When new employees join a department, college, or unit, supervisors can help them become productive and engaged more quickly by understanding the onboarding process.
Onboarding New Employees Module
- Planning New Employee Onboarding
- Onboarding and Organizational Culture
- Onboarding and Employee Engagement
A well-thought out onboarding plan quickly engages a new employee in the work of the department, college, or unit and:
- Shortens the time it takes a new employee to start performing successfully and contributing to their department, college, or unit;
- Helps a new employee quickly learn how to use their skills, knowledge, and expertise in their role and how to effectively work with their colleagues;
- Demonstrates that your department, college, or unit is well-run and values their employees by being prepared for them when they start;
- Significantly reduces the chances that a newly hired employee will leave shortly after they start or be unable to perform their job.
Review Quick Guide
An effective onboarding plan goes beyond just a checklist and:
- Focuses on moving employees through the onboarding process at a speed that allows them to be successful;
- Involves the supervisor, the team, and the new employee in the process;
- Is tailored based on the new employee's level of experience, their role, and their familiarity with the University;
- Covers all of the key elements: communication, resources, compliance, culture, expectations and relationships.
Apply: Create an Onboarding Plan
Use the template to create a tailored onboarding plan that encompasses all of the key elements.
Even the most detailed and thought-out onboarding plans can fail during the implementation stage if not enough attention and effort is put into connecting the new employee to the organizational culture.
Consider:
- What are the unwritten rules that your department, college or unit lives by?
- What do people pay attention to?
- What is rewarded and recognized?
Reflecting on these questions and more will help you gauge where your department falls within each of the common characteristics* of organizational culture:
- Innovation and risk-taking
- Attention to detail
- Outcome orientation
- People orientation
- Team orientation
- Competitiveness
- Stability
*Adapted from Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2017). Organizational behavior. Boston: Pearson.
Organizational Culture and Onboarding Quick Guide
Review Conversation Guide
Onboarding is a two way street - as a supervisor, you play a primary role in the process. However, the new employee must take responsibility for learning the details of their role and begin to perform their job duties. In addition, encourage new employees to ask questions to learn about their role, co-workers, organizational culture and leverage their strengths.
Oftentimes new employees are not sure where to start. The guide below will help them reflect on their experiences and think through some of the questions they might want to ask of you and their peers. The guide also contains recommended to-dos and timelines. Consider sharing the guide with your new employee and incorporating some of the topics into your regular check-in conversations.
Conversation Guide for New Employees Quick Guide
Apply What You've Learned
Need more practice? Work through the questions below to see what you have learned so far.
New employees start out excited about their new job, eager to dive into their work, and proud to be part of their department, college, or unit. Newly hired faculty and staff are among the most highly engaged employees at the University. While an effective onboarding plan sets them up for success, the ultimate goal is to keep them engaged over the coming months and years.
Onboarding is an engagement strategy. Engagement is about motivating and supporting a group of people as they work together toward a set of common goals and priorities. Onboarding is about figuring out how to motivate and support a new person as they join your department, college, or unit.
As a supervisor, you can take steps to ensure that onboarding leads to an engaged and productive employee and foster the conditions that create and sustain a high level of employee engagement.
Set Goals and Check-In
One of the most important things you can do as a supervisor to sustain engagement is establish regular ongoing check-ins to talk about performance and development. Set performance expectations right away so the employee is aware. Have conversations in a way that’s supportive and that happen over time, so it’s not the annual performance review that everybody dreads.
The Quick Guide to Goal Setting outlines the best practices that make the process of setting expectations more effective. Steps include asking for input, identifying 3-5 most important expectations in both results (the "WHAT") and behaviors (the "HOW"), connecting their work to broader priorities, and checking in. Review the materials below to get started. For more detailed information on the goal setting process, see Module 2: Managing and Evaluating Performance of this course.
Goal Setting Quick GuideGoal Setting Template
Apply: Find and Use Resources
The Employee Engagement module in this Supervisory Development Course is a fully online, self-paced module designed to help you learn about the ten conditions that foster employee engagement, the three stages of the employee engagement cycle, as well as provide tools and resources you can use to ensure that new employees have the support they need.
Review the Employee Engagement module and see what you can do to create and sustain a high level of employee engagement.
You have completed this module
Congratulations! You have completed this online module. The following are module materials and related resources. We encourage you to explore other online modules to continue your supervisory development journey.
Core Reading
- Accelerating Leaders’ Transitions - OPM.gov. (n.d.). Retrieved from When Feedback Attacks!! (when, how, and why feedback can hurt performance)
- Bauer, Talya & Erdogan, Berrin. (2011). Organizational socialization: The effective onboarding of new employees. APA handbook of industrial and organizational psychology. 3. 51-64. 10.1037/12171-002.
- Brown, K. F., & Sullivan, B. (2013, October 28). Delivering on Strategic Priorities: A Talent and Culture Roadmap. CUPA-HR Annual Conference and Expo. University of Minnesota.
- Cable, Daniel M., Gino, Francesca, & Staats, Bradley R. (2013). Reinventing employee onboarding (Hiring). MIT Sloan Management Review, 54(3), 23-28.
- Gigliotti, R. A., Ruben, B. D., & J. W. (2017). Snapshots of Academic and Senior Administrator Leadership Programs at Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Universities.
- Graybill, J. O., Carpenter, M. T., Offord, J., Piorun, M., & Shaffer, G. (2013). Employee onboarding: identification of best practices in ACRL libraries. Library Management, 34(3), 200-218. doi:10.1108/01435121311310897
- Kompaso, S. M., & Sridevi, M. S. (2010). Employee Engagement: The Key to Improving Performance. International Journal of Business and Management,5(12). doi:10.5539/ijbm.v5n12p89
- Managing the Employee Onboarding and Assimilation Process - SHRM Online. (2017, March 6).
- Reese, V. (2005). Maximizing your retention and productivity with on‐boarding. Employment Relations Today, 31(4), 23-29.
- Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2017). Organizational behavior. Boston: Pearson.