Unlocking the Power of Effective Onboarding: The Path to a Thriving Team
Mar 25, 2024
Seth Lewis
🎙️ Today on the show, we dive into the world of employee onboarding! 🚀
👥 Let's face it, most companies just take their new hires out to the job and call it a day. But is that really enough? 🤔 We think not! 💡
🔍 Join us as we discuss what should be done to ensure a smooth onboarding process and set our employees up for success. How long should you invest in onboarding? 🕒 What steps should be included? 📋
💪 We believe in having a structured onboarding process in place. And let's be honest, we're not perfect either, but that doesn't stop us from striving for excellence! 🌟
🗣️ Tune in to the show today as we chat it up about the importance of effective employee onboarding. Get ready for some valuable insights, practical tips, and of course, some fun along the way! 🎉
Do you want to grow your business and your profits? Is your business too dependent on you the owner? Improve or implement processes that help you grow. Eliminate stress while improving cash flow. Interested? If so check out LOS. Landscape Operating System with Peer group is for you.
Learn more here https://www.scalingscoresystem.com/los
🎙️ Today on the show, we dive into the world of employee onboarding! 🚀
👥 Let's face it, most companies just take their new hires out to the job and call it a day. But is that really enough? 🤔 We think not! 💡
🔍 Join us as we discuss what should be done to ensure a smooth onboarding process and set our employees up for success. How long should you invest in onboarding? 🕒 What steps should be included? 📋
💪 We believe in having a structured onboarding process in place. And let's be honest, we're not perfect either, but that doesn't stop us from striving for excellence! 🌟
🗣️ Tune in to the show today as we chat it up about the importance of effective employee onboarding. Get ready for some valuable insights, practical tips, and of course, some fun along the way! 🎉
Do you want to grow your business and your profits? Is your business too dependent on you the owner? Improve or implement processes that help you grow. Eliminate stress while improving cash flow. Interested? If so check out LOS. Landscape Operating System with Peer group is for you.
Learn more here https://www.scalingscoresystem.com/los
Speaker 1:
Good morning on Lanscape Talk. We're here, live in Rio, it's Monday, so getting after it Hopefully you had a great weekend, as always. If you're looking to grow your business, implement processes, reduce some of the time and share responsibilities with your team, bring up the second in command or other team members. Check out LOS. Los is a landscape operating system that helps you do this, as well as a peer group, so you get to learn from the best in the business, people that have similar things Going through things. You can always learn from other people and their businesses or processes, so check that out. There's links in this, so we'll dive in today. Today is Monday, just having a little bit of fun with the spring season. I'm here with Dan. Dan does some of our business development, helps with some of the systems and processes, and a little bit of this and a little bit of that. So how are you today?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, good, it's gonna be a good week.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, we're coming out of the winter time so I think a lot of things in people's mind is might be new staff, so we'll probably maybe just touch on that a little bit today and we won't get into where we find them yet. I mean, I'm sure that's probably a question or being fully staffed, but just kinda wanna look at the onboarding side of things and when you get somebody, what does onboarding look like and what should it look like for somebody that you bring it on, and maybe why is that important?
Speaker 2:
I mean I think just overall general way to look at it is it's always good when it's just standard. You have a set process. I mean it can be updated over time, but you have a process to the point where you might have someone who's kind of in charge of onboarding but at the same time it's so dialed in you have a checklist of all the things that needs to be gone through for each person. It's dialed into the point where if someone else has to jump in for a little bit, they know exactly where the person's at. They know exactly what the next steps are and it's not just like oh, I'll do the best I can Like, it's a very specific. They know what the next step is. It's always good to have that like standard. So you know what the process is. Everyone goes through the same process, gets them up to speed.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think the other thing, I think it's something we overlooked for a little bit and he spent a lot of time recruiting people and then they would get there and it was kind of like what's next, or what should we do, or you know they don't feel welcome. So, you know, I think it's like you know how do you make people feel welcome in your organization? Because I can think, you know, even going to a networking event, you know there's some people that just fit right in right away and they're just like talking. But I could always tell when you have somebody that's new and they're just kind of like standing there, quiet, maybe looking down on their phone, like how do you really outreach to them?
Speaker 1:
And that is a process you know in itself, to just say like when somebody comes on board, you may get an effort to make them feel comfortable. It's like start up a conversation so that they start talking about you know what they do, where they're from. Because I can think of you know we join networking events, we do different things, we're involved in stuff, and I can even, especially if you go to a place where somebody doesn't know you and you're there, you're just kind of like sitting at the table. The number one thing that you want somebody to do, if you're not that outgoing person, is to come over and just say hey, who are you, what do you do?
