Onboard New Employees Better with Business Intelligence

Your company is growing and you’re adding new employees fairly regularly. How streamlined is your process? Often times, new employees get tossed into the mix to fend for themselves and this can be a detriment to them getting up to speed in a timely manner. Don’t you want your newbie to be a productive member of your team as fast as possible? Here are a few ways that your business intelligence solution can help you onboard them efficiently.

1. Make Data Compliance a Priority

New employees can be a source of bad data. Do they know exactly what fields your company uses in your CRM? Do you use decimals or no? Do you need a dollar sign here or not? Small mistakes like this can quickly add up, adding uncertainty to your recent metrics.

Your BI tool can help onboard your new employees without a manager’s constant supervision by automatically detecting data errors as they are made, and ensuring they understand the processes you have in place at your company.

With this system in place, any number of new employees could be entering in data to your CRM, and all would be quickly notified that they are doing something wrong. The warnings tell you exactly where and what the mistakes were, and thus provide a layer of data validation that your CRM probably does not have.

This way, your new employee will quickly learn how to enter data into your system correctly from the very beginning, and avoid drawing the ire and collective hazing of your veterans.

2. Set Clear, Trackable Goals

Setting clear goals for new employees is a great way give them an immediate sense of purpose and direction. It seems like a no-brainer but how many companies have you worked for where you never quite understood your goals until months later? A good BI solution can help you track their goals, and also provide transparency for your new hires.

Your company might have multiple goals. Here is an example of goal tracking where different employees have to fulfill a quota of various activities in a given period of time:

Having this sort of goal tracking insight that’s constantly and automatically updated will help you as a manager make sure your new employees are on the right path, and help them keep goals in mind as they acclimate to your workforce.

3. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There’s no reason to let your newbies flounder to figure out how to close a deal. Sure, new hires can be an injection of new ideas and creativity who can discover new methods to bring big wins to your company, but that doesn’t mean they have to figure things out from scratch. Your veteran workers are a fount of knowledge and best practices, and their history should be used to show how things get done.

Say veteran employee Ronald Reagan is the leader in closing deals and newbie Harry Truman wants to know his secret. Your BI solution might show a efficiency chart like this:

Ah ha, Ron’s Negotiation to Verbal Commitment ratio is much higher than the others. Ron is great at getting his negotiations to end with a verbal commitment, meaning he is employing better negotiation tactics than others. Could new employees learn from Ron in this way? Insights like this can help new (and old) employees learn from your best performers, continually improving the efficiency of your business.

4. Review Their Performance in Context

No doubt you want to keep on top of your new employees’ performance in the first few weeks. Are they humming along? Are they lagging behind? It’s always best to address small issues before they become full blown problems. Your BI solution can help you in two ways here.

One, nightly/weekly emails give you an easy way to review your entire team’s activity on a consistant basis. Whether you like to have your overview snapshot with your morning cup of coffee or at the end of a good day’s work, these will get you in the habit of looking at your metrics and is an important method of making sure your newest employees aren’t struggling to keep up with their peers.

(Keep in mind that you can send these updates to your entire team as well, getting them too into the habit of pay attention to team metrics and giving each employee a sense of shared ownership and teamwork for collective goals.)

Two, your business intelligence tool can help you evaluate new employees against veterans, other new employees, or the company average, in order for you to get a good sense of how they are performing.

Your newbie might not be your top dealmaker yet, but compared to other novices, she might be leading the pack. You never know unless you look at the metrics in context and having a good BI tool in place can make this a breeze.

As for making sure new hires know how to properly clean the espresso machine…that’s completely on you.

Interested in what else our BI solution can do for your company?