Fox Pest Control is headquartered in Logan, Utah, with branches in Texas, Louisiana, Virginia, New York, and more. They are a rapidly-growing business with whom I received some of my first HR experience during my bachelor’s program at Utah State University. I worked for them as an HR Generalist and Senior Recruiter for two years, and near the end of my bachelor’s degree at USU, I had the opportunity to join a few colleagues for an official consulting project to help Fox with some HR-related challenges they were struggling with. We had the pleasure of working with Michael Stokes, COO (“Stokes”), and newly hired Austin Truman, Director of HR for Fox.
The Issue
This project was simple but complex. Simple, because the only thing Fox wanted our help with was employee onboarding. Complex, because there is a lot to employee onboarding. Onboarding is arguably one of the most important aspects of HR to get right because it’s connected to human psychology. For one reason or another, first impressions hardly ever leave. They’re made in the first few interactions with a person or organization and are near impossible to change later on. They fabricate nearly our whole perception of something and thus have a tremendous impact on how a person interacts with others.
When an employee onboards with a new company, they’re receiving all kinds of permanent first impressions that will determine with near certainty how the rest of their experience will be working there. It’s HR’s job to exploit this natural psychological tendency by making the onboarding experience positive, engaging, and bright. Else, the bad first experiences employees have with the company will have detrimental long-term effects including attrition and decreased productivity and morale.
We started by coaching Fox on this principle and shared a popular framework to follow called “The Four C’s of Onboarding” which illustrate all the ways successful onboarding helps a company and workforce.
- Compliance. New employees knowing the basic legal and policy-related rules and regulations.
- Clarification. Ensuring that new employees understand their new jobs and all related expectations.
- Culture. Providing employees with a sense of organizational norms and values.
- Connection. Vital interpersonal relationships and information networks that new employees must establish.
The primary issue was that Fox’s onboarding process only consisted of meeting the employee in the lobby on their first day, introducing them to their team, and asking one of their coworkers if they could show them the ropes and answer their questions. The new employee was then left under the direction of their manager, who had no training or understanding of the principles behind effective onboarding.
The Project
We brainstormed with Austin and decided the best use of our time would be to put together an onboarding checklist and process for Fox to start using. In addition, we wanted to lay the foundation of a manager training on onboarding where the “why” of onboarding (discussed above) would be shared so everyone who plays a part in onboarding knew of its significance. Lastly, we wanted to make sure we implemented Fox’s core values into this new onboarding system so each practice and procedure aligned with the company culture instead of fighting it. Company culture was very important to Fox, and they wanted to preserve all the values that built them up from where they started in 2012.
So over the course of the next few days, our team met together to construct this new onboarding process. We started with a spreadsheet list of each step that needed to be completed when a new employee was hired. It had steps for the new hire, their manager, the HR rep, IT, and finance. The list would be shared with each of these stakeholders upon a new employee’s first day and each step would be checked off throughout the day.
One of the most important steps we designed was regular manager check-in meetings. A huge thing Fox’s current process lacked was interaction between the new hire and their manager to help them get to know each other, establish expectations, and follow up with how things were going. Starting a new job is always difficult, and full of fog and confusion. If a manager stays near the employee always able to answer questions, provide clarification and support, and point them in the right direction on an active basis, new employees will ramp up much more quickly and integrate with the culture better. So we wanted managers to have a sit-down meeting with new employees on their first day, on the one-week mark, one-month mark, and each month after for the next three months. Austin and Stokes were delighted.
Conclusion
This project was relatively short but impactful. Onboarding, good or bad, can have immense consequences on employees and businesses. Now that Fox understood this importance and was ready to implement their first strategic onboarding system, they were ready to bring on the influx of hires it needed to manage its growth. There’s a lot to look forward to in Fox’s future, and we’re very happy to have played a part!
Thank you Austin and Stokes for this opportunity!
