It can be months until a new hire becomes productive and you see a return on investment from your time and money. During this webinar, you will learn how you can go from dreading onboarding new employees to getting them up to speed and productive as efficiently as possible within your advisory firm.
Today we're going to be talking about how to efficiently get your new hires up to speed and productive as many of you already know me my name is Ron Gorodestky I'm one of the co-founders and CEO at Hubly and for today's webinar I'm actually being joined by James Wheadon James has worked Hands-on with over a hundred financial advisory firms and their support teams to help fully optimize Hubly and enhance your business many of you have also met James in working with us.
today we'll start out by looking at some of the core challenges with new employee onboarding that we're going to be looking to address next up we'll cover some of the steps that you can take when getting ready to grow your tea and then lastly we're going to dive into some of the best practices that you can set up for uh to set you up for Success when onboarding new team members and then prior to wrapping things up we're going to be going through the Q&A box and making sure that all of your questions have been answered.
It's been exciting we've seen so many of you growing your teams over the last few years. In fact, we it feels like there's a new team member joining one of our firms almost every single day. Talking with firms, and also observing from the sidelines, we noticed a couple of key challenge areas that are faced by by many firms first and foremost we hear this all the time that being able to trust that your your new hires are going to deliver that same exceptional service to your clients is often top of mind for all advisors especially advisors that are growing their team for the very first time.
Oftentimes, we also hear concern about your ability to ramp up a new higher responsibilities and really get them productive successfully and efficiently along the way as well.
And lastly, we often get questions about how you can better leverage the tools that you use and the preparation that you do in preparing for the new hire to tailor that new hires onboarding experience and a role to be a better fit for them as a person and their unique set of skills and past experiences.
We find this conversation really to be super timely because looking at some stats we found that by 2025 it's expected that millennials are pretty good to account for up to 75% of the workforce. So millennials are not your college students today in fact they're already 26 to 41 years old and what they're looking for in a workplace are a few things first up is that ability to make an impact and see the impact that they're making on the business on the client.
It's important to bring them into the conversation.
Frequent feedback is an important aspect for for millennials as well enabling them to improve and grow within their roles and as many of us have already figured this out, flexibility. But not in just where we're working from but also what we're working on that ability to grow the scope of your role to grow within your role and to be independent in working towards some key accountabilities and being flexible in that and that leads nicely into the the next one which is a personal development opportunities – so feeling that their team, your team, is supporting them in their personal growth.
And last but not least, technology is also very important because as we know this generation has grown up around technology and is usually very quick and intuitive about adapting new technologies that they believe can support them personally and in their work.
So before they even come on there are a couple of things that we find are really important to do to put your firm and yourself in a position where you are ready to grow your team.
And oftentimes where we start that off is by documenting the things that you do time and time again we hear this often; that a lot of the processes, a lot of the steps, a lot of the the key flows that you go through when capturing and when fulfilling client promises and work are documented in your head sometimes they might be documented in a help desk article from one of your software vendors. But many times there's no single place to look and to see and find answers for yourself.
So you already know what you do for every client as different projects come up so it's time to actually create documentation around those key processes to get them out of your head.
Building good documentation ahead of time is going to make it easier for you to plug and play your new team members into those pre-established steps it's going to remove that need for new hires to constantly ask you or other team members for direction for feedback for review. That's not to say that review is not good but it's really going to take off that load in the early days of them joining your team from needing to really co-work with you on absolutely everything and give them that ability to have confidence that they can get their job done and for you to have confidence that they can get their job done as well.
And for you is going to provide that peace of mind that things aren't slipping through the cracks because you're not only going to have the ability to update your documentation over time and make it better if things do happen if mistakes do happen but if you have a proper work system in place you have your processes properly documented. You're also going to have the ability to see where those different projects are at what your team is working on how far along they are and that's going to give you a lot of Peace of Mind especially as your team continues to grow Beyond this next hire.
Great now that we know who we're preparing to bring out of the team and what they might be doing because we documented these processes we've done a bit of planning around that I'm going to pass this over to James to talk about what we can do to get that new hire up and running as quickly as possible.
Brilliant so it all starts firstly by creating an outline for the role so for this you'll want to identify the responsibilities that they're going to take on doing this will help you hone in those corresponding workflows that you've already put in place dig into those workflows and provide the context for the workflow steps that they'll be taking on. This might not be possible in all software but in Hubly this is what we recommend.
