Your worst employee is your own fault

Summary

• If your employees are performing poorly, consider it might be due to your hiring and training processes. It's your responsibility to set them up for success.
• Successful incorporation of a new hire involves onboarding, setting clear expectations, and providing context for their role.
• Clearly verbalize how you want tasks done, as new hires will initially bring habits from their previous jobs.
• To avoid discrepancies between expected and actual job conditions, either slightly underpromise or overdeliver.
• To set expectations clearly, use a detailed job description, ensure the interview process is consistent, establish goals for the first 90 days, address problems upfront, and have a thorough orientation process.
• For contextual understanding, share company-specific information such as mission, goals, values, and operational data, as well as role-specific details like department KPIs and systems used.
• Onboarding should reflect the ongoing support and environment the role will entail, to avoid future dissonance and dissatisfaction.
• At acquisition.com, we onboard by letting new hires meet leaders, sending exclusive company swag, and providing follow-up meetings to ensure a smooth transition into the team.
• Focusing on setting clear expectations and matching conditions to those expectations is key to retention and preventing employee turnover.
• Spreading this knowledge and context equips employees to make better decisions and contributes to the overall success of the company.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with a solid hiring process. Make sure to create a detailed job description that clearly explains the role. In interviews, consistently explain what the company and the role do. Find the best person for the job, not just based on experience, but also their ability to fit into your company's culture.

When you hire someone, give them a proper welcome. Have an orientation that teaches them about the company and their role. Share our vision, goals, and values. Let them meet other leaders and the team. This makes them feel included and part of something important right from the start.

Let new hires know exactly what you expect from them. Tell them how their role helps the company. Explain how tasks should be done. Have goals for their first 30, 60, and 90 days. Encourage them when they meet these goals. This shows that you notice their hard work.

Be honest about the job and maybe even make it sound a little harder than it is. This helps to manage their expectations. Then, if the job is not as tough as you said, they will be happily surprised.

Finally, if there are problems, talk about them upfront. Work together to find solutions. This shows that you trust them and value their ideas.

All this helps make employees feel secure, valued, and more likely to stay. It's important to invest time in onboarding and setting the right expectations to create a supportive environment for everyone.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"expectations are simply the verbalization of how you would like something done"

– Leila Hormozi

"most people come in even when you hire someone who's experienced, they're still playing the game based off the rules of their last job"

– Leila Hormozi

"to stay at the line we want job expectations to match job conditions"

– Leila Hormozi

"if you want to eliminate turn, here are the five things that I do to create the bridge between what they understand and what is reality"

– Leila Hormozi

"most employees want to do really well and most of them can make good decisions if they have the same knowledge as you"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

