Onboarding with Followthrough

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Creating a robust onboarding process is crucial for setting new hires up for success in their new roles and ensuring that they feel welcomed and supported within the organization. A well-designed onboarding process can help new employees become productive and engaged quickly, while also reducing turnover rates.

Here's the situation at a lot of companies though:

You've got the most elaborate, beautiful onboarding plan for entry level employees. The first 90+ days at your company. Trainings will happen on these days and meetings will happen at these specific times. But one day the trainer is sick or gets pulled into an operational fire. That meeting likely gets forgotten.

The new employee maybe gets pulled into a job or project that takes more of their time as they get into the swing of things. They are actively contributing towards the company goals, maybe even completing projects like the superstar that they are.

OR

You have very little plans around onboarding and you just have a list of expectations that a worker should be able to perform.

What both systems lack is an accountability system around the employee's progression. Operational and company demands can often strip away time intended for learning and structured training. As a company grows, this becomes increasingly hard to keep track of who knows what.

I will talk about adaptive training plans in another week because rigid structures do not work unless both the trainer and trainee(s) are independent of operations during training. And at a small business, oftentimes the trainer gets pulled away because they have a lot of context to help put out operational fires.

You need to hold a person accountable to new hires progression at your organization. It could be their trainer, someone from HR, or another peer. End of each week they should send an update to the team outlining where the trainee(s) are at. Here is an example dashboard I put together.

Make it easy and accessible for them to update. There are various ways you can do this in Excel, Google Sheets, and Airtable. The key is to not make it so a trainer or accountability partner is updating 50+ boxes for each hire and doing the reporting.This can even tie into a training dashboard for easy visibility for management.

I would then build two dashboards that outputted from various training cohorts (the above information) to show:

High Level for Each Station or Major Task

This is a quick reference guide for any manager or coworker to know who to either pull for a priority task or who needs to be trained.

• % of workforce trained in that station/task

• Who should be trained next in that station/task

• Projected demand for that station/task

  • If you have 2,000 parts coming through your business in May and each requires half an hour of work and only two employees trained on that process, you can know to train more to reach the capacity

Individual Dashboard

• Stations bought off on

• Stations trained on but not fully there yet

• Stations not trained on

This can even be tied into role and be an easier way to track their progression towards a raise. This clear accountability in task specific or knowledge work helps clarify for managers and the worker (I suggest making it clear to the employee which things are needed).

Thanks to Everest Brady for his help, writing, and research in assembling this week’s newsletter.

Read

• Permanent Equity: Successfully Finding and Buying a Small Business by Lewis Wang

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This Week on Think Like an Owner

Our guests on this episode are Jalen Ross and Orlando Remak, cofounders of CAM Collective, a holding company for association management companies like HOAs founded in April 2022. Today they have four member companies. Alex was lucky enough to meet Orlando during a trip to Ohio two years ago before he had started CAM Collective and have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know him and Jalen.

They talk about being intentionally decentralized while remaining focused on one industry and business model, focusing on growing revenue vs achieving cost savings, looking for ways to automate processes, hiring at a holding company level, and creating a partnership vs. being solo entrepreneurs.

We are sure you’ll be able to tell very quickly, but Jalen and Orlando beyond being partners are also clearly great friends and are very fun to chat with. We hope you enjoy this episode with Jalen and Orlando.

This week, we have on Chris Powers to answer the question, "What should a new listener expect to learn by listening to The Fort podcast?"

As a Think Like an Owner listener, there's a good chance you would also enjoy The Fort Podcast hosted by Chris Powers. Chris is the founder of Fort Capital, an industrial real estate private equity firm in Fort Worth, Texas and his weekly podcast hosts guests from real estate, business, entrepreneurship, and more. Alex was lucky enough to meet him at the second Capital Camp and came away thinking he was the most smartest and thoughtful person there. We highly suggest giving his show a listen. 

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