Effective onboarding practices are critical to an organization’s performance management. In an age of continuous change, it’s more critical than ever to ensure that employees are continuously onboarded in order to do what they need to be doing to meet the organization’s goals. In fact, this is one of the five areas that organizations need to master if they are to truly improve their performance, along with accountability systems, leadership skill building, sequencing, managing performance, and communication.
If your organization is struggling with continuous onboarding and performance management, here are some questions to ask:
Accountability System: Is your leadership evaluation holding people accountable for outcomes?
Leadership Skill Building: Is leadership skill building happening continuously?
Sequencing: Is your sequencing right? Are you implementing the right steps in the right order?
Managing Performance: Are you managing performance well?
Communication: Are you communicating the why along with the what and the how behind what you are asking them to do?
Strong leaders know how to onboard their employees in a way that is continuous and creates new opportunities for growth. Today, organizational results depend on how well leaders guide their teams to achieve. Equally important, leaders and teams must put systems into place that ensure employees at every level are seeking continuous improvement and connecting back to organizational values.
The best leaders continuously:
- Create a system-wide vision
- Clearly set and communicate a direction for people to go
- Align behaviors to priorities
- Create best-place-to-work environments that motivate people to action
- Reinforce critical and strategic thinking on how to achieve well-defined outcomes
How does initial onboarding at your organization look? Are you setting the standard aligned to your vision right away? Are you continuously reinforcing those standards of what right looks like through continuous onboarding? We encourage you to reflect on practices you can put in place to retain your employees and give them various opportunities for growth throughout the year.
Excerpts from: Maximize Performance
