In many practices, new hire periodic check-ins are little more than quick conversations. “How’s it going?” “Getting settled in?” Those kinds of things are good for casual notes and a vague sense of things, but the first 90 days is your most important opportunity to capture insights on your new employees' organic personality, skillset, on the spot thinking, adaptability to change and time management in your actual working environment.

In this article, we’re going to talk through how you fully leverage this opportunity and open the door to future success for your practice and your new hire.

During this time you will be able to determine how suitable your new hire is for your organization; likewise you should be encouraging your new hire to be evaluating your business.

Offering a developmental plan throughout the first 90 days presents your new hire with a clear timeline of goals and a kind of onramp to full integration with your team and the business as a whole.

Although each individual's growth may need more or less time to develop or additional help along the way, it's to your advantage to have a standard outline of expectations and the timeline to which you expect to adhere. Transparency will set your organization and new hires up for success with as few gray areas as possible.

• 30-60-90 day check-in review
• New hire feedback
• Use job descriptions as a guide to measure
• Clearly present goal metrics/KPI
• Short/long term goals
• Employee development:certification/license

30

The first 30 days will be a considerable amount of learning and training, check out our previous issue on successful onboarding for a more detailed explanation. Build a template to review, and measure against for the probationary period; this may be general or extremely detailed depending on your practice needs and the role of your new hire. Keeping developmental records on each new hire acts as an equitable way to measure performance and that remains true for every hire.

An example of what can be included in your new hire’s first 30 days and expectations:

• Schedule 30 day check-in
• Company culture and mission
• Platform, systems and processes
• Day to day operations
• Policy and procedures
• Job knowledge
• Getting to know the team

Getting through the first 30 days of employment is an achievement in itself, especially these days with new hires ghosting employers becoming a more common occurrence in all businesses. At the end of those 30 days, you should be able to rely on your new hire to successfully complete some elements of their position without supervision or assistance. Depending on the role, they may be fully autonomous at this point, but it’s always a good idea to spot check here and there.

60

During the following 30 days, distinguishing between what the new hire has learned, what they’ve mastered, and what still needs improvement should be the key focuses during the check-in discussion. This will help you and your new hire align and make sure the next month is as productive and fruitful as possible.

• Schedule 60 day check-in
• Identify challenging learning areas
• Be flexible as your new hire may exceed goals early, need more help, or maybe even need additional stretch goals to keep engagement high.
• Expect your employee to continually take on new tasks and provide a greater contribution to the team
• Start measuring results in the form of KPIs (key performance indicators) or other metrics relevant to their position

90 days and almost at the finish line of this probationary period. You and your new employee should both have a good sense of what it’s like to work together. It’s at this point where you both want to decide if you want to continue employment into the future.

Now is also the time for your new hire to fully put into practice the behaviors, skills and processes they’ve learned over the last period of time. They should be fully integrated into your team’s operations and should be more or less a fully fledged team member, requiring very little in the way of daily training.

90

Review growth and metrics of the two previous milestones. Discuss the next and final 30 days of the probationary period. Clarify any questions and offer any additional support.

• Schedule 90 day check-in
• Independently perform all major job functions
• Expect some administrative help still needed here and there, but it should be getting less frequent over time.
• Instill the expectation in your new hire that after 90 days, they will accountable for their work and the results they produce
• Meeting expectations
• Execute and complete
• Create a 90 day feedback survey

Offer a feedback survey to be completed by your new hire soliciting their impressions, suggestions, ideas for improvement. There is a tremendous amount of value a fresh set of eyes can generate for your practice, use it to your advantage. The feedback you receive from new hires will assist in your development program, represent value from employees while establishing trust.

Congratulations! Your new hire is on board, their probationary period has passed, and now you’re off and running to the next successful chapter of your business.