Episode 200: Onboarding at a High Level - Bringing on new employees the right way (or being that new employee)
Welcome to another edition of Around with Randall, your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.
It's wonderful to have you take a few minutes of your day to join me, Randall, on this edition of Around with Randall. I have had a couple of clients who have brought on new individuals into the Foundation Development Advancement Office. With what we've gone through over the last year—or years—with employee turnover, it's not a big surprise. But a part of that process has been a discussion about how they can make the onboarding, the orientation, the first 90 days, or maybe even into the first six months, all the way through that period where people are adjusting, a better quality experience. The cost of losing an employee in a short period of time, whether it's in philanthropy or another part of an organization, is incredibly costly. In philanthropy, particularly with major gifts, it's catastrophic.
When we lose a leader, or there is a culture change, or in healthcare when we're talking about mergers or budgetary challenges, so many things are out of our control. The one thing we can do is try to keep great people and attract great people. That onboarding process is really critical. So today, I want to spend just a few minutes chatting about what makes a great onboarding process.
Let me start with what I'm not going to talk about, which may be a little surprising. I'm not going to talk about what most people think of when they think of onboarding—a full day where we sit and it feels like we're shoving water through a garden hose in the mouths of all of our new employees. "Here's everything you need to know about the organization. You get a nice lunch, and go to your job the next day—and by the way, you should know everything." Yeah, we're not going to talk about that. We're also not going to talk about benefits, parking, or getting an ID. Those are things the organization as a whole probably addresses. If you're a smaller nonprofit, you may have to worry about them, but to be candid, that's not why people have bad onboarding experiences. It's not because they couldn't read the benefits package; it's because there wasn't a well-thought-out process.
There are two things to start with, a kind of philosophical methodology as part of the discussion, and then we'll talk about the tactics—how you actually do this. What is it that we're trying to accomplish? I think sometimes we fail to ask that basic question. If we ask great HR people, or individuals who bring on employees across an organization, what they're really trying to do, they're not going to say, "We have to make sure they get 100% on a test about benefits." That's not the question or the answer anyone involved in onboarding is concerned with.
I think what we want in an onboarding process is basic: we want our employees to feel valued from the minute they walk in, to feel that they made a great decision joining the organization, and to have hope that they will enjoy their job. We want there to be a defined sense of direction in the organization—or at least in the department. We also want them to feel part of a larger effort. There's nothing worse than feeling isolated, like you're the only one doing the work, just a small cog in a big wheel. That's a hard thing to overcome if that's how people feel.
We want them to feel and understand the culture and productivity—what we're all trying to accomplish. In those first days and months, it’s about the new employee feeling like they've arrived at a place that mirrors what they want professionally, with a welcoming culture (whatever that means for them), professionalism, and accountability. Most people don't want to go through life without accomplishing anything; we just need help doing it. We want a sense of teamwork, guidance, and direction, where everyone is rowing in the same direction.
If these things are missing, the consequences can be significant. First, it negatively affects employee engagement and can lower those scores. If new employees don't feel a sense of positive energy, or that their decision to join was a good one, they start feeling like, "Wow, this was a bad decision. I'm stuck." That's not the feeling we want in the office.
Second, this is where increased turnover occurs. When employees don’t have a good understanding of the organization, or don’t feel they made a good decision, they leave, especially in today's employment market, where they have other options. This leads to job-hopping resumes, where employees move every 12-16 months, which drives me crazy. But maybe that's not entirely their fault.
Third, studies show that good orientation and onboarding lead to longer-term productivity. If first impressions are poor—whether in jobs or daily life—they're hard to overcome. If the first weeks or month of a job are a disaster, it’s difficult to recover, even if the job eventually turns out great. Onboarding helps employees reach productivity faster, particularly in philanthropy, where there’s pressure to deliver revenue. Strong onboarding discussions and processes help employees understand what they’re trying to accomplish and get there faster.
