. The goal is that onboarding does not depend on whether you have an organized manager or an unorganized manager or whether the new hire happened to start during a calm week or a busy week or your outsourced IT vendor was told in time. You have a repeatable system that no matter who else is involved, it runs. Those are the things that I think HR owns in the onboarding process. So here's where we land with this. Onboarding fails in small businesses, not because people do not care, but because the process is manager-dependent, undefined, and triggered way too late. The fix is not a bigger HR department or more, uh, HR focus on making sure every piece is executed. That's going to drive you crazy. It is a pre-boarding checklist, a structured day one, a buddy manager check-ins, and a 30, 60, 90 day expectation document. And then finally, really clear expectations between what the manager executes and what HR owns. None of these things require expensive software. None of them require a dedicated onboarding team. Every single one of them can be built by an HR practitioner in a small business with a document, a checklist, and just some authority to hold managers accountable to the standard. The new hire who walks in on day one after losing sleep the night before deserves to be met with a plan. And the plan is yours to build, but not necessarily yours to execute. So this is something that we do. We have been called in on projects with teams who want us to help build a repeatable, executable onboarding program for them. And we come in, we learn their business, and then we build these steps. We build a pre-boarding step and we create templatable communication plans. Now, again, with your manager emails, with your buddy emails, I don't want it to be just an AI robot template, but we can absolutely create some, um, easy pathways for them to do the things that we're asking them to do. And then we build, you know, what does week one look like? What does week two look like? And yes, it can be customized by role, but we give enough flexibility in our plan that things can be adjusted where they need to be easily without having to change the entire plan each time. We build these skills frameworks. So by role, we sit down and we say, what do they need to come in with at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days? What are we going to teach them? We build those skills framework. It's a big project. It can be a big project from a time perspective, but once it's done and we've got the first hire that goes through this formal onboarding process, you always see a difference every single time. So while some of this may feel like a big undertaking, I promise you it's one that the ROI pays for itself with just one hire. I hope this was helpful. Again, if you want to see more of this, I don't want to go into all of the details if people don't want it, but if this is something that you would be really interested in hearing more about, then please let me know, um, in the comments or, you know, message me on LinkedIn and I would be happy to put together some more details. There's so many different directions we could take this. So some more details on how we do onboarding specifically inside our business and with our clients. Thanks so much for being here. I'll see you next time.