Takeaways from our conversation:
- Starting a new job is stressful, and one of the main goals should be to make the new employee feel safe. One way to do this is to set expectations are that (a) small enough to be achieved over a short time period and (b) not related to actual job performance at first.
- In the case of LACRM, expectations will be set around trust. The goal of the first month is for the new hire to feel safe and trust the rest of the team and the company. This way they know they don't need to worry about their job performance during training.
- It's valuable to give new hires a lot of context about the business (e.g. the history, who you serve, why, etc.) but this can be hard for employees to retain because they're learning so much at once. One way to help with this is to build everything into the same narrative.
- In the case of LACRM, because "trust" is the theme of onboarding, it might make sense to center all the other company lessons around that same concept. Instead of teaching new hires about 20 random concepts, explain how each of those concepts leads to trust.
- Most importantly: explain to the new hire why you're doing things the way you are. Just giving them info won't be helpful (and might actually be hurtful) if you don't contextualize it. This should be a topic for the first day, or maybe even before the first day.
- In the case of LACRM, focusing on trust might actually give new hires a reason to distrust the company if it's not explained why trust is so important (they might wonder what happened in the past to cause trust to be such an emphasis).