Fourth, poor team integration can undermine even great employees. If the environment in the department is poor, it’s hard to retain good staff, even if they love the organization’s mission. People naturally seek social connections, and without that, they’ll look for work elsewhere.
Fifth, confusion and miscommunication can wreak havoc on new employees. After a great hiring process, they may feel lost or stuck if there’s no clarity about the organization or their role. This drives people away quickly.
Finally, a poor onboarding experience diminishes the employer brand. If, after a week, a new employee goes out with friends and says, "This place sucks. I can’t believe I took this job," that reflects poorly on the organization.
Do you want those kind of situations where your employees are going out and telling people, “These people are confused. I don't know what's going up”? You can't have that because that increases your brand. Eventually, you may need more people, and maybe one of those other people that were at that table having a beer on that Friday night after that first week are people you want maybe down the road. Are they likely to consider you if you're not doing what you should be to make people feel embraced? They feel a part of a bigger effort to understand what they should be doing.
These are things that happen when we don't create the right onboarding.
So what does this onboarding look like? I think that there are three main areas that we have to think about when we are leaders. And by the way, if you're an employee coming into a new organization or you've been there for a while, write these down and say, "I want these things. Can you help me do these things?" It's incumbent upon leaders, I think, to present the program. But if you don't have that kind of leader or that kind of thought process in the organization, go fight for it because if you like your job, you like being what you do, you like to go ask for some of these things.
So we're going to break down in three areas: First, the organization. The second is the skills, and the third is the team.
So I'm going to start with the organization as a whole. I'm not talking about, “Hey, here's who we are. Here is a two-page sheet on our facts and figures. Go read it and memorize it.” Yeah, any idiot can do that. Give that; it's not good leadership.
What does understanding the organization look like? Well, the first thing is, how do you help someone meet the people in the organization? Do you give them a list of 10 people, 15 people, and say, "We're going to help schedule time with these people inside the organization?" And they're going to tell you why they like to work here and what they do and why it's important and how it interacts with what we do in philanthropy. Do you take them and introduce them face to face? Do you make it easy? If you're in a university, who are the 15 people that are the critical meets that they have to have to be effective in their job? Outside of the office, in a hospital, healthcare, who are the key physicians or department chairs or directors of service areas? How do you get them to know the greater reason people are gathered here together?
And then there's the piece internally: are you mandating everybody on the team needs to spend an hour or two with the new employee, with Bob or Cindy? Are they assigned a day where they are just shadowing people? And we'll get to that on the external side here in a moment. But sometimes it's just sitting in meetings and listening and asking questions. We want you for 90 days just to learn.
The second thing is, particularly on the sizes of the facilities, it's just knowing the organization's structure. One of the things that I did that was recommended to me when I went to the University of Nebraska was I took an hour every day for the first six months because there's like 41 buildings or something like that on the University of Nebraska campus here in Omaha. I just took an hour. I called it my walkabouts. I found the morgue, went down an elevator down the hallway, and I was like, "My gosh, it's the morgue." I went in. "Hi, I'm a new executive here. My name's Randall; I oversee philanthropy." To the morgue, I have a feeling I know what you do. Tell me about it.
Now I'd walk back, and then the next day I'd go a different direction. Just to get to know people, are you helping your employees do that? If you're an employee, are you doing that? Your small organization is pretty easy. Your big organization, are you getting out into those places to see what actually goes on on the front lines, particularly in philanthropy because we're the storytellers? It's tough to tell the story if you don't know it.
So knowing people, knowing the organization, number two, inside the organization is evaluation. Do you know if you're the employee? Does your new employee truly know—not talking about just HR—what they are going to be evaluated on? Do you sit down and say, "I want to walk you through what an evaluation will look like in a year, 90 days, or six months? I want to tell you the things I'm looking for."
