Recruiting and hiring a new executive is an expensive, albeit important undertaking. However, once you have the right candidate, you must keep the process going or risk losing your investment.
An executive onboarding program is essential in making sure the new hire is supported enough to seamlessly transition into their new role. In this article, you’ll learn what an executive onboarding process is, how it works, and some best practices for implementing it correctly.
What is executive onboarding?
Executive onboarding is the process of accommodating and assimilating new executive team members into the organization. It revolves mainly around familiarizing them with the company culture, values, and mission. Since senior leaders are responsible for driving these aspects within the company, executive onboarding is essential.
The process also introduces the new leaders to their specific job roles and responsibilities, as well as company policies and protocols. The executive onboarding plan typically includes meetings with the senior executive leadership team, board of directors, colleagues, team members, subordinates, and other key stakeholders.
Likewise, newly hired executives can also undergo some form of informal training to provide a better perspective of the entire organization. To minimize new employee turnover and attrition, an effective onboarding process should last up to one year. Rushing it can lead to suboptimal retention rates and underperformance in other onboarding metrics, like time-to-productivity or engagement.
Why is executive onboarding important?
Executive onboarding is important because it represents a significant investment in the long-term success of the company. There are many benefits to having a successful onboarding program, but these benefits are amplified when it comes to executive onboarding.
Here are some of the most relevant reasons why corporations need to invest in their executive onboarding process:
- Employees on an executive level generally have more experience than other hires. This means they’ve probably worked with many other companies and witnessed onboardings good and bad. A great onboarding experience will get them to acclimate faster. A bad experience, however, will immediately raise red flags. And first impressions count for a lot!
- An effective onboarding plan will also reduce turnover rates. By setting clear goals and expectations, you can help your new executive hires adjust to their roles better and quicker, and increase their retention rate.
- A well-organized executive onboarding plan will also create ample opportunities for the new hires to establish solid working relationships with the senior executive team and other key stakeholders. This helps build trust with both peers and subordinates.
- If they’ve received a solid onboarding, newly hired executives will probably be in high spirits. This feeling often permeates down from the executive team to the rest of the organization, boosting everyone’s morale.
- An executive who’s undergone an effective onboarding process is also better prepared to do their job effectively. They can take initiative and integrate into the company’s mission sooner.
- While the recruiting process of an executive can be expensive, it pales in comparison to the money that can be lost for every day the company goes without an effective member of the senior leadership team. In other words, a successful executive onboarding program has a high ROI (return on investment) and will often pay for itself many times over.
With the general explanation out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the best practices of a successful executive onboarding program.
7 executive onboarding best practices
Since every company is unique, there can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach to executive onboarding. Nevertheless, there are plenty of employee onboarding tips that you can use to great effect.
Set clear expectations
By not setting clear and realistic expectations right from the start, stress and confusion can often arise. It’s best to have a discussion with the new team member during the first week or two of the onboarding process to discuss what the new role entails, what objectives you want to reach and by when, and how the new exec will achieve those goals.
You shouldn’t expect things to resolve by themselves or hope the new hire will do wonders without a clear direction as to where you want to go.
Keep them engaged with new learning experiences
Given the fact that executives are experts in their field, they may begin to wonder if your organization is capable of offering them something of value. In many instances, new hires are looking for opportunities for upskilling and professional development. These can keep employees engaged with a company over the long term.
An onboarding learning management system (LMS) like Docebo can help them learn and develop further, no matter their current experience level, by leveraging a wide variety of training programs and activities. The Docebo platform is social, interactive, and flexible. It offers customizable user plans that can scale based on each learner’s training needs. It also provides engaging training material that grabs people’s attention and keeps them focused.
Provide adequate information
When successfully implemented, an executive onboarding process helps new hires to develop strong working relationships and reach peak productivity ASAP. Around 60% of executives say that it takes them, on average, six months to make an impact in their new role. Some 20% said it took them nine months. However, an effective corporate training program, coupled with easy access to the right information, can bring that period down to just four months.
A conventional onboarding process usually includes an onboarding checklist, manuals, and other handbooks. At an executive level, human resources can also add:
- Job role expectations, goals, and milestones
- Other executives’ job descriptions
- Resumes and competencies of the new executive’s direct reports
- Project due dates
- A list of shareholders and other key stakeholders
This information provides more context on the existing organizational structure, helping the new hire to achieve a successful transition.
Create opportunity for team bonding
You can’t really expect your newly hired executive to hit the ground running on the first day or even in the first week. They need some time to adapt and get to know their new team members and direct reports. You should allow them to do so as soon as possible.
To build relationships with their coworkers and improve cooperation with stakeholders, encourage one-on-one meetings or small group gatherings. Most importantly, you shouldn’t overwhelm them with too much work right away but allow them some time to build rapport inside the organization.
Leverage the predecessor’s knowledge
One of the biggest challenges facing new executive onboarding is the knowledge gap left behind by the new hire’s predecessor. Given their high level within the organization, it can take many months before the newly hired executive reaches the same level of efficiency.
If at all possible, it’s a good idea to find a replacement and begin the onboarding process before the predecessor leaves. This period of overlap will give the new hire firsthand knowledge and insight into their new role. The predecessor executive can act as a sort of temporary mentor, showing them the ropes and passing the torch, so to speak.
