MANAGEMENT By Ryan Englin
2 Weeks
Help them get to know your culture.
4 Weeks
Assess skills and acknowledge gaps.
12 Weeks
Continue to transfer knowledge. Set goals. Help them align with your vision.
The Power of Onboarding How to get workers engaged and profitable
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here's nothing worse than having to turn down a contract because you don’t have the team to handle the job. Even worse, construction companies with high turnover suffer from decreased productivity, low employee satisfaction, and high burnout. All of these problems impact your company’s profitability and growth. Even the best hiring strategy doesn’t matter if people quit after a few months. To avoid piling stress on your top people, you have to get onboarding right. A good onboarding process dramatically improves employee retention and productivity.
Onboarding for the long-term Onboarding sets the tone for the rest of your new hire’s career. Too often, Ryan Englin is the founder and CEO of Core Matters, host of the Titans of the Trades podcast, and #1 bestselling author of Hire Better People Faster. If you’d like to learn more about onboarding, check out chapter 6 in his new book.
16 | THE STEEL ERECTORS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA
people look at onboarding as a series of events that need to be checked off: orientation, employee ID, systems access, compliance documents, and then they’re done. In reality, if you want to develop your new hire into someone who’s committed to the company and knows they’re valued, you have to put in the time to connect them to your company during their first 90 days. The most important thing to remember is that onboarding isn’t about you, the employer, it’s about your employee. It’s about their needs. When you look at onboarding through the lens of an employee, you'll have greater retention, higher engagement, and greater productivity. Why? Because from the first day of work, your new hire knows you care about them and their future. After years of working with construction companies, Core Matters developed the 2:4:12 Launch. This process focuses on the things that don’t come in your standard HR-generated new hire packet.
2 Week Goal: Help them fit in After a grueling round of interviews, it’s tempting to throw your new hire into the jobsite and hope for the best. After all, they said they could do the work, right? Wrong. To build employee engagement, you must slow down during those first few days. Getting your new hire on the jobsite faster won’t make them a better employee. It leads to confusion, overwhelm, and burn out. To put it plainly, if you rush this, they’re going to quit. The job hunt is one of life’s most stressful events – right up there with the death of a loved one and divorce. In fact, most people would rather have a root canal than sit through an interview. When you find someone who’s a great fit, it’s your job to make the transition into your company as painless as possible. Introduce them to the team, spend time with them in the job trailer, use their name in conversations, and really get to know them.