I think one of the things I didn't do well, one of the things I did do well at the University of Nebraska Medical Center was when I showed up, I sat down, and I kind of did this. I had people say, "Well, this is what I think I should be evaluated on." "Yeah, I don't care about that. I'm going to evaluate you on this because this is what's going to move us in terms of money, dollars, fundraising, success." Well, that was a totally different series of conversations because then they knew what to expect and what we were going to do.
There's nothing worse than going through some period of time, going into either a 90-day review or maybe six months or maybe it's the year-end evaluation, and you've only been there eight months and you're like, "Why am I not being evaluated?" Well, that's because the leader didn't share what we were actually going to try to accomplish or you as the employee didn't ask.
A part of this also is how compensation works, particularly as we move into, with gift officers, more and more discussions about bonuses. I'm not getting into the details here, but if you go back to an episode in the podcast here, 72, talking about bonuses, and number 60 was about the overall. That was the study I did, 1,500 plus different individuals still very applicable right now, even though it's a year or two old, about what people want in their jobs. That's a part of this. How do we compensate people?
The third element of organization is culture. And really what I'm talking about here is what is it that we believe in? And that can be broken up into smaller parts. We need to talk about remote working. I'll often, or we hear often, what are the expectations? Are we a little more flexible when we get there or say, "Hey, you know, at eight o'clock, the door is open; you better be seated at your desk or be working wherever you're supposed to be?" What do we do in terms of respect? How often do we meet? Do we have opportunities to gather and socially connect? Helping people understand the social makeup, the cultural makeup.
Particularly, I think right now about remote, what's appropriate, what's not, setting some boundaries is really important.
It's the organizational piece, the skills piece. So this is about can they do their job? And we have to start with an evaluation of their skills. We think we know what their skill sets are when we interviewed them. Hopefully, if you're doing the interview process well, you can garner some of that information, but you really don't truly know until you get them in the job.
Are you doing a little pre-testing like how their skill sets? If they're a gift officer, do they know how to make phone calls? Do they actually know how to go see people? If they're in the database infrastructure finance, do they actually understand what we're doing? What is it that you can do to really evaluate where their starting point is? Because if you can do that, you can leave an immense amount of the problems that come when somebody says, “I don't know how to do my job” because you will have known I need to prepare them either with more education, more training, more opportunity, or less depending on their skill sets for their ad.
Don't forget—and this comes from another episode—I'm not going to get into this, but episode four of this podcast, 102, about what we're looking for—that most of the time I think we're looking for the wrong things in people. We assume based on their resume they have all these skills. I don't know if they do or not, but the point is we've got to do some evaluation because once we do that evaluation, then we can build out what this looks like.
If we're hiring people that don't have as much experience but have all the innate qualities, we can teach them the skills of the job, but we can't teach them the fire and the belly. Are they going to get there in the morning? Are they going to show up? Are they going to do their job? There's a sense of resiliency. They don't take things personally. They have this communication and connection to who we want representing the brand of our organization.
But maybe they don't have all the skills. Then we can start talking about finding tools to help you. I have a couple of new employees, and I've set out an onboarding process that includes all of these podcasts, from the moves management process to how to manage up to your new boss, along with readings about various aspects of where we are in the nonprofit world today. I mean, it's like one and a half pages of podcasts, readings, blog posts, and other materials because I want to give my clients something to do.
Does every employee need all of it? No. But if you can say, "Look, your weaknesses are in planned giving, and we really need you to be thinking about this. Here are three podcasts, two sheets of paper, and we're going to give you some time to talk with Randall about what this looks like," because your skill set is a little lacking, but boy, you're good in other areas, so you can start rolling on that.
Another way of doing this is through shadowing. I have a client I love working with; she's one of the best leaders I know. She has her new employee, who doesn't know much about philanthropy but has those intangibles that will make her great, shadowing her every day or assigning her to another leader. She says, "I want you to go with Bob or Cindy for the day. You're just going to watch them in their meetings when they go see a donor, when they're in an administrative meeting, when they're talking about strategy, when they're trying to implement a project."
