Employee On-Boarding Virtual Summit Agenda

BONUS Peer-to-Peer Best Practice Component:
Be prepared to roll up your sleeves -- and learn. Throughout the program, your instructors will use a series of short interactive exercises designed to help you and your fellow participants share your successful on-boarding and best practice ideas with each other.

Session 1: 10:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. (All Times Central)
Developing an On-Boarding Strategy that Retains and Engages New Hires
Is your on-boarding program retaining new employees or causing them to suffer from buyer’s remorse? A clear, concise on-boarding strategy is critical to engaging new hires, and in this session, you’ll learn how to develop an effective action plan that uses well-defined objectives to establish a long-term bond between new employee and the employer.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Why it’s important to view on-boarding as an on-going process and use that mindset to develop goals for your program
• Goal setting question #1: What do new employees need to know about your organization that would make them more comfortable about joining the organization?
• Goal-setting question #2: What positive first-day experience can HR provide for the new employee that he or she will remember?
• How to build a business case for on-boarding
• How to build an on-boarding experience that responds to the three stages of the new employee, including the most important: when new hires decide whether they made the right decision
• Recognizing on-boarding failures and how to address problems that are likely to derail your on-boarding efforts
• Problems in getting managers to participate and engage in the on-boarding process
• Recognizing what separates on-boarding from traditional new-hire orientation
  

Session 2: 10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Rolling Out the Red Carpet for New Employees -- Step-by-Step
In this session, we’ll take an in-depth look at the necessary steps that HR must initiate and complete during the new hire’s first days on the job. From the minute the applicant accepts the job offer to the new employee’s first few weeks, your instructors will walk you through the key phases that are required to create a structured, yet memorable, on-boarding experience for new employees.

Learning Objectives:

• The essential prep work that will help you outline a detailed schedule of on-boarding activities
• How to use checklists to manage other crucial details, including ideas for setting up the new hire’s workspace
• How to communicate to the department and the entire organization about the new hire’s arrival
• An hour-by-hour walk through of how to structure a new hire’s first day on the job
• When the new hire’s managers should enter the picture on Day 1 -- and what their role should be throughout that critical first day
• How to use the on-boarding experience to engage the employee in the company’s history and culture
• How to make the paperwork process painless
• Rewards and incentives that you can offer new hires (and their families) to celebrate the new job
• What your organization’s CEO can do that will go a long way in retaining the new hire
• How to make the new hire feel part of a team during that first week
• Ideas for making on-boarding fun and interactive
• Examples of how today’s innovative employers are incorporating online video into the on-boarding experience
• A 15-minute break will occur during this session.
  

Extended Break 12:15 p.m. - 12:45 p.m.

Session 3: 12:45 p.m.-1:30 p.m.
How Supervisors Can Accelerate the New Employee’s Engagement and Job Training
The #1 reason why employees leave their jobs? Answer: their immediate supervisors. So, why is it that many employers fail to incorporate supervisors into the on-boarding process? This approach can only lead to disastrous consequences, resulting in expensive turnover costs that HR has to justify to management. With this session, you’ll learn an approach that positions your supervisors at the center of process, ensuring the success of the new hire’s performance on the job.

Key Learning Objectives:

• How to transition from an HR on-boarding process in the first 90 days to a company-wide orientation during the next 90 days, that includes managers, mentors, and the new employee’s work team
• How to begin the process of training new employees in their core responsibilities
• Ideas for building the critical working relationship between the new hire and their manager
• How to create a first assignment that engages new hires in their jobs and the company
• The role that senior management plays in getting the new employee acclimated with the organization and its business objectives
• How to pace or spread out information about the organization to employees and why this will help new hires achieve a better understanding of their job duties
• The important role that supervisors play in the new hire’s next 90 days, including a model for training new employees in their jobs, ways of setting performance expectations, and advice on how to deliver constructive feedback to a new employee
• The skills necessary for supervisors to effectively implement long-term on-boarding, including the ability to frame processes and tasks for easy recall and implementation
  

Session 4: 1:30 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.
Energizing On-Boarding with Powerful Mentoring Programs
Using current employees as mentors is an effective way to immerse your new employees into the company culture and, at the same time, provide existing employees with a valuable career development opportunity. In this session, we’ll take a look at how to structure and manage a mentoring program that works simultaneously at engaging new and existing employees.

