Why GOOD employees quit… 5 MISTAKES to avoid..

Summary

• One in three companies retain their employees 50% longer than others by implementing effective onboarding.
• Proper onboarding is crucial and often overlooked, but can be templatized for efficiency.
• When employees fail, it's often due to poor onboarding, not their capabilities.
• Onboarding is similar to customer retention – it requires more than a single call or meeting.
• A premature exit of an employee can cost a company 100% to 300% of the person's annual salary.
• From personal experience, re-onboarding an employee with the right resources can lead to success.
• Pre-onboarding communication should start immediately after a job offer is accepted.
• Regular communication with the new hire is essential; twice daily check-ins for the first two weeks work well.
• New hires should have a structured agenda and understand the "why" behind each task.
• Clearly articulate 30, 60, and 90-day goals to set immediate expectations.
• Establish a strong feedback loop early to build trust and set standards.
• The five common onboarding mistakes include lack of pre-onboarding, insufficient manager communication, inadequate structure, unclear expectations, and the absence of a feedback loop.
• The five C's of onboarding are: Compliance, Clarity, Culture, Connection, and Check back.
• Ensure all legal and practical onboarding steps are met to avoid compliance issues.
• Clarify roles and goals to provide direction and focus for new hires.
• Immerse new employees in the company culture to foster a sense of belonging.
• Facilitate connections within the company and assign a 'buddy' if needed.
• Regularly check back with feedback and progress assessments to maintain alignment.
• Investing time in substantial onboarding saves costs and creates a positive, supportive work environment that pays off in the long term.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing an efficient onboarding process to keep your team happy and effective. Remember, proper onboarding can save you a lot of money in the long run. Here's how:

1. Start pre-onboarding immediately after someone accepts a job offer. Send an email outlining what they should expect, like system logins and the schedule for their first week.

2. Connect with your new hire twice a day for the first two weeks. Chat once in the morning and once in the evening. It'll help them feel supported and answer any questions they might have.

3. Create a daily agenda for the first one or two weeks. This will give them structure and help them understand what they're learning. Tell them why each task matters, so they know how it helps the team.

4. Set clear goals for the first 30, 60, and 90 days. Review these goals with the new team member to make sure they're on the right track.

5. Build a strong feedback loop early on. Let them know it's okay to give feedback, too. This helps build trust and shows you're open to hearing their ideas.

Here are the five key areas, or the five C's, to focus on:

• Compliance: Make sure all the paperwork is signed and they know about any company rules.
• Clarity: Give them clear goals so they know what they're working towards.
• Culture: Help them understand the company by connecting them with the right people and resources.
• Connection: Introduce them to their team and maybe assign a buddy, especially if you're not the best person to answer their work questions.
• Check back: Keep giving and asking for feedback regularly to ensure everyone is happy and productive.

Putting time into onboarding shows your team that you care. It helps create a supportive workplace where everyone wants to do their best. Use templates where you can, to make this easier and more consistent. A happy team is a productive team, and that's great for business!

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Onboarding starts the moment that they sign the job offer"

– Leila Hormozi

"I'm not hiring you to do work, I'm hiring you to solve problems"

– Leila Hormozi

"Trust is built through adversity"

– Leila Hormozi

"The more friction that you can put in on the front end, the smoother the ride will be on the back end"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you don't have time to focus on this onboarding… you don't have time not to do it"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

