As a hiring professional, you already understand how critical the employee onboarding process is to an organization’s overall success. Sometimes, it is unclear how to measure how well that onboarding process is working to position your new hires for success. This issue has only become more pronounced in a modern world of dynamic job duties and fast-changing technology.

Measuring new hire productivity can be challenging, so it goes without saying that tailoring your onboarding process to improve these measurements can also be a daunting task. With the correct tools in place, however, you can help your new team members hit the ground running and measure their performance effectively to ensure your changes are working. This will rely on your understanding of three critical concepts.

Understanding Time-to-Proficiency (TTP)

Time-to-proficiency, or TTP, is one key term you’ll want to wrap your head around before refining your onboarding and training processes to support new hires better. Setting good goals and performance indicators is crucial, but the more important metric is time-to-proficiency. This is a metric that shows how much time is required for each new hire to get up to speed in their role.

Begin by Defining Your Performance Indicators (PIs)

Before you can actually measure productivity, you need to define exactly what that means for your operation. Performance indicators, or PIs, are specific job metrics that can be monitored and quantified for best results. Effectively implemented PIs will give you raw data showing how much work your employees are doing and how well they’re doing.

Depending on your industry and each individual team member’s duties, performance indicators can look quite different from job to job. For example, if you’re hiring salespeople, you would focus on how many sales each employee makes when evaluating their productivity. A customer support agent, meanwhile, can be judged by how many support tickets they close and how satisfied their customers are.

Once your PIs are well defined, make sure to set a regular schedule for reviewing and updating your PIs. As technology, markets, and workplaces continue to evolve, so must your policies and priorities.

Set Goals and Communicate Clear Expectations

Once your performance indicators are in place, you need to decide what levels you’d like to see employees performing at. When it comes to setting effective goals for new hires, many of today’s leading organizations are leaning into the “SMART” framework. This acronym stands for:

  • Specific – There should be no room for confusion or misinterpretation when you’re telling new employees what you expect of them over their first few weeks or months at the company.
  • Measurable – Performance indicators don’t work well when they are open to subjective interpretation. Performance indicators that can be readily and definitively measured are the key to ensuring your employee evaluations aren’t subject to internal bias and other vectors for human error.
  • Achievable – It’s only natural to expect excellence from your team, but you want reasonable goals that your whole team can share and buy into.
  • Relevant –  Make sure the goals you set are things that will have a direct and positive impact on your workflows.
  • Time-Bound – Ensure your new hires understand where you want to see their productivity, how it will be measured, and how long they have to get there.

The challenge provided by your PI goals should inspire and invigorate your hires rather than make them anxious from day one on the job. When your employees exceed their goals, take time to recognize their achievements and use them to build camaraderie and morale.

Putting It All Together With a Comprehensive Onboarding Program

Once equipped with a good understanding of these three key concepts, you can begin to refine your onboarding process to help your new employees meet these goals. We encourage you to check out Stang Decision Systems’ fully featured SkillBuilder Gap Analysis tool and consider implementing it as part of a robust onboarding protocol.