Speaker 1:
Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm gonna bring you out. I just feel like a part of the team, somebody cares, somebody noticed me. But I think if you're not doing anything and you don't have a formal quote process, I mean obviously you can get there, but just assign somebody to just have conversation. I mean we have a couple of people that love to talk. Right, if you're talking about assigning things, just give them, say like I just want you to make them feel comfortable because that person, you know, maybe over time, like you know, drive somebody nuts. You know, I'm not saying any specific person, I'm just saying in general that like style, but like when you're first coming in you're like wow, you know that's yeah, that's what you want, that's what you want.
Speaker 2:
So, you know, I think that can be really helpful so we can have a welcoming committee chair.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, exactly, you know what do you think? Where do you think most people you know fall short? Or what you've seen fall short in the onboarding process, you know, or the inverse of, like what is the benefit of you know what should an onboarding process take you through? So obviously you post an ad, then you hired them. You know, we can talk about that in another episode. But, like, once they get to that point, most people think you're done and, to be honest, to really retain your people, I think that's where it actually starts. So, like what should be included in that time and really driving forward from that point?
Speaker 2:
Well, I mean, it's really important to like one like set the specific expectations, like really early on, like you know, give them a good sense of like you know, this is how we operate, these are the things that we like expect you know from our texts, instead of like getting them going and just trying to, like you know, feed that to them slowly, like over the course, you know, because things come up and you're like oh we, you know, once someone develops a certain habit, it can be harder to like get them to break that Like you want to make sure like it's set up right from the beginning so they know, like exactly like by the time they show up, even like for their first you know full day, they should have a pretty good idea of like what the day is going to be and like what their expectations are, how they're going to be, what their expectations are, how they should show up, you know, what they should have with them, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2:
So I feel like the biggest mistake is probably you kind of touched on it earlier, but just like being a little bit unprepared in terms of, oh, we'll just, you know, we'll have them come in and then we'll just decide. You know what we think he should do when he gets here, kind of thing like that's you're already behind if you're doing it that way.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I think, as a person, if you go in and I can think about from the office perspective, when people start in an office and they have and we don't do this perfect, but like if you have their email set up and they're you know, if you have a business card, if they need business cards, or they have their workspace or their computer set up, that's a lot of stuff. That is, it shows intentionality. Now, there's a lot of times where that doesn't actually, you know, doesn't happen, but the more that you can like commit to, like helping prepare and get them running faster, the better. Obviously, there's an ideal for everything and you have to choose. You know pick and choose, like what you can do. Ultimately, you're working towards that goal. But I just think onboarding is so important.
Speaker 1:
And then you know what, as far as like training wise, you know what is the expectation of what they should be doing and how do you get them certified and what are some points where you check in, like you know, is it, is it in a week, is it two weeks, is it a month? Does that take you to 90 days and Just allow a way for them to communicate? Because if you're not doing that, I just feel like it's really and it's hard because you're like hey, go do the work, but when they don't do the work, I Feel like it does come back on. You know us as leaders to say, like I was I was talking to somebody the other day and they were. They were like saying how they were complaining about you know that everybody wants a, a talent. Right, you want a player, so a player, it's great. But like you want a player because somebody else developed the a player, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:
So the question is is like, if you want the a player, are you willing to put in, to be training obsessed to help develop the a player so you have the a player recognize who has the ability to go? I like sports as an example where you say, okay, you know a scout, so if you're a scout, you look for the ability to grow. You're not in the majors yet. I mean I don't like baseball, but baseball is a good example. They I Don't follow what I should say, but like they have scouts right, so like they look for potential. So what is the potential that you're actually looking for? So that they can, you can, they can grow. Like, if you're not gonna get an a player, you know how do you grow it? And to me that's on boarding. On boarding is growing your people to the next level. So I don't know if there's anything that you think when you hear those things, but that's kind of the way I think about it.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I mean I mean definitely like things I pick up on. Like, early on, working with a guy is like is he, is he like flexible and adaptable, like if I give him something you know, or have him watch a video or you know, learn some new way of doing something. Like, is he, is he very open to like, oh, like he's engaged in that he picks up on and he's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense, you know I'm gonna do. Or is he kind of like resistant, like oh, I, you know I do it this way.
