Employee onboarding is not only HR's job

People managers have a responsibility over the success of new hires. What to do in the first 3 months?

tarting a new job is stressful.

Some show it with enthusiasm, drive, or ecstatic talking. Others: with closing themselves and failing their objectives.

In any case, as a manager, you have a central role in paving the way to success of your new team members. Your goal: normalise the change, help them adapt, guide them towards performance, and create space for them to shine in the organisation.

There are three main areas to address during the onboarding of a new hire: their technical mastery of the job, the social integration, and how they learn to navigate within the organisation.

Three key areas for successful onboarding

Now, how do you do that?

First, prepare the field and plan the onboarding program

Onboarding starts before day 1. Make their arrival known to the rest of the team, department, and company.

Think about how you would integrate them in the objectives for the next quarter, in the vision for the next year(s).

Prepare the necessary materials for their integration. Gather all useful resources in the same place.

Make sure your new hrie has access to all the required spaces, folder, and tools.

Second, set the Onboarding objectives

The purpose of the onboarding and the trail period is to figure out if this was the good choice — both for the company, and for your new team member.

To set the scene at the right level, prepare their initial objectives. I always use the 30–60–90 days approach to guide the new team members into their first weeks. Depending on their seniority and autonomy expectations, I go into more or less detail.

For example, we set the following objective for a Program Manager with two specific projects and space for autonomy to define what comes next. It was important to be specific in the beginning and to show that my expectation is for her to define the needs of our clients and prepare the roadmap for the next months.

Example of 30/60/90 objectives plan for a Program Manager

Give them a head start in networking

When you start in a new job, you don’t know who does what. Unless you are a company of two people, you will do your new hire a huge favour to share a list of key colleagues and what they do. Without exception, my team loved the list of contacts I prepared for each one of them.

The key colleagues list gives you more confidence to know who to turn to and to start building the organisational map in your head.

Prepare a template with regular contacts and adapt for each team member depending on their projects and objectives. Be mindful about the time of others and try to vary the contacts from other teams when there are multiple colleagues doing similar jobs.

With junior team members, you will need to be more specific on the topics to cover during the “Get to meet each other” meetings. Explain what is the goal of the meeting and suggest a couple of open questions they can use.

Personal advice: integrate shadowing in their learning plan to mix learning & get to meet session for even more impact. Get them to spend 1–2 hours with colleagues they can learn from. For example, if you want your new joiner to better understand your customer pains (ideal for product managers), schedule 2 hours of shadowing a support agent. Let’s be honest — the support agent will be less efficient during the shadowing so make sure this is clear with their manager.

A common techniques used in startups is assigning buddies. It’s a great way to give them a name they can trust from day 1. Buddies are informal mentors who are there to help them navigate in the company. They are available to answer any question of the newcomer (and there is no stupid question!). Just make sure they ARE available. Nothing worse than being assigned a buddy who is too busy to care about you :(

Plan a project to deliver within the first 45 days.

New joiners which are quickly recognised for having delivered something are more successful in the long run.

I have absolutely no quantitative proof on the question but I have many examples in my experience about colleagues who were either let go in their first 3 months, or who left at their own will. What’s common between them? They weren’t identified. They didn’t have this one thing they had done that people could connect with them.

Some examples on impactful and easy to put in place projects for different positions:

Content experts: audit existing content, suggest improvements.
SEO managers: analyse SEO performance of existing websites.
Data analysts: build dashboards for a business team that has been waiting for attention for months.

I am sure you can come up with specific ideas for your team. Stick to projects that can be delivered in 30 days (so they can start working straight after the orientation period of the first two weeks). Give them a clear objective and what not to do. Leave enough lack of detail to let your new hires talk to others and learn about the company, their colleagues, and the business challenges via the project work.

Review progress every month

Each month, schedule one hour to go through the progress of the previous month and validate the direction for the next four weeks.

Encourage your new hire to ask questions and to challenge what they see. With each meeting, you will (hopefully) observe how their confidence gets stronger and their integration — stronger.

I have seen several methods work magically for the monthly progress:

“Surprise” report — the team member shares what surprised them during the period; what they learnt, and what they need to focus on in the coming weeks
OKRs review — look at the key results you had set at the beginning and discuss the progress of each one. Focus on the reasons behind the results that have not been achieved yet, and what support you can offer.
Assignments — for the end of each month, ask your new colleague to deliver a specific assignment. This could be the preparation of a pitch, building a deck, or any other format where they can summarise their monthly learning and use it in their work.

The challenge here is to find the golden balance between boredom and anxiety. No stress, though! The onboarding period is here to give you a good understanding of where the flow of your new team member is.

Personally, I have never seen boredom experience during the first months with my team members — this might be a bias of working in ultra high speed startups though. If it happens, use the monthly milestones to change the objectives and expected results for the next month and invite your new joiner to participate in the definition of the new objectives.

If you find that your employee finds their initial objectives too challenging, give them the benefit of the doubt and ask yourself if you had not set objectives that were too ambitious for their level. If the answer is no, well… this could be a signal that the job may not be the good match for them.

Be available

Integrating a new team member is time consuming. There is no second opinion on that.

Yet, if the onboarding is done well, you and your company will enjoy the collaboration of an operational, motivated, and driven colleague.

There are numerous studies that show the cost of a new recruitment, ranging from 40% to 400% of their annual salary. Whatever the exact number, what you should know by now is that repeating the process of hiring, waiting for them to join (especially when you need to have 3-months notice as in France or Belgium), and getting some new is a pain you want to avoid inflicting to yourself.

Instead, make being available a priority during the first few months of new hires.

Plan in advance regular checkins, more often than with your other direct reports. Make it clear they are not interrupting you & your colleagues when they have question, but rather encourage them to do so.

Onboarding new hires is a key mission for every manager. It’s not only a job of HR, it’s not only a question of reading the company handbook.

It is a moment when you will set the right direction for the career of your new hire, when you will connect them to the right areas in your company, and you will recognise their strengths to propel them to success.