You want to update your documentation to allow the new team members to see the bigger picture and the additional context to completing their tasks we recommend documenting task descriptions that make it easy to see the inputs to the task itself which will essentially give them what they need to know in order to complete that step this is also a good opportunity to help keep the tools and resources that they'll need within reach. You can do this by linking the software they'll need to use or to help videos or forms that they might need you can also pre-write email templates to ensure consistency and repeatability and remember to also take a moment to pre-assign who each step will now route to once they join the team.
Excellent, next take a look how your workflows are named you want to create thoughtful naming conventions that are descriptive enough to understand what they do at a glance. Our advice here is to keep things simple which will basically help you stay high level and avoid getting into the weeds for example break up your large complex processes into smaller stage-based workflows this will help you provide visibility and allow you to oversee progress to ensure that the correct steps are being followed to get client work done intentional naming of your workflows will help your team members develop habits around finding work at the start of their day and using their documented structures to drive what they're working on finally tailor your onboarding based on your new hire.
Once you know their past work experiencing capabilities you want to prioritize which processes they'll get started in ease them into their responsibilities over time because you're not just introducing them to the process but you're also giving them the time to learn your team's work habits the software suite and the nuances of each client relationship go above and beyond by documenting additional instructions and even recording short training videos – providing these options for the new hire to answer their own questions independently without needing to seek out direction from your own team.
Think about clear outcomes for their first three months, break those down into achievable 30-day goals schedule regular one-on-ones to answer those questions and schedule 30-day check-ins to measure that progress. By doing this you'll provide open honest and consistent feedback which will be key to successfully onboarding them and keeping them engaged long term thank you I'll pass it back over to Ron to recap and talk about where you can begin.
Getting started as often is often that big question right it's it's you're looking ahead at that anticipated growth or the growth that you're already seeing in your business and so it's important that you really start by really following the checklist that we covered today start by documenting those processes. You can never start too early think about those areas of your business right now that are bottlenecking your growth maybe areas where you yourself can potentially step out of the way and oftentimes beginning to document what you do and how you do it will give you the confidence that you need to go out and know who you're looking for.
As James mentioned, when when preparing to actually bring somebody on isolate some of those key processes, focus back in on those key workflows, tweak them, update them, add additional context and documentation in the descriptions. That's going to allow whoever you bring on now that you have a role in mind to work more independently without needing to really rely on you for additional guidance and steps and without you having to double check and look over their shoulder that they're not missing an important step and that they're keeping that consistent tone experience for their end clients. And most important that they're really scaling the service and adding to tour capacity instead of adding to capacity in one place and taking away somewhere else but the finishing touches on those workflows create thoughtful naming conventions, split some of those workflows up that's going to give you a little bit more visibility.
It's easier to see where clients are at if they're not all in one very long process if they're split up across multiple different stages in that process you can more easily spot what somebody else on your team is working on if that's their stage prior to that being passed back over to you and vice versa. It also gives some predictability to your team to see what's coming down the pipeline so they can also plan their days effectively as well and then most importantly sit down and and plan for that onboarding. Oftentimes, this happens after you've made that hire. Before they start where you're going to be looking at the clear objectives that you've isolated for them to achieve within their first three months and then working backwards from them to develop a training plan to get them ramped up and into those effectively.
As James mentioned, weekly check-ins are a very good structure in fact in the first few weeks of working with you you might even see it effective to have a morning and an afternoon checking – something quick, 15 minutes just to touch base and see where they're at. But providing those opportunities for structured and ongoing support is going to allow them to know predictably that they're going to meet with you and that's also going to eliminate that constant need for interruption or input throughout the day where that could wait until later on in the day and most importantly by you taking a moment to understand where you want them to get to within those first 90 days you can be more intentional in communicating those outcomes to them as well and as for us all it's a lot more more intuitive and straightforward when we know how we're being measured and how we're being assessed and what we're working towards. So taking that time before they start to to set up those outcomes the first 90 days set up daily or weekly check-ins and then really take that new hires onboarding 30 days at a time is it going to allow you to get them successful faster and more predictably as well.
We also recommend doing a bit of a technology audit that that's intuitive when you're documenting those workflows and processes but also before you're bringing on that new hire try to understand really where you're working across the different technologies you have if you don't yet have a workflow tool or a task list tool that can actually support building those documentations for your processes then maybe you do that technology audit first prior to setting this all this up.
If you're a customer, as you already know, you can always message us in the Hubly chat. If you have any questions if you're not a customer yet then if you visit our website at myhubly.com you can always schedule a free call with us and ask us those questions and we'll help you get started. We also have that chat online as well so if you have questions and you're not a customer you can always message us using that chat as well thanks everyone hope you have a great rest to your day the rest of the day.
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