what is up today what i want to talk about is what one in three companies do to retain their employees 50 longer than the two out of three companies that don't if you didn't already guess this in your head it is pretty similar to what you do to retain your customers 50 longer which is onboarding this is something that um i think most companies especially when they're just starting up don't believe they have time for um and they don't focus on it all and the reason that about 76 of new onboards feel like they don't have the proper tools is because they believe that their manager actually doesn't have the bandwidth i actually believe that the managers haven't had the training and they haven't had the education on how to onboard because if you actually know how to onboard it's not as complicated as it seems and it really doesn't take much time because once you do it a couple of times you can templatize it i can tell you from my personal experience that almost every time somebody has not succeeded in one of my companies especially in the very beginning it's because they've had poor onboarding obviously there's times when that's not the case and the person comes in it's very obvious they were very different on the interviews than they are when they came in and we made a mistake in hiring that person but more often than not it's an internal issue right if you've really vetted the person in the process and you've gone through a thorough hiring process which i talked about in my other video then you know that it is on you to onboard the person correctly and i think that most people just lack the education to understand what the onboarding actually should look like it's very similar to clients which is i see a lot of people who say oh yes we do onboarding and i'm like what do you do for the onboarding and they're like we do an onboarding call and i'm like okay cool you do a call but where's everything else around the call right there's so much more to it than that and so that's what i want to break down today is the most common mistakes that i see and that i've made in terms of onboarding and then what uh the five c's of onboarding actually are um and hopefully you can remember that and it could be something that you can share with your team so that everyone and everyone that is a manager in your company or leader can implement this to make sure that you guys retain people 50 longer than everyone else um and so just so you know if you fire somebody or you lose somebody before having one year of employment they typically cost you between 100 and 300 of that annual salary and so i've talked about this in my other videos but it's a huge cost and a lot of companies don't focus on it and so if you want to go from feeling like you're turning and burning and you can't find good employees to focusing on what can i do to create good employees then you want to listen to this video i'll tell you a story which is i had a manager about three and a half four years ago who she onboarded a new employee and it was in like a finance operations department i had interviewed this person i was actually the last interview and i thought that she was fantastic i was like she's a skill man she's a culture match like i feel like she has the same values as people on the team i really feel like she's going to elevate the team so i was really excited for argument and about a weekend i could tell that the manager wasn't very excited and then two weeks then i could tell she really wasn't excited and three weeks and she's coming to me saying hey i really need to fire this woman and i was like you need to fire her like i felt like she was an absolute perfect fit it's very rare that i have that much confidence in somebody and so i said okay like let's dive in and look at what's going on here and the first thing i want to look at is how did you actually onboard that person and so when i asked her to give me the onboard documents or what she was doing to onboard that person it was essentially nothing right it was like we had one call and then i had her shadow a bunch of stuff read a bunch of stuff and look at a bunch of stuff and i was like oh gosh okay and that was when i realized that for my own team i really needed to put the processes in place that they knew how to onboard someone properly and so i created a lot more resources and trainings on how to do that that we can use internally and a lot of it was templates and so that's something i'll encourage at the end of this video is just how to kind of create that i think that the reason that a lot of people don't do this and they end up doing what she did right which i'll tell you that she actually when i went in i said we need to actually re-onboard her okay and so i had her redo do a proper onboarding using the resources i created and then she re-onboarded her and to this day she's still in our company kicking ass that's how much the onboarding makes a difference if you're thinking about yourself and you're like i can't really comprehend how much of a difference this would make just think about when you start using a new software right okay well if you don't have the onboarding to use the new software you don't know what buttons to click you don't know where to go you don't know who to talk to and so you're kind of left blind and you you could maybe use the software but you're only using like a fourth of its capacity and i see that as what happens with employees except they're only able to express a fourth of their capacity because they don't know how to utilize the business and the people within it the first five common mistakes that i see when it comes to onboarding employee are these the first one is the lack of pre onboarding okay so there's telling somebody and giving them a job offer and then accepting it and then there's their first day and a lot of people think okay well onboarding starts on day one onboarding does not start on day one onboarding starts the moment that they sign the job offer it's the communication between that and setting the expectations i'll give you the example which is something that we do is we're gonna send a an email out after that occurs and it's going to say all the things they should expect in the coming weeks and with a timeline so when should you expect the next email um what do you need to do on your end which is often setting up systems logins etc um and then what to expect in your first day and when you're going to get the schedule what your first week is going to look like okay so just setting the expectations for them because someone enters a new job they feel like there's a lot of uncertainty and there's no predictability and humans really like predictability so if you can tell them what's going to happen next and when it's going to happen they're going to feel a lot more comfortable coming in and they're actually going to be able to take a lot more action because they feel confident with that i would say that sending them a swag package some you know team gear some stuff like that like a poster of the core tenants like that stuff that we like to do as well and so you know do with that as you may that's the first piece the second piece is that once the person comes in they have their day one there's too little communication with the hiring manager and so when i say hiring manager i mean the person who is their supervisor okay so most