Key Learning Objectives:

• The mentor system: How it works and why it’s critical to the new hire’s success
• Criteria for selecting mentors for an on-boarding program
• What does a mentor do? Understanding the skills that mentors should posses in order to be effective for the new employee
• How to guide mentors in their new roles and address potential pitfalls along the way
• Teaching new hires to be good “mentorees”: What they should expect and not expect from their mentors, skills (description, explanation, accepting constructive criticism)
  

Session 5: 2:15 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Measure the Success of Your On-Boarding Program
There’s no such thing as the perfect on-boarding experience. Only the best practice programs are courageous enough to continuously assess weaknesses and improve as needed. This session will review approaches for measuring the effectiveness of on-boarding programs and ways of incorporating these assessment strategies into your future efforts.

Key Learning Objectives:

• Ways to gauge whether the experience produced the intended results
• How to use a survey to measure effectiveness of the on-boarding program’s content and presentation
• Using turnover as a key indicator of your success or failure
• How to use key retention and engagement factors that matter to employees -- such as job interest alignment and leadership qualities of supervisors -- to track the effectiveness of your on-boarding program
• How to use surveys and interviews with both new employees and their managers to assess effectiveness of a long-term on-boarding program
• What an onsite observation of the new employee’s performance can tell you about the success or failure of your on-boarding program
  

Session 6: 3:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Q&A Roundtable with Attendees
In this last segment, you’ll have an opportunity to pose your questions to our expert faculty live via e-mail or Twitter.

Your Workshop Leaders...

Hal Adler is the founder of Leadership Landing, a consultancy dedicated to helping leaders attain higher performance and profit through customized individual and team development. Prior to founding Leadership Landing, Hal was President of the Great Place to Work® Institute, the global research and consulting firm best known for creating the gold standard in workplace recognition, the annual FORTUNE “100 Best Companies to Work For” list.

Prior to joining the Institute, He was the founder of the Training Arts Institute, and his professional career also includes leadership positions with the Center for Talent Retention, a management training and development firm, and Manpower, a global HR Consulting and staffing business.

Hal’s range of practical, hands-on leadership experiences spans from managing within multi-national publicly held companies, to being the first hire in boutique consulting firms. Hal has years of experience working with leadership across such industries as healthcare, airline, finance, manufacturing, insurance, retail, hospitality and gaming, technology, and construction. He is a regular keynote speaker and presenter at professional association conferences, including the Society for Human Resources Management annual conference.

Linda S. Newman is Director of Employee Development for Alston & Bird LLP. Alston & Bird is a large law firm headquartered in Atlanta and has been recognized by Fortune Magazine for the last ten years on its annual list of the “100 Best Companies To Work for in America.” Alston & Bird has more than 1,800 lawyers and employees in nine offices including Atlanta, Charlotte, Dallas, Los Angles, New York, Raleigh, Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.

Linda has been in her current position for 11 years and has more than 30 years of HR management experience. In her role, Linda provides strategic direction for the firm’s customer service initiatives and the development programs for the Executive Staff. With Linda’s contributions, the HR team has implemented and managed many programs that have brought Alston & Bird national recognition as an innovator in branding a level of customer service that is unique to law firms.

Linda graduated from Eastern Illinois University and worked as a paralegal for 5 years before transitioning into law firm management in Human Resources. She is a frequent speaker on topics related to best practices in human resource management and cultivating great work environments.

Dr. Deborah Tobey has been in the Organization Development (OD) field for more than 20 years, and is owner of a solo consulting practice, Deb Tobey LLC. She has served clients in both the public and private sector, including such organizations as Ceridian Corporation, Saturn Corporation, General Mills, O’Charley's Corporation, the State of Tennessee Departments of Human Resources and Transportation, Whirlpool Corporation, the University of Tennessee Institute for Public Service, the YWCA, Deutsche Bank, BMI Inc., the Center for Nonprofit Management, and the American Management Association.

Dr. Tobey’s areas of expertise include: consultation skills development; leadership development; group and planning process interventions; teambuilding; performance and training needs assessment and evaluation; training/instructional design; competency modeling; supervisory and management development; and “train the trainer.”

She is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her doctorate is in Human Resource Development (HRD) from Vanderbilt University. She is an adjunct professor at George Washington University, Vanderbilt University, and Belmont University. Dr. Tobey is author of Data Collection for Needs Assessment (2007) and Needs Assessment Basics (2005). She is co-author of Facilitation Skills Training (2007) and Facilitation Basics (2004).