You’ve finally found the perfect fit for the role you’ve been hiring for. Now what?
Preparation for a new hire is essential in setting a positive tone for their experience as an employee at your agency. It’s your opportunity to structure a training path that not only sets the employee up for success within the functions of their role, but also makes them feel connected to your culture, brand and their career trajectory within your agency.
When preparing for a new hire, I find it helpful to think of both short-term and long-term milestones for the role. Short-term milestones, or checkpoints, may be defined as what skillsets, competencies and processes the employee needs to execute on proficiently in the first several weeks or months of their time with you. On the other hand, long-term milestones may be defined as the skillsets, competencies and processes the employee will need to execute on in the first year or two of being in their new role. Defining these milestones gives transparency to the employee on what is expected of them and reassures that both the employee and you as their manager are clear on their growth opportunities at your agency.
When establishing short-term milestones for your new hire, it may be useful to think of those milestones as falling into two categories: orientation and onboarding. Orientation can be thought of as the employee’s introduction to your agency and their role. Orientation may include trainings or exercises that include “the four C’s.”i
Compliance: Meeting with HR and/or an office manager, meeting with IT, learning about data security and documentation practices, completing necessary licensing and having carrier appointments.
Clarification: Defining goals and milestones, learning day-to-day tasks associated with the role, defining agency structure, learning where to find supplies or resources needed for the role and utilizing an agency glossary of terms.
Culture: Defining your company’s vision and goals, defining your company’s values and introduction to technologies leveraged by your agency.
Connection: Establishing “meet and greets” or trainings that provide the opportunity for the new hire to develop meaningful connections with a mentor, trainer, employees in other departments, carriers and vendors.
In contrast, onboarding can be thought of as the more technical portion of the employee’s initial training. The onboarding phase may include trainings or exercises in the following categories:
Industry Knowledge: Trainings on errors and omissions, the relationship between carriers and agents and defining captive vs. independent agents.
Process and Procedures: Workflow, agency management system, pipelining, cross selling and technology/software training.
Coverages and Carriers: Policy forms, carrier appetites, carrier specific coverages/endorsements and carrier contacts.
Power (soft) Skills: Written and verbal communication, agency specific sales process, customer service skills and time management skills.
When establishing long-term milestones or checkpoints for your new hire, it may be helpful to “chunk” milestones into shorter timeframes. For example, if you are defining or mapping milestones for the first year, you may define skillsets, competencies and processes for the three-month, six-month, nine-month and 12-month checkpoint. This will allow you and the employee to understand what additional trainings or resources may be needed to move to the next checkpoint.
As you are mapping out what trainings, resources and exercises are needed for your new employee’s orientation and onboarding, there are several platforms that work well for managing the documentation of this process. ACN offers templates such as:
Other options include project management platforms such as Asana or Microsoft Planner. Both of these options allow you to create tasks and tie links, documents, job aids, etc. to those tasks. These options allow the creator and any users (think other subject matter experts or mentors) involved in the training process to access the training path and see what items are completed or outstanding.
To avoid learning fatigue, your new employee will appreciate the ability to access their training material via different methods or sources. A well-crafted training path includes one-on-one learning opportunities with trainers and mentors, but also includes other modalities, such as e-learning platforms. This also ensures that you and your training team are able to accomplish your day-to-day work outside of training the new employee.
Applied University is a great way to provide an introduction to the navigation, function and features of Applied products. Because every agency’s workflows are different, it will be important to clarify whether the employee will be using the workflows as they are described in Applied University, or if they should consider these courses as a high-level introduction. Total CSR is another excellent resource for interactive e-learning content related to soft skills/HR content, introduction to the insurance industry and coverage knowledge.
No matter the size of your agency or the role of your new hire, preparing a documented training plan that is transparent and replicable is key to your employee engagement and retention.
Sources:
i: “Onboarding New Employees: Maximizing Success” by Talya N. Bauer, Ph. D, published by SHRM