You’ve done it—you’ve implemented all your best practices and used your hiring assessments and interview skills to find that perfect candidate for the job. Now that they’re hired, what’s next? How do you make sure they quickly achieve a state of maximum performance?
Something I see all the time—and it just happened again the other day with one of my newer clients—is the lack of preparedness to ensure the new hire is comfortable and productive as quickly as possible. In the excitement to get the new hire trained and up to speed in their new role, a few extra steps are often forgotten.
From the moment a person is hired, it is important to start setting expectations and equipping them with the support to be effective right out of the gate.
Here are 4 easy (often overlooked) steps to maximizing new employee performance:
- Once hired, set performance expectations from day one using feedback from your assessment tool. You can’t expect employees to be efficient if they don’t know what you expect from them. They should also have a focused goal to aim for. If a goal is not clearly defined and knowingly achievable, employees will be less productive. Make sure their assignments are as clear as possible and tell them specifically what impact each assignment will have. This helps foster a sense of responsibility and accomplishment.
- Assess your current workforce to identify any disconnects between team members. Having “group profiles” will also give you an idea of how a new person will fit into your current workforce. You can place top-notch talent together, but they may still fail to perform as a team because the dynamics of interpersonal relationships depend on the personalities of those individuals, not on their skills or expertise.
- Design strategies and use tools that will provide your managers and supervisors with feedback that helps them better understand the dynamics of their workforce. Understanding these dynamics assures that your organization remains highly productive with talented employees that are kept on the right track, regardless of how many new hires there may be.Also, be sure to give new hires—and all team members for that matter—feedback on their performance. There is no hope of increasing employee performance or productivity if they don’t know what areas of their job need improvement. This is where performance reviews play an important role with new hires.
- Use assessment feedback to identify what the new hires need; then coach or train them accordingly. The goal is to help them succeed! Not providing training, or reducing it, might seem like a good way to save some time and money, but this usually backfires. Forcing new hires to learn their jobs on the fly can be extremely inefficient. Rather than not providing new hires with guidance, take the extra time to teach them the skills necessary to do their job. This way, they can accomplish these tasks on their own. What may have felt like a waste of your time initially will actually save you time later by not having to correct errors or answer simple questions.
Finally, be sure to encourage continued employee development. Helping employees expand their skills through activities such as coaching, attending seminars and increasing their responsibilities will build a much more advanced workforce that will benefit your organization for the long term. These opportunities provide employees additional skills and behaviors to improve their efficiency and productivity.
Whether you are on-boarding new hires, moving people into different roles of higher responsibility, or simply providing support to your current workforce, follow these 4 easy steps to build a high-performing team. Beyond boosting productivity, these steps will also help increase employee engagement.
Implement these 4 steps – and then pay attention to the results!
As always, if you have anything to share, or would like to add any of your experiences with assessments and new hire productivity, let me know in the comment section below.
