Onboarding is not just for new employees. Here is who else needs it.

And so the next time that I hired someone on a project basis, I created an onboarding document. And I said, hey, here is a little bit about the company, a little bit about my work style, how I like to meet with team members, where to find stuff. It’s Monday today, let’s check in on Wednesday, make sure we’re all on the same page. Friday, I’d love to get an update on where things are at. And this is someone that was only going to be working with me for three weeks.

But I did it. I wrote it all up. She asked some questions, I answered them. We checked in on Wednesday, we worked through it. Friday, she sent me that status email. And it was such a different experience. Welcome to the Managing Made Simple Podcast. I’m Lea Garvin, your host and team operations consultant. Through this show and my signature Ops Playbook, I condense a decade of experience driving team operations in some of the most influential companies in tech to save you time, money, and stress.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner who realized that running a team isn’t as easy as you thought it would be, or a new manager looking to learn the ropes, or a seasoned manager ready to up their game. Everyone is welcome to hang out with Managing Made Simple. From conflicts, to feedback, to delegating, and more, we leave no stone unturned when it comes to what makes us love managing, kind of hate it, and everything in between.

Let’s go. Welcome back to the show. Today, I want to talk about two misconceptions that come into play when we’re talking about onboarding, right? Because these misconceptions can actually cause us to not create a great onboarding experience, which will really make your team members miss out on the opportunity to hit the ground running and be successful through a role change. And so the first misconception that I want to debunk is that we only need to do onboarding when someone is new to the team or new to the company.

OK, now, first of all, let me roll back the tape. What is onboarding? So onboarding is a certain set of things that you do to help someone that is approaching a new role get up to speed. So onboard onto your team or role or company. This is, you know, learning the ropes, learning things about the company or team, about the priorities, about job, you know, like working norms, things like that, expectations, all of those things. And we can approach that really, really well where someone feels like by the end of that, they are totally ingrained in the culture.

They understand, you know, what success looks like, how to be effective in their role, what the expectations of them are in the first 30, 60, 90 days. We can do it really well. Or someone can feel like, well, I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m kind of sitting around. I don’t really, you know, I’m just kind of waiting for someone to tell me what to do. Now, in the second example I just gave, that actually happens more commonly.

We don’t really know, you know, what what to do when we start a company. Our manager’s busy or not there. Everyone’s underwater. No one can really show us the ropes. We don’t know anybody. So we don’t feel comfortable asking questions. And that new person just kind of sits and waits. Now, that person’s already getting paid, most likely, right? They’re not on commission in most cases. And so that’s just costing you money every single day. And that employee is probably, it’s costing them their excitement for the job.

When we join a new role is like the highest, is that moment of highest excitement. This person is coming in likely really eager to be there. They want to bring their skills. They want to show impact. And when we don’t onboard them, which means we don’t really show them how to be successful. We don’t show them, teach them about the company. We don’t spend that time. That excitement starts deflating, right? Like a balloon with a hole in it that’s just withering down to the ground.

And so when we don’t approach onboarding thoughtfully, that’s where we can really chip away from this enthusiasm. And then when you have new team members that aren’t really excited about it, it doesn’t allow them to be successful right away, right? It can also make other team members feel like, yeah, this company does kind of suck. Like, what are we doing here? And so you want to capitalize on that excitement of a new person to bring like rise all the boats, right?

Instead of kind of bringing down everybody to a level of thinking, what are we even doing here? Okay. So that’s why we want to explore these misconceptions and reframe them. So my first misconception I want to talk about is thinking that onboarding, as I mentioned, is only for new employees or folks that are just starting a new job. And when we believe this, we don’t do anything when someone’s job changes or like they become a manager, which is another way that their job is changing.

So if I was an administrative assistant on a team and I become a project manager, or let’s say I was a project manager and I become an account executive, okay, let’s say my role changes like that. A lot of times we don’t think about the need for fully re-onboarding someone as if they had just joined your team from scratch. Okay. And this is something I talk about a little bit with Jessica Heller in episode seven of the podcast.

