Onboarding Shouldn't Run on Spreadsheets and Guesswork.

a study done by the Society for Human Resource Management says companies that fail to implement an effective onboarding program experience higher turnover, and it it results in substantial financial losses. So with poor onboarding programs, the stats show they have about a fifty percent higher turnover rate compared with those that have structured programs. And then twenty percent of that turnover takes place within the first forty five days of employment. So that's why it's really important for you to get them onboarded quickly so that they can be confident and competent in doing their jobs and be successful and have long wonderful careers in this industry. And so, again, that's why we built onboarding pathways with templates available to you. We've got templates for the first ninety days that we have created. It also costs up to forty percent of an employee's base salary to hire a new one with benefits, and then it takes approximately three to eight months for a new hire to become fully productive at work. And so our goal here is to really change that, with providing you with this wonderful tool. So with that, I am going to ask Nikki to talk to us a little bit. She is one of our beta customers for onboarding pathways, and I just wanted her to kind of tell us a little bit. What you're seeing right now is a a video loop of her old the old way that she handled onboarding. And so, Nikki, will you tell us a little bit about how that impacted your teams, how you managed it, what were some of the pain points with with using an Excel spreadsheet to manage onboarding? Well, we had tried several different things. We tried different softwares. We tried automated reminders. We tried everything. And, really, we found that going back to the basics was kind of the best way forward. And so an Excel spreadsheet with, you know, all the things we wanted. Well, the hard part of this is while very well intentioned, it's a very long sheet. You can see by, like, scrolling. I think it's almost three hundred rows, and it's every touch point that we want them to be able to have some sort of exposure to in their first, you know, thirty, sixty, ninety days depending on the position. And so while very well intended, it had some unintended consequences of, you know, it's a lot. It's very overwhelming when a new hire gets that, and they're like, oh my gosh. You expect me to go through all of this. And then the constant follow-up with the property manager or the regional manager or the maintenance supervisor or whoever that supervisor is. There's a pain point with the constant follow-up. And then, you know, with this, we started with, you know, was it done? And then, well, maybe it was done, but they're not really comfortable with it. Or they did the training and they hadn't been exposed, and so it kind of evolved. And, again, very well intentioned, but very bad unintended consequences, that came out of this. And what we found is we need the onboarding because we need something I mean, any good trainer or any, you know, good multifamily professional leader worth their salt is gonna have something that helps track through the onboarding process for their new hires because it's important. I mean, you know, the statistics you showed a minute ago are they're very true. I mean, the turnover in our industry is, you know, I think historically has been in an all time high, and it's hard to keep people. So you wanna be sure that when they do have that onboarding experience, it's good and not this three hundred row spreadsheet that they're overwhelmed with on their first So this is what we were doing. Right. And now let's look at what you're doing today with onboarding pathways. Tell us a little bit about how your admin experience has improved, your leadership, your employees, and kind of the overall reaction at Hanover to this. So, I'm gonna kinda step back a little bit and tell you kinda what this came where this came from. You know, I've overseen the training department with Hanover for eight years, and one of the things that's kind of a consistent message is training never stops. You know, your first day, your first week, your first month of training, that's kind of the beginning, but it never stops. And so, you know, my job is is constantly evolving. And what we found is we had our leadership conference, and this is what you're looking at. It's kind of the content that came out of our leadership conference. And we this we had a support survey that we sent out to our our on-site teams. And we asked them, you know, how do you feel about the support you're getting from training, from our global services team, from all of those things? And then we took that information. We kinda packaged it up in a way that we could present at our leadership conference what we're doing as a response to their support survey comments. And we had overwhelming feedback in the support survey that they really wanted a better onboarding experience, you know. And this is coming from managers. Managers want a better onboarding experience for their people. So we're responding to a need and a request. And, you know, I had already started working with Grace Hill on this, late last year. And probably the my favorite part of this is I sent our spreadsheet to your team and was like, can we automate this? Can we make this easier? Can we make this more digestible? And with most other software companies that you work with, you kinda get what you get. You don't throw a fit. Right? Grace Hill has been so amenable to change, and it's kinda refreshing, especially coming from a systems mindset that I sent them this spreadsheet. It was like, can we automate this, make it digestible, but then also make it interactive and engaging, and make the user want to use it? And not only did, you know, the Grace Hill team do that, but they also took so much great feedback. So every time I said, hey. This is great, but can we maybe do this too? It wasn't a, no. Wait for the next release, or no. That's not something we can do. It was, you know what? Let me look. Let me let me take a look and give me a week or so, and then I did. So this this tool was not only built with property management in mind, it was built nearly to spec for exactly what I would be looking for, not just from a, you know, director level, you know, overseeing training development, but I was on-site for a long time. And this is something that to me is very easy to understand, very easy to interact with. And when they finished building it, I mean, I I just told the the guy with Grace Hill just yesterday in an email. I was thanking him saying, I'm gonna leave you in my will. Like, this is fantastic. I love what they came up with, and it is easy to use. And it was and and the the best part of it, the spreadsheet's gone, but everything that was in the spreadsheet, like all the meat and potatoes that you really need for training, the content is still there. It's just packaged in a way that makes it less overwhelming for