employee the person who's lazy they don't show up on time but they don't actually get their work done they're inefficient what if I told you that that person was actually your fault that they acted that way why because you hired and trained them so today's video is going to be about all the things that happen after the moment you hire someone to ensure that they're successful and you retain them so there's really three things that go into fulfilling on your promises made when you've hired somebody onboarding expectations and context at the end of this video what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk you guys through how we onboard teammates at acquisition.com so let's start with expectations okay expectations are simply the verbalization of how you would like something done let's look at a common example when you tell your kid to make their bed it's like Johnny go make your bed right he might make the bed and it might look like right because he made the bed but it's all frived like the pills are everywhere technically it's made but it doesn't look that great or you could say Johnny go make your bed like a five-star hotel would make your bed and then it looks nice the sheets are all spread out there's no wrinkles the pillows are fluffed and it looks great that's the difference in how we verbalize expectation to people when most people come in even when you hire someone who's experienced they're still playing the game based off the rules of their last job and so until you set expectations that are different and then reinforce those expectations they're going to just continue doing what they've always done let's say you hire someone from corporate they're often told to be quiet during meetings and so they're often punished for speaking up during meetings whereas if you hire that person bring them into your company and you're a small team you want them to speak up and so they might come in and at first they might not be talking at all and what that tells you is not that that person is shy it tells you that that person has been punished for speaking up and so what you want to do is reinforce them speaking up if that's a behavior you want the easiest way to do this is to first set the expectation of what you want to verbalize it to add it in the job description to explain it to them and then to follow up with encouraging them when they are meeting expectations unfortunately what happens most of the time is that a company hires a person they sell the person on this big grandiose Vision how amazing this role is how amazing the company is because they're just desperate for this person to say yes they tell them they get flexible work working hours oh you don't need to answer on weekends all these things and what happens is that person comes in and then they see oh you do expect me to work until late at night oh you do want me working weekends oh people aren't that nice here oh you do want me to take on this huge project that wasn't part of my role and even if that person might have agreed to those things on the front end the fact that you didn't set the expectations properly now it's a negative so you've taken a neutral experience and you've made it a negative simply not by letting them know ahead of time there's the line which is neutral right they're just getting what they expected there's below the line which is where most companies go now they're feeling badly about the role they're regretting their decision they're feeling like maybe I should have stayed at my last job now what do you do to get above the line well to stay at the line we want job expectations to match job conditions right so what you say the role is is exactly what the role is they're happy that things are the way they expect if job expectations are better than job conditions then you get somebody who's discontent but if you can create job conditions that are better than job expectations that's when you get somebody who's really excited about the decision and feels really great about the decision that they made to join your company so the question is you can can do two one of two things you can either lessen the expectations you set so you can actually make the job sound worse than it is I'm not saying a ton worse I'm saying five percent worse or you can increase conditions once they come in so you could say these are the expectations and then you could find a way to over deliver on how great the job is in my opinion the best thing to do is to set expectations five percent worse than they actually are so when I know that somebody's coming in and there's like a lot of work that has to be done in the department I basically tell them oh my gosh there's nothing in place there's no infrastructure it's a show you're gonna have to do so much cleanup I try to make it sound worse than it is mostly because I want their expectations to be properly set and then often what happens is they come in and they're like hey I'm ready like I'm gonna do this it's gonna be a big undertaking this will be rewarding and then they come to me and they say Layla oh my gosh it's not nearly as bad as you said and I'm like oh is it not you know I thought it was pretty bad and they're like no you've actually done a great job with all these things and so we've taken what could be a negative and turned it into a positive just by how we bring the expectation if you want to eliminate turn here are the five things that I do to create the bridge between what they understand and what is reality the first is an accurate and well thought out job description if they click on the ad for this job description they're looking for what you've listed there not something 50 different and so if they come in and it's completely different than the job description that right there is a negative the second is consistently repeating the same message in every interview so one thing that I want to make sure is done in every interview is we set expectations what does the business do and what does this role do within the business because I want them to understand how their role connects with other pieces of the business and I want to know that we've said it not once not twice but minimum three times to the person they really get it they're crystal clear on what needs to happen the third piece is setting 30 60 90 day goals they're really just the agreements of the progress that's going to be made within that time period I like to collaborate with somebody on this because if I really want someone to come in and have autonomy over their role am I just going to push work at them and say this is what you do or am I going to say hey I'm not you know a creative director or a director of people or a director of customer success so I don't know if this is possible do you think these timelines these things are possible and so if we can set expectations before they even come in of what we want to accomplish in 30 60 and 90 days then they know what to expect and we create predictability in their mind and then when we've created predictability you create even more Security in their job the fourth thing that you want to do is you want to discuss problems ahead of time what you don't want to have happen is that you explain all the things they're going to do but you don't explain the problems that are currently going on in the department or that the role would be solving and so they come in and they're going to be doing the activities you outline but there's problems that exist that they didn't know about and so it feels like a negative because they weren't aware you want to think through what are the problems that this person is going to observe when they come into this role in the company and how how can I let them know about those ahead of time and maybe even start collaborating with them on how they could solve them and then the last place is a proper new hire orientation just like you onboard a customer for a product you want to onboard an employee or a job there's probably two pieces to this which is a general onboarding where you're giving them contextual knowledge of the