The first 90 days of a new appointment is make it or break it for your new employees. Your company’s communication strategy is a critical element of your company’s onboarding process if you want to retain the great people you’ve recruited.
“Your goal in every transition is to get as rapidly as possible to the break-even point,” writes Michael D. Watkins, co-founder of leadership development company Genesis Advisers in his book, “The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter.”
The “break-even point,” as Watkins calls it, is the point at which the employee is contributing more resources than they are consuming from the company. Getting to that critical point early has an exponentially higher return for employees who transition well. Those who take longer to get to the break-even point have a lower value to the company over time and an uphill battle to climb for the rest of their time in that role in order to undo bad first impressions made in the first quarter of their appointment.
How can your human resources team get your new employees to that break-even point more quickly? Here are a few tips:
- Highlight what is important for your team. New hires are overwhelmed with a mountain of information as they learn the new role, the company, and the social dynamic of their new workplace. Visual guides to key goals, stakeholders, and goals will speed the process along and get your employees to “break-even” more quickly.
- Integrate your new employees as part of the team. When you’re new, learning names and positions can be a real challenge for even the most outgoing employees. Assimilation for your new employees is paramount to their success, so find creative ways to keep names, faces, and positions fresh.
- Loop your new staff into existing announcements and events. Nothing can make someone feel like an outsider more quickly than everyone else assuming they already know about upcoming events, meetings, or office gatherings that were organized before they joined the team.
We believe that improving your communications strategy to better welcome new employees is a perfect use for your Retriever Digital Signs. Highlight key benchmarks and goals in your playlist, showcase your organization’s stakeholders with names, images and video, and keep the staff picnic at the front of mind, even if someone wasn’t on the original email.
It takes just moments to make a dramatic shift on the longterm success of your new hires. We can help you get started. In fact, we’ve written a book all about how to effectively communicate as a Human Resources professional, which we’d love to give you a free copy of: