7 Ways To Help New Employees Hit The Ground Running

Whether you’ve hired recently or are about to bring on new employees, you need them up to speed yesterday.

Or tomorrow.

Either way, when you work in a fast-paced environment like Finance, you want to help new employees hit the ground running.

Onboarding helps, especially if you start it before they step foot in the door (or on a Zoom) their first day.

New Employees Need More Than Hand-Holding

Of course, you — or any other company leaders — can’t walk new employees through their jobs 24/7.

And hand-holding does more harm than good: Think about the research on helicopter parents and their kids’ inability to mature, adapt, solve problems and handle adversity. Same goes for new employees: If they come to depend too much on you or others, they will learn the job more slowly and will struggle to adapt or handle problems.

So without too much hand-holding, here are seven steps to get new employees up to speed quickly and doing great work:

1. Get Them the Info They Need Early

This is more than just the stuff HR doles out, like company directories and options for health plans. Any directions, guides or tools that new hires will need to get the job done should be in their hands on Day 1. Even better, send them anything that’s not proprietary or confidential before that first day.

That way, they can look them over and get a running start on the job and you spend a lot less time reviewing the basics when the new employee actually starts.

2. Make Shadowing Their Full-Time Job at First

Managers like to talk mentoring. Yet what spurs on-the-job learning is shadowing someone who’s not only great at doing their job, but also has a feel for teaching someone else to do it. (Hint: That person isn’t always your top A-lister.)

Keep your antenna up for those employees who have a way of explaining things and making the complicated simple. Then attach your new employee to them for a few weeks.

Have your shadowed employee get the new hire started doing parts of the job after a few observations. Watching someone do a task, then trying it soon after, takes the pressure off and feeds a new hire’s eagerness to show their worth.

3. Throw Them in the Pool

Even if it’s their first week, your new hires can accompany you or other employees to meetings, planning discussions and other activities that are either indirectly or directly related to their job.

The best thing is, they don’t need to do anything but listen. It gives them a bird’s-eye view of how you and your company run things.

This gets their feet wet and speeds up the process of learning how their position and department fit into the company’s overall mission.

4. Show, Don’t Tell

Your new hires are out of school – they don’t need more lectures. Make sure whatever you or another employee teaches is explained with concrete examples of how to do whatever it is you’re teaching them.

Most people pick up things quicker when they’re shown, rather than told, what to do (even when they take good notes). People are more likely to remember actions, not too many words.

5. Hover a Little Bit

Giving a new hire a bunch of directives, then retreating to your office, clearly shows you have confidence in the new hire’s ability to follow directions and get things done.

But you’re not taking into account the new hire’s confidence, which probably isn’t too high after only a few days or weeks on the job.

Leaving them to fend entirely for themselves can be scary to new hires and can backfire when it comes to training them to do their jobs correctly.

It’s OK to look over their shoulders for a bit. The new hire can tackle an assignment knowing he has some room to screw up and that you’ll be there to show him how to fix it before he completely messes up something.

6. Drill Down

What you teach your new hires won’t have a lasting impact unless you explain or demonstrate the reasoning behind the job.

For example, telling a new employee to meticulously track expenses takes on more importance if you explain why it’s a necessary part of their job.

Explaining each aspect of a new hire’s job without underlining the job’s value, risks making it look to your new employee that it’s just drudge-work that has to get done.

You’re less likely to get the employee to give you and the task their undivided attention if you don’t impress on the employee the importance of doing it right the first time.

7. Stick to 1 or 2 Things at a Time

This is a mantra we tell ourselves at onboarding time, but as the days and weeks with a new hire go by, we tend to forget (or actively ignore).

Why? Because we can’t resist our instinct to rush things along, even when they’re going at a slower but steady pace.

Piling more work, adding deadlines and hurrying assignments too early on will only frustrate new hires – and surely won’t make them move any faster. If anything, suddenly having too much to do at one time could do the opposite – paralyze them.

Instead, distribute new tasks to your rookies in a manageable pace, only adding more to their plate after they have others completed — and you’ve checked with them that they’re ready to handle more.

Doing this will not only build their confidence, it’ll help them adjust easier – and learn a lot faster.