If you want to talk about, learn a little bit more about nuances of onboarding and re-onboarding, go hop over to that one. But what we have to do instead of thinking, okay, we only onboard when someone’s new is thinking about every single time there’s a shift or transition that that’s an opportunity to re-onboard. Now let’s look at what happens when we don’t re-onboard someone. Well, I know when I’ve changed roles on a team that I was on, when I haven’t kind of fully made that shift and had a re-onboarding, I’m still kind of thinking about that previous job.

Sometimes people are still asking me to do tasks from that previous job. And I’ve seen this come up a lot for folks that have moved out of maybe an administrative assistant job and into a project manager, project coordinator is people still look at them as out of their job. They’re going to them for the same things. They’re asking them for help with things that are more administrative. And that it’s really hard for that person to set that boundary that, Hey, I’m in a new job here.

Those things are not part of my job anymore. I love to help out, but actually I don’t have the bandwidth. And it can create a lot of tension on setting that boundary. You know, in a similar vein, if we were a individual contributor, we shift into a manager role and a lot of the individual contributor responsibilities, maybe are following a team member now, instead of us, not, not sort of thinking in terms of this is a new job in following through with a re onboarding, you know, that could make us still kind of keep some of those older responsibilities, make a really hard delineation of tasks between us and our team member.

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve been talking with a business owner or manager, and they’ve said, I want to be a better manager. I just don’t know the steps. Tell me what to do and I’ll do it. And frankly, I’ve felt that way too. Even when I had been managing people for a while, because this stuff is hard and it changes all the time. So the last time someone asked me for the steps, I made a cheat sheet, head to Leah Garvin.com slash scorecard for 20 things you can do this month to be a better manager.

This is literally your tell me what to do and I’ll do it steps to motivate your team and get better results. There’s no time like the present. Grab the scorecard or write freaking out. Leah Garvin.com slash scorecard. So instead of kind of thinking, okay, that’s only for new, you know, as a manager, as a leader, as a business owner, thinking about what is that process for re onboarding a new team member? You know, having a conversation about what are the changes in role responsibilities?

How do we want to let go of the previous work? You know, how do we want to really mark this transition with the broader team so that folks aren’t coming to you for the old responsibilities? Things like that. And then putting something into place that really clearly makes that shift. Because when we do that, instead of someone kind of like having a leg on either side of the fence and they’re feeling like in a game of tug of war, that person can fully feel like, yes, I’m in this new role.

This thing that I’m excited about. They can hit the ground running. They can start delivering impact there without, again, feeling like they’re being pulled in different directions. Because when we’re pulled in different directions, we can’t operate at our best. We can’t deliver our best results. We can’t produce the, you know, impact that we sought out to do. If we were being promoted or into a manager, we might be really needed to do the new responsibilities. And it’s kind of costing the rest of the team that we’re still falling into some of the old patterns we were before.

So we really want to make this big shift. Now, the second misconception that we can run into with onboarding is thinking about onboarding as it’s only for full-time employees. It’s only something that we do when people are going to be here for the long haul. Now, why is this a problem? Well, because anybody working with us in our team, whether it’s for a one or two week project basis or six months or working on, you know, part time, whoever is going to be interfacing with our company or team, they have to understand the ropes of the team, the working norms, what success looks like, what are our priorities, right?

All of these areas that I talk about in the Ops Playbook that we map out for how an effective team is run, everybody has to understand what those are. So if we don’t give some kind of, even if it’s a more consolidated or accelerated onboarding experience to folks that are just joining your company for a brief amount of time, if we skip over that, we haven’t had a conversation to set expectations. That person doesn’t know what success looks like.

And you’ve got to think about it. Every single person, no matter what they’re doing, they want to be successful. They’re joining your team. They’re working with your business because they want to do good work. We got to believe that, right? Otherwise, what’s the point? And so knowing that, we want to create the conditions that that person can be most effective. And I will tell you, I have hired virtual assistants or someone to work on a project basis and not done that onboarding and just send an email and be like, hey, here’s the Google Drive folder.

I have this. Here’s this document here. Can you put together this thing? And I did not get the results that I was hoping for. And whose fault is that? It’s my fault. Okay. And I was disappointed. I was frustrated. I thought, oh, I don’t want to hire people, see how much effort it is, right? All the things that we think about. But the facts are, I didn’t do the onboarding. I didn’t sit down with that person and say, hey, I know we’re going to jam on this project for two weeks.