Speaker 2:
Or you know this doesn't really like get what what the point it you know. So, like that's that's definitely like you said, like having having all the experience you know, coming right in with it. It's like sure, like that's great, but like, at the end of the day, it's like it's not hard to get the right people like up to speed on like how we do things, as long as they have that like good attitude and you know they're, they know they're there to like learn and like do the best they can and develop with the company.
Speaker 1:
One of the things. This is probably I don't know, it might have been 18, you know, maybe 20 years ago now, but, like you know, when I first started in the industry, you know it was a bunch of kids and they had no skill, they had no resume on landscaping, they had nothing. They were just either friends, friends of friends, kids that you know their parents needed them to like just get a summer job right, and we delivered amazing service. We grew the company based off of almost, I would say, like the McDonald's model a bunch of teenagers, right. So the question that is is like why now, all of a sudden, we say we just need these eight players because that's the only way we can deliver a service? And I would just really, if you think about it like that, like how we started and grew a company was with zero skill. There was one, there was one person that knew what they were doing. You know they were the person that knew what they were doing, kind of, and that was me. So all you really need like one person that knows a little bit, and I was even learning at that time. You know, I remember I'm going to go right into the camp. You can't make it up. So you know you can't make it up.
Speaker 1:
That's a segment where we talk about things you just can't make up. It's like can you believe somebody did that? We give examples of, like strapping down dirt. You know just, you know all sorts of things. But you know, as I was starting and it just made me think of this, somebody came to me and said I have grubs in my yard, right. So I didn't know what grubs were, but they told me what they wanted. They're like we want to dig the grubs out. So I came in with an excavator and we just dug up the whole. We dug up all the. We had trailer loads of dirt we just hauled out. We literally dug the grubs out and then hauled in new soil.
Speaker 1:
It was the most ridiculous project ever, because you don't need to do that. All you need to do is oversee the dead spots, because the grubs now I know they're only a seasonal thing, right. So you know they could have got a project for, like you know, we could have seeded it for probably a couple hundred bucks. And here we brought in heavy equipment and like earth moving stuff and we literally extracted the grubs. Really ridiculous, you can't even make it up. If somebody told me that now I would be like you're an idiot, like why would you do that? But that was at the time. You just can't make it up. We completely removed their yard because they had grubs, but that's the kind of thing. But the customer was happy at the end of the day because that's what they asked for and that's what they thought they needed. We were both uneducated but we were just a bunch of kids doing what the customer wanted and they loved us.
Speaker 1:
It was completely ridiculous. Now, I mean, that's one you can't make up. I mean we literally took out and put in a whole new yard and you don't need to do that. But so that's kind of a funny one. But it's just. As you learn, you know what it is. So I'm out of. Do you have anything that you've seen in the last week or so?
Speaker 2:
I'm not thinking of something just right off the bat, like last week or so, but something I was thinking about earlier was along the same lines as the onboarding thing, with like having guys that are there to learn and grow with the company and all that. On the flip side of that, sometimes you get guys that just like the example that came to my mind was a guy that like worked with us for a little while. Every once in a while there'd be just like a little bit of damage, nothing like huge or anything, but just like a little damage appearing here and there. We're like, hey, like nothing would get reported or whatever. We'd be like, hey, like, what's going on with this?
Speaker 2:
And one of the things was it was like a piece on the side of a trailer got like just a little bent up and we're like just not making accusations or anything, but just like. We got to have a conversation like what's this about? And the guy was like, oh, the wind did it. He was like, yeah, oh, he never. He just like wouldn't take responsibility for stuff. That like was obviously his responsibility. But yeah, the wind did it. It's probably the funniest thing I've ever heard is like damage goes like.
Speaker 1:
You can't make it up. You can't make it up.
Speaker 2:
I'm sure the wind did that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, if you have anything you can't make it up stories that you have things that you see, whether it's your crews or other people that you see please share them Again. We have like a ongoing thing where we keep track of them and we're going to actually give out some prizes for like the best. You know it can't make it up. You know we'll have a bracket where we'll kind of do them head to head once we get enough of them and we'll kind of see, like you know who wins and you know the champion you know from there, so great, great, you know. Thanks for tuning in today. We'll keep you posted. If there's anything you want to hear or us to dive into, please feel free to share it. We also look to do some product reviews. Again, check out LOS if you're looking to grow scale with like minded people. If you're lacking time, you know, and you just need better processes I mean that's one of the things that gets you time back so you reach out to LOS, check them out. Links will be in the thing. There's also some landscape training stuff and we'll look to help get you resources that help grow your business and grow your profits.
Speaker 1:
I'm Seth. This is Dan, we'll be back tomorrow. Talk to you soon.