As part of its social learning package, Docebo also makes it possible for the predecessor to capture insights and share knowledge with the new executive. In fact, all the best performers in the company can create so-called learning pills—easily digestible bits of factual information that focus on target skill areas. They can use Docebo Shape to create these learning pills in minutes.
Both peers and direct reports can access these on demand, whenever they need a quick refresher or to learn something quickly. This way, new executives can quickly bridge the gap, even after their predecessor has left the organization.
Focus on objectives and not time
Basing certain aspects of the onboarding on time is beneficial. Setting clear goals and milestones that are achievable and time-bound gives new hires purpose and meaning in their new job. However, looking at the whole onboarding process as something with a specific start and end date can be detrimental.
Instead, try to create a company culture that’s focused on continuous learning and development that emphasizes objectives, not deadlines. By developing an ongoing personal progression plan based on milestones and clear objectives, each new executive will experience better engagement and retention. It’s also important to keep in mind that people acclimate differently and a fixed onboarding time frame may not be viable for everyone, even if it’s for the same role.
Maintain communication after the process
Whether or not you consider onboarding to be an ongoing process, it’s a good idea to maintain regular lines of communication with the new hire to ensure they’re settling in and that their knowledge transfer remains intact. This will also show the newly hired executive that you care about their learning and development.
Conduct regular check-ins to gauge how well their transition into the new role is going. You can follow a 30-60-90-day plan. This means you conduct a check-in every month during the first 90 days to gain some feedback. You can also look for any gaps in knowledge at this time and determine if they need any further training.
Common executive onboarding challenges
Even though a strong onboarding process can increase new hire retention rates, roughly 50% of all newly hired executives will leave the organization within the first 18 months. It’s clear that there are some challenges related to executive onboarding that hiring managers and human resources must address for companies to retain their top talent.
Let’s take a look at these challenges in more detail and some solutions to overcome them during onboarding.
- Cultural differences: As mentioned earlier, executives are often experienced professionals who’ve probably gone through numerous industries, organizations, and company cultures. It’s for this reason that there’s a relatively high chance that there may be some misalignment in terms of values, work practices, and communication styles. In addition, every employee is different and comes with their own perspective and background.
- Solution: If an executive-level employee is not meshing well with your culture and work environment, this must be addressed upfront. Express the company culture your executive will need to embrace and uphold from the start to mitigate any misalignments.
- Remote onboarding: Remote employees can rarely, if ever, come to the office to interact directly with their colleagues, sign documents, or even get an office tour. This can lead to feelings of isolation from the rest of the team, which can result in a lack of engagement, direction, or assistance. In the case of remote executives, not being able to get the feel of the company can seriously affect their productivity.
- Solution: Use a remote-specific employee onboarding program, to schedule one-on-one meetings with colleagues and direct reports, provide tech guidance, stay up-to-date on how new hires are feeling, and introduce and incorporate them into the company culture. With a SaaS (software-as-a-service) onboarding platform like Docebo, which integrates with most professional human resources tools, it’s far more efficient to digitize and automate as much of the onboarding process as possible giving you more time to connect with new executive hires.
- Unrealistic expectations: Given the nature of their role and experience, the expectation is that newly hired executives should perform and deliver immediate results from day one. But this pressure to immediately showcase their value in an unrealistic time frame can result in stress and burnout. It can even backfire.
- Solution: New execs need time to build relationships and get to know the company, its employees, culture, values, and workflows. Be sure the executive is trained on the fundamentals of the company and is provided with opportunities to understand the business and its team.
- Information overload: While it is important to provide adequate information, as previously mentioned, you want to avoid overloading the new hire with too much at once. Probably in the hope of not forgetting anything important, human resources departments provide new employees with everything and anything they will ever need during their first few days in the new job. But this leaves them scouring mounds of documents and information, trying to remember how everything works which can be overwhelming on top of any new job anxieties.
- Solution: Spread this knowledge throughout the entire onboarding process and beyond. An onboarding checklist can help keep track of all of the steps during the early days and weeks. For training, a micro-learning approach grants learners access to critical bits of relevant information on demand. They can even store the content they want in a personal library and revisit it whenever they need to.
- Lack of engagement: As previously mentioned, executives are typically seasoned professionals who’ve undergone many onboarding programs throughout their careers. This means a higher likelihood that the onboarding process may be perceived as boring or outdated.
- Solution: A good start is not directing the program mainly at filling out paperwork. Consider having more fun and keep the focus on forming relationships with peers, team members, and other key stakeholders. One-on-one meetings and lunches with senior staff are generally the way to go. When it comes to training, PowerPoint presentations can quickly become dry and uninteresting. Instead, consider a more engaging approach like Docebo’s gamification or hold internal webinars. Gamification is a form of game-based learning that leverages the learner’s competitive nature to increase engagement with the course material and knowledge retention. Webinar courses are also great for remote onboarding as they are more social.
Now over to you
Your executive onboarding program shouldn’t be something that gives you a lot of headaches. It needs to be something that brings value to your organization and is capable of engaging and retaining top talent.
To ensure an effective and seamless executive transition into your company, make use of all the right tools. Schedule a demo with Docebo to begin onboarding executives hassle-free.