The First 100 Days of Onboarding New Employees

 

You probably have heard the importance of the action plans of the "first 100 days" after a new President takes office or after you begin integrating two companies after a big merger, but I am guessing you haven't heard it applied to your recruiting and onboarding efforts with each of your new staff members. In many marriages, couples date for years before getting married. In contrast, in recruitment, someone can join your organization after only a few hours of interviews, which means you are essentially living and working together from the start of their employment. These "first 100 days" will dictate whether this union will work or not, and how you handle these first few months is critical.

Read the rest of this post in Entrepreneur, which I guest authored this week.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.

Lesson #362: Firing Long-Term Employees is Hard, But May Be Necessary

I consulted a client that had to do something they had never done before—they had to cut a long-term employee that had been with the company for over 5 years.  Once an employee has been with a company for that length of time, they have basically become “family”, so that is the equivalent of cutting your “brother or sister.”  And, most employees that get to 5 years of service, must have been doing something right during their employment, otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted that long.  But, things can change.  And, in this case, the employee no longer was a high performer, they had quickly become a poor performer, and that was causing broader challenges for the business, as described below.  This post will teach you how to handle situations like these, and why cutting your “brother or sister” may be the only option you have.

A Little Background

For purposes of this article, let’s say the employee here is named James.  James was part of the sales team.  He started out of the gate slow in his first year, but he quickly picked up steam with training and effort in his second year.  He was a high performing sales person for a couple years straight.  James loved his job and the company, and the company and his peers loved him.

But something happened in year five; his sales levels cut in half of the previous years and there were much higher instances of clients becoming very upset with James for lack of responsiveness and for making mistakes on their projects.  So, not only were revenues down, customer complaints and resulting fixes required were way up, which meant the rest of the entire team needed to step up and fill that void.  Many conversations would happen with James, trying to get him to improve his performance, and each time he said he would try to get better and that it would never happen again.  After a year of underperformance, and repetitive missteps by James, the company finally hit its breaking point and terminated James.  So, here a few lessons out of this story.

Employees Can Change

Good performers can go bad, like in this example.  And, bad performers can become good.  People are humans, and things are happening in their everyday lives.  Maybe their health goes bad?  Maybe their kids are becoming a bigger burden?  Maybe they are caring for ailing parents?   Whatever.  So, just because you had a good performer, doesn’t mean they will stay one, and you need to reassess their performance, as if the clock was starting new every quarter.  Which can be really hard for employees you have grown very close to over the years.

Cutting Friends is Hard, But Sometimes You Have No Choice

In this story, James was integrated into the fabric of the company, and he was well liked by everyone.  Which bought him some “leeway”, in terms of a runway to fix his mistakes, as compared to a brand new employee with no history with the company.  But, you can’t let your friendship with an employee blind you to his performance.  When customers are complaining, your brand is getting tarnished with negative reviews.  When your fellow staff are complaining, your credibility as a manager is getting questioned as to why are you continuing to let this poor performance happen (as it is directly impacting the rest of the team’s day-to-day job cleaning up his mess).  Make the tough decision and part ways sooner than later.  It should not have taken over a year in this case to resolve the situation.

Unpunished Poor Performers Get Increasingly Bold The Longer They Get Away With It

If you set a line in the sand, and the employee crosses it, you need to live by your word and take action.  In this case, the line was set in the sand, James crossed it on three separate occasions, but he continued to keep his job.  All that did was embolden James to believe he would never get fired, regardless of his actions, and he continued in his old bad ways, as he believed there was no real punishment coming his way.  And, when the punishment finally came, a year late, he was pretty much in shock that it actually happened.  So, if you set a line in the sand with an ultimatum, in terms of expected performance of a staff member required to not be terminated, you need to live by it if that goal is not met.

Never Lose Your “Street Cred” With the Rest of Your Team

The longer you let a “bad apple” stay with a company, the higher the risk that employee spoils the “whole bushel” and has everyone looking for the door.  Employees want to work in reasonable working environments, and repetitively doing extra work to put out other employees’ fires is not a desirable situation for anyone.  And, employees want to work for a boss they can trust to do the right thing, even if it means making the hard decisions.  They are looking to you as the leader, to help them “put out the fire” created by other bad employees.

The Economic Impact of Keeping a “Bad Apple” Employee

In the case of James, his sales dropped to half of the rest of the sales team.  That was worth about $500K in revenues and $50K in company profit per year.  That is not an insignificant amount that a replacement salesperson could have retained.  And, the economic impact of hundreds of upset customers spreading negative reviews online or to their peers, could be worth 3-4x this amount.  I always said, you gain 2-3 customers from positive word of mouth, and you lose 8-10 customers from bad word of mouth, as customers are much more vocal when they are upset, than when they are happy.  So, when you add those two factors up, lost sales plus lost prospective sales, this was a $200K-$250K bottom line impact to this business.  That’s why you need to take action, sooner than later.

Closing Thoughts

So, hopefully, none of your long term high achievers will turn into poor performers in your businesses, as that rarely happens.  But if they do, don’t repeat the mistakes my client made in this case study.  Act swiftly, making the hard cuts within three months of the poor behavior not getting resolved.  And, act fairly, treating a long term employee with respect (e.g., offer a high severance payment for their long tenure with the company).  It is never easy cutting employees, especially long-termers which you view as “friends and family” of the company.  But, sometimes, you just have no choice.

For future posts, please follow me on Twitter at: @georgedeeb.