Why is it critical to make sure you onboard all new employees in a timely and effective manner?
One of the most frustrating aspects of running a manufacturing facility is losing people from the lines of your production floor. If you don’t have the right people in the right place, you risk missing production quotas, which could create strained relationships with your customers. A company’s ability to onboard new employees quickly and adequately is key to meeting production quotas and minimizing production disruptions.
As manufacturing companies grow, one area that often gets ignored is the onboarding of new employees. Taking managers away from their ‘real’ jobs to teach these new employees ‘how things are done’ can be an expensive proposition because it can take managers away from doing what they do best—overseeing the production lines.
One of the ways to shorten the time it takes to onboard new employees is to provide simple, easy‑to‑use training documents that will help the new team members get onboarded quickly so that they can get to the work they were hired to do. These documents don’t need to be 100-page manuals that never get picked up. Instead, they can be simple, easy-to-use documents that can minimize the training time not only for the employee, but for the manager as well.
Here is how to put this document together:
- Capture each step of the business’ processes on paper from the standpoint of a new employee with limited experience. Pretend you have never seen the process before. Document each step in the process with an explanation of how it is to be accomplished.
- Organize the information so that it has a logical progression.
- Structure the information into an easy-to-read format. In other words, write your ‘how to’ document in such a way that a fifth grader could pick it up, understand it, and use it to complete the onboarding process.
- After you have structured the document with the information you need in a format that your reader will be able to use, make the document presentable. For example, choose a clear font, and use bullet points and numbers to show the progression of the process in enough detail so that the new employee will have no problem understanding the material.
When your next new employee arrives on the job, hand him or her your easy-to-use, simple-to-follow document that will quickly and efficiently walk your new team member through the process of onboarding. In this way your company can save time, money, and even frustration. And who wouldn’t want to do that?
If you need help creating simple and easy-to-use documents to onboard your new employees, call us at 713-723-9142 or visit our website at www.sheaws.com.