business and then a technical onboarding which is how you onboard them to this role specifically within the business I promise you if you can do those five things you are much less likely to have an employee churn to lose people in the first 30 days but I think a lot of the times what we do is we say well I hired this person they have this experience so like I shouldn't have to do all this work to make sure that they're going to stick but the reality is this is not that way the same title in you know Sally's bake shop is going to be completely different than like Joe's marketing company these things really matter and what we want to focus on the most is keeping expectations clear setting them properly on the front end and making sure that conditions and expectations match so the second thing that we want to do now that we've covered setting expectations is we want to cover context what is the context somebody needs coming into the company to be successful what circumstances does this person need to know about in order to do the job well why does this job exist if you give people context as to why the job exists they're more likely to help you in a strategic way in one of our portfolio companies we were trying to build what you could say a brand and so we brought in an Editor to make videos for their Instagram that editor wasn't onboarded properly and so they started making like super quick baby videos these videos got millions of views but they actually did the opposite for the brand they showcased it in not the best light because of that the leaders are saying oh my gosh this person is in the right fit and I said well did you tell them that the reason that we hired them is because we want to build a brand they were like well I feel like that's obvious so we have the conversation with the editor did you know that we want to build a brand we want to showcase this reputation how amazing blah blah it's like oh no no I just thought you wanted to get more abuse because in this last job what did they want from him they want him to build videos that got views that's why it's so important to have that contextual knowledge because he knew how to do the role but he didn't have the context into which why the role existed so there's really two kinds of context there is company specific and then there's role specific context company specific contents why does this company exist where is this company going what are the values of this company how does this company behave how do we hire people how do we fire people how do we hold people to expectations what are our goals what are we focused on this year what are we focused on this quarter who are the leaders in this company who are the people that make decisions how's the company celebrate how does the company improve how does the company learn and what are our philosophies around things like pay benefits Etc I know it sounds like wow that's so much I know this is why building a company is hard because it is a lot so what I've done is I've created what I call like our vision deck and that deck I update every quarter and then every quarter I can give that to HR and then they can put that into our onboarding so that people can go through that deck and they get all the company context plus some more let's say you don't have an HR department that can do onboarding for you I think that one of the best things that founder can do is do the company context onboard you meet with them and you tell them what's the vision what's the mission here's the quarterly goals and you run them through those things now if you're bigger and you do have say an HR department or someone who's head of people and you have functional leaders then it makes sense that they then learn how to do that themselves now on the other side you have role specific context so it's going to be the job description what are the expectations of the department so what kpis do we track of this department that you're in what's the current workflow that this job adheres to what systems are we using for this department what Cadence of meetings do we have what kpis is this rule held to and what technology do we use to get the job done those are all role specific most employees want to do really well and most of them can make good decisions if they have the same knowledge as you but what happens most the time is that we would hold all this knowledge from people not on purpose but because we're lazy and we just don't feel like we're laying that knowledge but if we can get it all out of our heads then we can Empower people to make better decisions not just in their role but for the company overall by the way if you don't have a business and maybe you're at a job maybe you're not at a job maybe you're looking for a job we have this thing called Mosey Talent you get first dibs at all the jobs open in our portfolio at acquisition.com and at acquisition.com itself the last piece to ensuring that you can successfully retain talent and employees is really onboarding philosophically how I see it is that onboarding should mirror the future of the role a lot of times onboarding and the way that you manage somebody during onboarding is very different than you manage them for the rest of the time that they're with you and that's why a lot of people can make it through the first 30 60 or 90 days but they can't make it thereafter because then their behavior changes because your behavior has changed what is the environment that this person is going to be operating in are they going to be doing the same thing every day are they going to have a lot of support or are they going to be doing different things every day and they're not going to have a lot of support you want the onboarding to mirror how much support you're going to be giving them later on so what a lot of people do is they build out this like really beautiful onboarding for like one week and then they just throw them into the fire after that if the reality of the job is like you need somebody who can just deal with the fire then tell them that from the beginning on board them that way basically have themself on board and then set that expectation higher for that but what a lot of people do is they kind of sugarcoat it and then they bring somebody in who needs more assistance and then after a week or two they're like I can't do this anymore this is all I've got and then that person flounders if that person is going to have a lot of support then give them a lot of support onboarding if that person isn't going to have a lot of support then give them less support on board so at acquisition.com we do a couple of other things that really help especially because of a remote team to onboard people and make them feel really welcomed and set good expectations the first thing is that every person that comes on gets to meet with all the leaders we're not some Mega Corporation and I think that one of the biggest advantages that people have if they work here is they get to communicate with leadership they get to get mentorship they get to learn from people and it's like an open door policy the second thing that we do is we send a swag package so one thing you'll notice like we don't sell right now acquisition.com swag and so we have exclusive swag everyone works with us the third thing is that I will meet with everybody on the team who's new if I've interviewed them I meet with them like three or four weeks later to see how it's gone if I didn't interview them then I'll meet them in week two typically and then outside of that I would say the team welcoming people and offering time offering guidance offering recognition to new people has been one of the most powerful things that you can do a huge welcome in slack we do like a welcome slide on the weekly meeting and we try to celebrate the fact that they join the team so these are all the things you want to focus on after you've hired somebody but if you feel like gosh I don't even know how to hire people then I made this video here for those of you who are trying to figure out how to hire on my 100 million dollar hiring strategy