Why set goals during the onboarding process?

The onboard­ing process can be a stress­ful and scary time for new employ­ees, try­ing to learn so much new infor­ma­tion about their new organ­i­sa­tion, team and role. So with­out some form of struc­ture the first few days and weeks in a new job could be over whelm­ing, that’s where short term goals set­ting comes in. 

Set­ting short term goals is a great way to get new starters up and run­ning from day one. These goals shouldn’t be any­thing too stress­ful or com­pli­cat­ed, just sim­ple, easy to com­plete tasks to get new employ­ees famil­iarised with the organ­i­sa­tion, their new team mem­bers and their role. 

These goals could look some­thing like this: 

Name: Han Solo 

Job: Sales Assistant 

Start Date: 10^th of January 

New Goal: Arrange a meet­ing with Har­ry Pot­ter and Jane Eyre to find out what they do in the organ­i­sa­tion and how you will be work­ing with them in the future. 
Com­ple­tion Date: 14^th of January 

New Goal: Read the prod­uct mar­ket­ing mate­ri­als avail­able on our web­site to get a bet­ter under­stand­ing of the prod­uct sell­ing points.
Com­ple­tion Date: 17^th of January

New Goal: Get famil­iarised with our com­pa­nies core val­ues, these can be found on the com­pa­ny por­tal.
Com­ple­tion Date: 12^th of January

New Goal: Call 6 cus­tomers from the data giv­en to you and try to arrange meet­ings with their sales reps to dis­cuss con­tract renewals.
Com­ple­tion Date: 19^th of January 

The employ­ee now has a clear view of what is expect­ed of them dur­ing the first few days in their new role, and by com­plet­ing these goals they get to know peo­ple with­in their team, learn about com­pa­ny poli­cies, and begin to car­ry out tasks that will be expect­ed of them in their role.

Also, by set­ting goals that are rel­a­tive­ly easy to com­plete you’re set­ting your new employ­ees up to suc­ceed, allow­ing them to start achiev­ing goals right from the get go, giv­ing them a pos­i­tive expe­ri­ence in their first few days. You can make this even eas­i­er by log­ging these goals in an easy to use online per­for­mance man­age­ment plat­form (such as Clear Review) allow­ing the employ­ee to go back to the goals to remind them­selves of what needs doing.

If new starters don’t have goals to com­plete they can end up feel­ing lost or bored with­out a sense of pur­pose, on the oth­er hand if they have goals that are too dif­fi­cult or not clear­ly explained, they can feel defeat­ed before they’ve even started.

Progress against these goals can be checked dur­ing the reg­u­lar check-in con­ver­sa­tions between the new starter and their line man­ag­er. At the end of the week the man­ag­er and the new starter will go over the goals, update progress and check off those that have been com­plet­ed. If the new starter has not been able to com­plete these tasks this might be a sign that they are strug­gling or they don’t have the tools they need, in which case the man­ag­er can take steps to help fix this.

Once the man­ag­er is con­fi­dent that their new team mem­ber is set­tled in and has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed all the set goals, they can them set them some more chal­leng­ing goals that might take a few weeks or a cou­ple of months to complete.

By break­ing down a new starters tasks into short term, clear goals you can make your onboard­ing process eas­i­er, smoother and more pro­duc­tive all round. If you’d like to talk to a mem­ber of our team about how Clear Review can help your organ­i­sa­tion improve the onboard­ing process (amongst oth­er things) get in touch with us today: +44 (0)20 3637 4489 — hello@​clearreview.​com