Onboard your new hire with ease
Written by katie test davis
So you just hired your new communications director (or other communications teammate, we aren’t picky about titles here at Forthright). First, congratulations! I’m so excited you found a great person for your organization.
Now, let’s set them up for success. Onboarding is just as critical as selecting the right human.
Studies show that solid onboarding is worth its weight in gold. Research shows that effective onboarding can improve employee retention and productivity by 52 percent and 60 percent, respectively.
Here are the ingredients of an effective onboarding.
30/60/90 day goals
The first thing any new hire needs to know is: what does success look like? Selecting goals allows you to make expectations explicit for your new hire and ensures your up and coming rockstar is focusing on the most important priorities.
Creating these goals also helps YOU, as the manager, get clear with yourself about how you want your new hire to spend their time.
Personally, I like to create short-term goals that move the organization forward, but also help the new hire get grounded. For example, a great project for a new communications teammate is to conduct a communications audit (here’s more on that) to help them understand who your target audiences are, and how you’re currently communicating with them.
Another great short-term project – if the hire is in a communications leadership position – is creating a strategic communications plan, outlining the ongoing activities and tactics that they will be doing and how they will measure success. Not only is this an essential ingredient to an effective communications program, it’s also a productive way to help them understand all the moving parts of their job. They should easily be able to accomplish this in the first 90 days.
organizational grounding
I’d argue that communicators – more than any other role at an organization (except for maybe the executive director, but even then…) – need to understand every single bit of the organization’s work in order to be effective.
That’s where contextual onboarding comes into play. Your new communicator needs to start getting to know all the different key functions and start building relationships.
I’ve been the head of communications at multiple organizations. At each one, I invested a huge amount of time in building relationships across functions, with the end goal of understanding what each department was working on. The best way to do this with your new hire is sending them on a listening tour across the organization.
Ensure that your new hire has time carved out to meet 1:1 with each program lead and that they use that time to ask questions and build relationships. Ensure they know how to describe their new role, and ask them to brainstorm a conversation guide/interview questions before they go so that they are making the most out of their time.
feedback and debriefs
I think you know how we feel about feedback at Forthright: we love it 24/7/365. It’s our absolute favorite and an essential ingredient in ensuring high-quality work and building a team where everyone belongs.
Creating a relationship from day one where feedback flows easily and regularly in both directions (from you to your new hire and from your new hire to you) will pay off in spades as you work together.
A few ways to do that include:
Asking for feedback on the onboarding process
Debriefing how assignments are going (take time to explain your edits verbally for the first few documents)
Building feedback into your check-ins in a very intentional way (for example, have a section of your check-in agenda dedicated to feedback)
We’re so excited that you found a great new teammate. Please let us know if we can be helpful as you set them up for success and get them going on projects!
PS - The Management Center has a great 30/60/90 day onboarding template we love.