of the time that is the person who hires them sometimes it's hr but and most people are probably watching my videos it's probably hiring me interests like sales manager that marketing manager ops manager that they're hiring a person okay so when they bring someone in what i do and i still do this with executives okay is i will talk to them twice a day every day for the first two weeks minimum and so when i say talk to them i don't mean like i'm slacking i'm slacking them in between i'm talking to them once in the morning for 30 minutes and then in the afternoon for 30 minutes so at the beginning and the end of their day and i can tell you like i've tried not doing that because it is a pain in the ass right you're like this is a lot of time talking to this person it works like a charm uh it gets the person to speed really quickly and it helps answer all their questions so they don't have constraints in the roadblocks once they when they're starting to you know get themselves educated understand the company this is something i still do to this day i typically do two times per day for the first two weeks and then you go down to one time per day for a couple weeks and then you go down to twice per week and then once per week onto a normal one-on-one cadence and i let them dictate this okay if i feel like they're really excelling and they're doing well then i'll say hey how are you feeling do you want to do less or more and typically they'll say hey i think we can wind it down a little bit if the person's not succeeding then obviously i'm just going to stick to the plan okay so that's the second thing is that most people don't do that much communication what most people do is they do like once a week once every other week and i've seen managers do this and i've i've let them have that autonomy within my company before never works out so that's the second thing is communication the third thing is that there's too much uh uns there's not enough structure when they're onboarding somebody something that i like to do when i'm onboarding is i want to make sure i've laid out hour by hour their agenda for the first one to two weeks what a lot of people do is they just say i need you to consume all of these things and shadow all this stuff but that leaves a few things which is one people like structure and regardless of what the job's gonna look like on the other side you want the structure to facilitate the learning and so yes maybe they don't need that much structure once they get in and in their role they won't have any provided after the onboarding but if you make that clear to them you say this is here so that you can quickly get up to speed on the company and so this is more than you will ever have any other time then that is okay within that structure what i like to do is i like to tell them why they're doing everything they're doing so if i'm gonna have them shadow somebody if i'm gonna have them do a one-on-one with somebody if i'm gonna have them introduced to somebody what's the outcome of the conversation i want them to have that person and what's the intention behind having them consume these things what do i want them to look for a lot of the times if you really want somebody to consume and learn something then you want them to take notes and give you feedback okay so that's a huge way that you can get someone to learn faster when you're onboarding them is you want them to give you feedback on the things they're consuming learning and the people they're talking to so that's the third one is that there's not enough structure now the fourth one is that there's unclear expectations so typical case scenario and this is probably what happened for the first year that we had a business was somebody would come in would on board them and then about a month two months into it you can tell that they're a little hesitant and every time we'd be on a one-on-one they're just like i just want to make sure i'm focusing on the right things and the reason for that is because we didn't have and i didn't set proper expectations off the gate so i was used to waiting a little bit and then setting kpis but i didn't have anything in the short term for them to aim for and so what we do now is we do 30 60 and 90 day goals okay and so if you're looking at that you just want to based on the role decide what are the most important things that you want them to accomplish within that amount of time and much of the time what i'll do is once that person's accepted a job offer i'll review this with them prior and say does this sound reasonable to you um if it's a you know say lower level role or one that i understand i might be able to set the expectations for them without having to get their input but if it's a high level role and maybe i don't have expertise in it i'm going to have to maybe even have them create it themselves right if i'm bringing an executive i'm going to have them create their 30 69 day plan give it to me and then i will review it if i'm hiring somebody who's a manager or an individual contributor i'm going to make it and then have them review it so it also depends on the expertise of the person but having that gives you the goals to shoot for and what you can do is just have check-ins at 30 60 90 that are specifically for reviewing those targets and to see were those reasonable if so what are the next ones these ones make sense are they also reasonable etc etc or have priorities changed and then the last piece is that they don't have a feedback loop and what i mean by this is a lot of times when somebody's coming in what we tend to do and this is what i tend to do in the beginning is you want to steer away from any conflict because there's usually not a huge amount of trust built um and there's not a huge amount of camaraderie and they've come into the team and they're new and you don't want to hurt their feelings you don't want to make them feel like they're less than you don't want to discourage them here's the thing trust is built through adversity and so when you can come to a person and say hey i love what you're doing but this right here it's not working or this that you did over here doesn't work with our team this is how we do it instead they then trust you to be transparent with them and they know hey layla will come to me when i'm doing something that isn't aligned with the company or with the role and she'll let me know she's not just gonna like ghost fire me one day and so the more friction that you can put in on the front end the smoother the ride will be on the back end it's kind of like if you're getting married it's like go through talking about all the you know uncomfortable before you get married and you will have a good marriage if you don't do that then on the back end there's gonna be way more friction and it's gonna lead to you know all sorts of you don't wanna deal with and so it's the same with onboarding something you wanna get all that friction out in the beginning so the rest of the ride is smooth now those are the five most common mistakes right we have lack of pre-onboarding meaning you think that onboarding starts on day one rather than right after they accept a job um we have too little communication which is you think that communicating once a week or twice a week is fine when someone's brand new when in reality twice a day is pretty effective um there's lack of