Literally, they’re passing this person off, and she's already saying, "Man, I am learning so much about the culture, tactics, and what I need to be doing." What a great way to empower someone and show you care about them by providing those learning opportunities! All the while, she brought this new staff member to join me in a multi-million dollar ask, where we discussed how to make this gift come to fruition. Afterward, I asked her, "How do you think she did?" and she responded, "It was fascinating; I learned so much!"
Are you giving new people that opportunity? And if you're new, are you asking for these? "Hey, let me go shadow Bob or Cindy. They're doing incredible things. I think I could learn so much by just following them for a day and then apply that learning into what I need to accomplish."
Now let’s talk about the team, which is about collegiality. I want to start with the premise that I do not believe everyone in our offices has to be best friends. In fact, I probably advise against it. What and who is most important to an employee should be at home. However, we do need to function as a team in an environment to make what we’re trying to do possible. Everything is easier when we have a good team rather than trying to do it ourselves. It’s just that simple—different skill sets, different perspectives, and different opinions all meld together to help us come up with the best strategies.
I believe we waste too much time only doing team-building activities once a year. Why not do those things more informally throughout the year? I had a former client who did this really well; once a month, they hosted an hour-long lunch with everyone. They would bring their lunch, and we would just sit and chat. Some of the sub-departments in a large foundation started doing it, and they found they got to know their people better.
Think about a new employee: if you only do this once a year, they come in and wait eight months for the next gathering. Why not schedule it within two or three weeks of when the new employee arrives? Let them figure out where the parking is, the bathrooms are, and get the kind of basics. Why not have an informal gathering every time a new employee starts, if you can? It doesn’t have to be complicated or costly, but it can be very effective.
The second thing is sometimes we need to get off-site and break down the barriers of our office walls. Sometimes that just means grabbing lunch or drinks after work. What I used to find incredibly effective was asking my employees if I could join them at their son’s or daughter’s basketball or soccer tournament. They would often respond, “Seriously?” I’d say, “I like to know my people, and I like to know their families.” People would be surprised, but I genuinely cared.
It’s not something I did all the time, but doing it occasionally with the right people showed that I really cared. Getting to know your team outside of work builds rapport and trust that is highly effective. Finding ways to do it informally is critically important to building a team and bringing people into that team.
So, organizational and bigger picture skills—where do they add value? How do I give them the tools to be successful? Team building: how do I build a supportive environment around them? These are the things that make great onboarding processes.
My hope is you can take some of these ideas and say, “Okay, when the next new employee comes in, we're going to do this a little differently and get better.” We need to ensure that we are welcoming people and elevating them into the highest levels of engagement we can because that's what we need.
Eventually, this will lead to a better team, better productivity, and better outcomes. Good people are hard to find; we need to make sure they feel welcomed, empowered, and part of the process.
Don't forget to check out the blogs I post every couple of days—Tuesdays and Thursdays—at allotflanthropy.com. They’re interesting 90-second reads that give you something to think about. If you’d like to reach out to me, my email is podcast@allotflanthropy.com.
The world keeps spinning, and with every turn of our globe, we encounter more challenges. I believe the value of philanthropy has never been more needed and perhaps never been more underestimated in terms of its significance. Sometimes that can feel defeating, but I want you to know that what you’re doing every day is empowering—for you, for your community.
My all-time favorite saying is: "Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Then there are those who wonder what happened." At the end of the day, we are the people who make things happen. We’re looking for community leaders, partners, and philanthropists who also want to make things happen, to help those who are wondering what happened to make their situations better.
Philanthropy is all about the love of mankind, humankind. That’s what you do every day. I hope you feel that and know that, even amid struggles and challenges, you are making a difference every day. That’s something to hold on to and embrace, walking into the next day knowing you can do it all again.
I look forward to seeing you next time right back here on the next edition of Around with Randall. And don’t forget—make it a great day!