that new hire. And it's because of how they were able to tie in not just the onboarding, but the courses and the learning paths and specific assignments and how you can even just, you know, craft checklist of, hey. Did you do this? You know, did you go through these things on your first day? So I absolutely love everything that they did, and we're using it for everything now. That's so good to hear. You know, when I worked on-site, which was a long time ago, but I I remember training trying to train people on a lease up. And they're following me around the office, and I don't even have time to explain anything to them, because with such a fast paced environment. And I feel like with onboarding pathways, this is a good way for them to have, you know, like, something that really makes them feel like they understand what they're supposed to be doing. And then I feel like our content the Sparks content that we provided so if you're on this webinar and you don't know about Sparks, Spark is our new microlearning that we launched last year, and it's training that looks like social media. So it's real. It's TikTok. It's like what we're used to watching, and, you know, I've I've followed people and get recipes. So it's the same idea but with property management. And we've got over a hundred and sixty sparks that we have created that you can drop in to onboarding pathways to get people trained up quickly. So if you want someone to learn how to, greet someone when they walk in the door, they can watch a a minute and a half, two minute spark to see how you how they need to be greeting that prospect. And then in addition to that, we have learning plans that can layer over these onboarding pathways that have the full courses in them. But the idea is you can use this product to get your teams trained up faster. So it's a it's a a really neat, tool. And then we've also found, Nikki, in your doing, this exercise with us, we've had probably about fifteen customers. I didn't ask for the exact number, but in that participated in the beta, worked very closely with our product team to make sure that we were building this to meet industry standards and to support what they need in order to have successful communities. And so one of the things that you have determined and other customers have said, they're using this not just for onboarding, they're using it for promotions and transfers. Can you tell us a little bit about how you did that? I think you talked about two communities that were across the street from each other but had different training needs. So we've actually had several instances where this has come up just since we kinda finalized and deployed this. You know, we introduced it at our leadership conference. And, you know, being that it's fair housing month, you know, you wanna make sure you get your fair housing stuff training, you know, all of that done in your, you know, first day, first week, first month, however your your company does it. So we have that plugged into the onboarding pathway. And it's for onboarding for new hires. Now if it's a transfer or a promotion, you may not necessarily have it in there unless you're going to, like, the supervisor version of sexual harassment. Right? So you wanna make sure that's plugged in for those. But for fair housing, you know, it may not necessarily be that you have fair housing plugged in, the fair housing specific training plugged into promotions and transfers. But what if they're going from Houston to Denver? Where in Houston, you don't you're not required because it's not a protected source of in source of income is not a protected class. You're not required to accept section eight vouchers. But in Denver, you are. So you need to add a layer of that fair housing training when you're going there, and this is where the onboarding pathways are so helpful because we have just kind of a standard, you know, layer template, if you will, of here's everything every new hire needs to do. And we use that as kinda like the the the skeleton of what we were doing for any and all others. But then if you have a promotion or a transfer or even a promotion that is a transfer, they have different needs depending on where they're going, what type of property. A high rise is different than a mid rise. You know, Denver is different than Houston, and the leasing manager is different than a property manager. So you have to help them understand like you're those are the people that get lost in the shuffle. They just do. And it's it's hard because when you're being promoted and going to a new location, you have so much to learn. It becomes culture shock if you're going to a different place and, you know, shell shock if you're being promoted to a different position, especially if you're going to a different product from maybe a garden community to a high rise or vice versa. So all of those things that we felt like these are important to plug in and make sure they get in their first thirty days, We added that to additional custom pathways. So we've got a new hire. Great. We've got a new hire for leasing, new hire for maintenance, new hire for, you know, every position, but we also have transfers. We have promotions, and we have transfer promotions to identify where we had gaps in our training processes that have just improved our entire all of our onboarding, not just for new hires. It's great. And the the opportunity to make sure that you're capturing not just the new hire fair housing, all the onboarding training, but also anything supplemental that may impact them in their new role on this onboarding tool is really tremendous. Yeah. And the thing that I love about it too is that you don't it's not all just training that you have to do. Like, not everything is elearning that in order to to work on a property. You've gotta understand your market. You've got to acknowledge a key policy and understand the importance of having access to keys. And what do I do if someone comes in and asks for a key? They these are all things they have to know, and it's not always, the same across what keys are, but, you know, it's not always the same across every property. So I I just I love this, and I'm super excited about it. We do you didn't have the templates because you were part of the beta. And so you did your own template. But within the system now, when you go in, there's the the temp it'll there's a tab that says templates. And when you click on that, you can see the ones that are Grace Hill templates have our little little round logo. And you can use those. You can just copy the template over. And then if there's anything that you don't want, you can just easily remove it. You can reorder things, and then you can add your own task. You can change up the sections. It's very user friendly. I've been using it, and we've been working on, the templates and web I have requests for more, and so we have the the list for that, and we'll continue to provide our customers with everything they need in order to make this tool work really well for them.