structure so not having enough of a laid out agenda and a cadence for them in the beginning then there's unclear expectations not having the 30 69 today and then there's not having a feedback loop okay so you're not being able to uh quickly tell them where they are going right versus going wrong and so what i want to move to is what do you want with your onboarding okay so this is the framework that i think i got it from shrm which is uh it's a human resource resource um that by the way they have tons of good resources so i would go there and look at stuff if you have questions on people onboarding employment compliance all that stuff um but they call it the five c's of compliance and so my interpretation of it is this okay there's five c's and i'll just kind of tell you what it means to me because i don't necessarily follow exactly what they say but it you know it all means the same thing one way or another the first one is compliance so when you're onboarding someone you have to make sure did i have them sign all their paperwork do they have an nda do they have an employment agreement did they sign the employee handbook do they have training on compliance within the company some companies that's irrelevant some companies it's irrelevant for most departments except for say finance i.t or hr and so that's the first piece that you want is you want somebody it might be you if your company smaller might be your hr manager to make sure they're reviewing all the compliance with that person they're making sure all the paperwork is signed make sure all the legal pieces are taken care of and that person has training on any compliance needed to make sure that your business operates without risk okay the second piece is clarity this piece we already covered that's having 30 and 60 90 day goals okay that's making sure that person has clarity on what they are there to do oftentimes i tell someone i hire them as i'm like i'm not hiring you to do work i'm hiring you to solve problems here's the problems i want you to start solving okay and this is going to measure your progress towards solving those problems i don't expect you to solve problems in your first 30 days but i do expect some to get solved in the first 60 or 90 right depending on the level of that problem the third is culture so this is where when you're designing the onboarding you want to think how do i immerse them in the culture what do what should they watch maybe it's a event that you threw two years ago maybe it's a presentation or a webinar that you've given maybe it's your podcast or a book right maybe it's books that you've read podcasts that you've consumed um what do you want them to connect with right do you want them to talk to your marketing manager who in the company embodies the culture to an extent where they should form a relationship with them and they will also understand these people represent the culture that you want and so connecting them would be a great thing to do and then it's you know what do you want them to read and so like reading the employee handbook uh reading any of the other sometimes i'll send people old email threads even if i for example i'm handing over a vendor to somebody i'll just forward all the emails i've ever had with that vendor and just say here's the background in that relationship so it's being able to read the historical data okay so that's the third one is culture and then the fourth is connection okay so that's where um there's a couple ways that you can do this obviously there's introducing them to peers there's also connecting them to peers so a lot of the times what you might want to do especially if that person is coming in for a role where you as their boss may not be the best person to be a resource for them because maybe you're not really close to it is that you want to assign them a buddy and that person is the person that's going to be their first go-to if they have questions or things that they need to ask and so oftentimes if i set it up like that i will have that person be on the check-ins that we're doing each day or even run the check-ins if it's that close the second piece of that is making sure that you facilitate cross-departmental communication so you might ask them to sit in on meetings that are of departments that they are connecting with daily but they don't actually run or manage okay then they have a holistic perspective of how their department's going to affect these other departments because they're able to watch and see what they talk about and look at and measure on a day-to-day basis and then the last piece is check back okay so that is essentially what we've been talking about this whole time which is making sure you have a good feedback loop making sure that you're communicating clearly and often um and so that's that two times a day check-ins that goes to the one to the you know twice a week to the once a week as well as being able to confront them and give them feedback and ask for feedback frequently something that i like to do is when someone first comes in when i give them their welcome package when i tell them what their onboarding to look like i say listen something that's amazing is that you come in here and you've got fresh eyes and so what i would love is if you're on all these meetings and you're talking all these people um you know you don't know that you know sometimes when you've been going in a company for so long there's like an elephant in the room that people don't even notice because the elephant's been there so long i would love if you could write down those elephants for me and i would love if in a week you can compile those notes and send them to me an email and so you are encouraging them to give you feedback and then you in return will also give them feedback so you're fostering that relationship where you're creating that open candor in the beginning and so the five season of onboarding okay you've got compliance you've got clarity you've got culture you've got connection and you've got check back and so if you are uh growing quickly and you are a small company if you're a startup you're probably not funded you're probably not backed i cannot express the importance of this because a lot of people say they don't have time to focus on this onboarding they're like lelo that sounds like a lot i've got to put a ton of stuff together i don't even know how i'm going to do this um the reality is that you don't have time not to do it because the amount of money it's going to cost you if you continue to lose and turn over employees like many companies do who don't have onboarding you're going to you can either take the time now or you can pay the price later and so i would prefer to take the time now and also make sure i set those people up for success and i love working in the company i'm working in and it's a good culture and high morale rather than a culture of churn and burn where people don't feel like they're taken care of don't feel like they're supported and have no motivation and so i hope that video is useful if you are also working on interviewing i refer back to my other video on how to successfully interview and then that will help you understand um how to make sure that you have the right people in when you're onboarding them so with that i hope you have a great rest of your day evening morning what up and i will talk to you soon