Let’s talk about where all the files are, how I like to review things, when I’d like to see an update. You know, here’s all the brand materials, whatever. I didn’t set expectations around, you know, work, around updates, around, you know, when I want to be brought in the loop, communication norms, none of it. And then when I didn’t get the results I wanted, that was on me. Okay. So that is why we want to think about anytime anyone’s going to be interfacing with the team or the company, there needs to be some kind of onboarding.

And again, it can be lightweight if it’s for something that’s, you know, it could be a meeting like I just described, where you kind of talk about the ropes and kind of open the door for that. It could be creating a document. It could be creating a checklist of a process. But we want to do something because then, right, if I take that same story, because I have now, I did course correct. And so the next time that I hired someone on a project basis, I created an onboarding document.

And I said, hey, here is a little bit about the company, a little bit about my work style, how I like to meet with team members, where to find stuff. Let’s, you know, this it’s Monday today. Let’s check in on Wednesday. Make sure we’re all on the same page. Friday, I’d love to get an update on where things are at. And this is someone that was only going to be working with me for three weeks. But I did it.

I wrote it all up. She asked some questions. I answered them. We checked in on Wednesday. We worked through it. Friday, she sent me that status email. And it was such a different experience. I felt like, oh, OK, I want this person way longer than three weeks, first of all, because this was really working for me. And I realized that by getting it on paper and mapping it out, I treated this person as if they were a full-time employee that should be set up for success, know what success looks like, all that good stuff.

And then the output I got from them was as if they were a full-time team member, even though it was only going to be for a few weeks. And so the quality of the work was better. I was able to get what I wanted without a bunch of turns and iterations and things like that. So I was able to get those results faster. Right. So that was a huge time and money savings right there. And the stress was relieved on me.

Right. I could go back to focusing on what I want to do instead of worrying about, is this person going to get it right? Am I going to have to find someone else? Am I going to have to redo it? Right. All of that energy, I didn’t have to be focusing on it because I created a really legitimate, substantial onboarding process that frankly, it only took me like 20 minutes to write up that email. And so I also want to caveat that, that if you’re not doing any onboarding for folks that are working for your team for a short amount of time, because you think you don’t have time for that, take 20 minutes, write up a couple of things, a little bit of the company, a little bit about your work style, a little about your kind of working norm expectations, what success looks like with that project.

That kind of thing should not take you more than 20 minutes and that will save you hours on the back end. Okay. So now let’s go reframe those two misconceptions that onboarding only happens when you’re new, not when you actually get a new role in a team. Okay. So we’re going to do onboarding for the new roles and not thinking you only onboard for folks working full-time your team, but you do some kind of onboarding for anybody interfacing with your team.

And when you do those things, it’s going to be transformational. And that is why onboarding is the first area we dive into in the Ops Playbook. Because when we think about this and figure out what is that process that I need on my team to make sure that people can hit the ground running, that they know what my expectations are the first week. Am I just going to be here as a sponge absorbing things, meeting with people?

Or am I expected to, by the end of week one, have been really cranking out results? Whatever you want to see, you got to spell it out. What does it look like after a few weeks? How do you actually gauge that someone has really understood what the job is about? Maybe there’s an assessment. Maybe you have a check-in. A lot of teams I work with, we set up a 90-day kind of checkpoint, see how things are going.

Okay. That’s why we spell this out, because being able to make sure it’s clear and consistent for every single person is going to continue to elevate the quality of work on your team and make sure that everybody joins your team, feels set up for success. Remember that they keep that new, higher energy up. They help everybody on your team feel re-energized about the team. So that is why we focus on that in our playbook. And I really hope whatever it looks like for you, you map it out.

How can all team members, regardless of if it’s brand new, brand new, or they’re working their full time or only a few weeks, how can they be set up for success from the beginning? See you next time. That’s all I have for today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Managing Made Simple podcast, where my goal is to demystify the job of people management so that together we can make the workplace somewhere everyone can thrive.

With that said, let’s spread the word. If you love this episode, please pass it along to someone who might benefit from it. See you next time.