High employee turnover is one of the most expensive problems a company can have. Even if you’re hiring new employees who technically has the same number of years of experience, they don’t have experience at your company to know how you run things.
Here are some of the things you’re going to experience if you hire someone new:
- A lot of interruptions due to basic questions
- Less time to work on the things you need to work on
- Work being completed in a way that wasn’t up to your standards
- Everything moving slower, as they learn new software or systems
- Some frustrated clients who may not know they’re dealing with employees on their first week on the job
If you’re not prepared, hiring a new employee can be a mess. An exhausting mess. The next time you’re bringing someone new on board, try these strategies to make it a bit easier:
- Prepare yourself—spend the week leading up to the new employee’s first day getting ahead on your own work, knowing that you’ll be spending a lot of time training in the coming weeks.
- For every question you answer about how things are done, tell the new hire to write it down, providing directions the next time they come to that same problem or as a procedures manual for future new employees. Take the time to teach them right the first time, and every time you give them instructions, have them repeat back to you what they think they just heard and make sure they understand why you do it a certain way.
- Come up with a list of tasks where the execution greatly matters (making a sales call or communicating with clients) and where it’s not so crucial (filling mailers, creating a spreadsheet, setting up their desktop). Start the new hire on the less crucial tasks and see if they do it in a way that meets your expectations. If so, let them graduate to bigger responsibilities.
- Set them up with tutorials for the new software or systems. Most software companies have their own set of training classes via phone or web. It’s worth the few extra bucks to set your new hire up with a seminar, rather than watching them waste time trying to figure it out on their own. Let them know who the resident expert is in the office, so that they can create a mental list of go-to people.
- Let your clients know you’ve hired someone new. They will be far less likely to get fed up with slower service if they know it’s your employee’s first week on the job.
Though hiring a new employee is never easy or inexpensive, it can be less of a headache if you follow these tips. If you train them and make them feel welcome, they’ll stay and you won’t have to bring on new people so often.
As a speaker and author, Curtis Zimmerman has impacted over one million people with his life-changing messages and award-winning programs. Curtis is an expert at transforming organizations by inspiring individuals to live their lives at performance level.
Want to be inspired? Check out his podcast The Next 24 Hours.
