Don't Forget Soft Skills During Onboarding

One of the most powerful tools employers have for improving employee soft skills starts on day one: onboarding and up-to-speed training. What happens when new employees walk through the door on their first day? How are those first days and weeks leveraged when it comes to communicating which soft skills are important and how they are evaluated?

Make sure you know exactly what happens with your new hires in the formal orientation, onboarding, and up-to-speed training. Most employers have only a minimal process for addressing soft skills in their formal onboarding process. Of course, some are better at this than others.

Typically, employees should at least:

1. Be provided a basic introduction to the mission and history of the organization
2. Get the basic facts and figures
3. Meet some of the key players
4. Receive a primer on policies and paperwork
5. And be given a list of some rules and traditions

It's also important to carry consistent soft skills focus through the inevitable hand-off to the hiring manager, once the official orientation program is complete. That’s where so much of the real onboarding action is going to happen and that’s where the ball is often dropped.

How much should you focus on soft skills?

If you want to send the message that soft skills behaviors are truly a high priority, then you have to pay more than lip service. How much of your onboarding and up-to-speed training is dedicated to spelling out performance standards and expectations for those high-priority soft skill behaviors? How much time is dedicated to championing those behaviors and teaching them?

A simple rule: It should be about half.

As one savvy leader in a very successful retail chain put it: “For every hour we spend teaching a cashier how to operate the register, we spend at least an hour teaching them customer service skills—how to interact with customers and how to solve their problems.”

Three examples of soft skills onboarding in practice

There is a rental car company that prides itself on hiring only college graduates for every position, no matter how entry-level. They also pride themselves on an onboarding process that not only teaches every new hire the business but also makes it clear to new hires exactly what kind of workplace citizenship is expected.

The provided training materials spell out everything new hires must learn, from week to week. From day one they are expected to be working, helping out in any way they can, during the day. There are also weekly coaching sessions. And there are tests—at the 30-day mark, 60 days, and 90 days.

Of course, not every company has the resources to provide such a robust program. However, there are still ways to formalize soft skills training in small ways with a large impact. A senior director in one company said this of his team: “When it came to email, they did a bunch of things that drove everybody crazy. We developed a list of what to do and don’t do for email communication and we built in a 30-minute module in orientation. Problem solved.”

A similar solution to poor meeting etiquette in a large law firm demonstrates how soft skills training is valuable across the chain of command—no matter how senior or experienced employees may be. The firm began explicitly teaching new hires how to prepare for and conduct themselves in meetings—and it wasn’t just the new associates whose meeting manners were not so great. After they developed the program, leadership realized that everybody in the firm could benefit from learning and observing these best practices for meetings. As a result, said the senior partner, “We had a real change in our culture around meetings. People in this firm became religious about following the rules of conduct. Our meetings got much better and they remain so. It’s a centerpiece of our culture now.”