Here is a simple tool you can use to improve your employee onboarding process. You already know that employee onboarding is extremely important if your organization is going to be successful. A good onboarding process makes the employee feel like she has made the right decision, quickly exposes her to the company’s culture and improves the chance that you will successful retain her.
So here it is: the 30-60-90 Day Success Profile. You create a document that describes what you expect a SUCCESSFUL employee to be doing at 30 days after hire, 60 days after hire and 90 days after hire. What behavior do you expect the successful employee to have? What skills should she have acquired?
These goals should clearly define tasks that she is to acquire in order to complete her job. Make them S.M.A.R.T. goals. The more specific the goals are, the easier they are to measure. Telling an employee to ‘just do your best’ doesn’t help! Here is an example:
- At 30 days the successful employee will be able to demonstrate a basic understanding of our CRM system by creating a new customer record and sending an automated email from within the system.
- At 30 days the successful employee will have submitted a weekly report on time and completed without error.
By creating clear goals for what you want the employee to accomplish, you increase the chances that she will be successful. Also, because you must articulate the goal in advance, you’ll need to give some thought to what behavior you want to see in a good employee. (A lot of CEO’s that I know get tripped up here. They have a vague notion of what they are looking for in a successful employee but they can’t articulate it. Go ahead! Give it some thought in advance.)
After you have defined what the successful employee will be doing at 30 days, consider how she will behave at 60 days. What new skills do you expect she will have mastered? Here’s an example:
- At 30 days, the successful employee will be able to look up a customer in our CRM system and send them an email.
- At 60 days, the successful employee will be able to do an advanced find using multiple criteria in CRM and will be able to set up an email campaign to all customers that match that criteria.
PRO TIP: After you’ve created the list of behaviors you want to see from a successful employee, group those behaviors into categories. The categories can be anything that makes sense to you but some good ones include:
- Sales activities
- Software skills
- Reporting
- Teamwork
- Professionalism
- Meeting skills
- Presentation skills
- etc.
Some of these categories might be common to all individuals in your organization — teamwork and professionalism, for example. Some categories will be position specific.
In my next post, I’ll show you how to use the 30-60-90 Success Profile as a tool to quickly weed-out bad hires.
Now, here’s my challenge for you: Think of an open position you want to fill and come up with a list of behaviors that define “success” for that position. I’ll get you started. “At 30-days, the successful employee will be able to…”
Aloha and best regards,
Dave