But as Newhouse highlights, creating fruitful onboarding experiences is worth the effort. It increases the retention, productivity, and loyalty of your new hires.
And your new training supervisors are no exception.
With recent research showing that every dollar invested in learning and development (L&D) results in nearly five dollars of additional revenue per employee, getting L&D right is as vital as ever.
This article will explain how to properly onboard your training supervisors using a constructive plan.
We'll step you through a practical 30-60-90 day template that ensures your new training supervisors are informed, motivated, and enabled to boost your organization's success through effective L&D.
✈️ Why is onboarding important for training supervisors?
Training supervisors play a crucial role: they direct and orchestrate the goals and aspirations of your L&D framework.
And with L&D becoming more strategic and influential in organizations, it's worth onboarding your training supervisors as effectively as possible.
By creating a welcoming, supportive, and motivating onboarding experience, you will boost the potential of your training supervisors and underpin your organization's L&D efforts.
Here's a checklist for an effective 30-60-90 day onboarding plan for your training supervisors.
Preparation
Prepare for their arrival by completing the necessary paperwork and administrative tasks.
Admin prep may not be very exciting, but it's vital to get it right. Inadequate onboarding preparation causes delays and inconveniences that will hinder progress for your new hires.
The key elements of preparation are:
✅ Onboarding paperwork—Your new hire should receive, read, and sign the documents for their role, including:
Legal employment papers;
Tax and compensation documents;
Internal role-related documents, e.g., organizational charts, performance appraisal forms, hybrid work arrangements, and leave entitlements.
Onboarding documentation covering your organization's tools, processes, company policies and procedures, vision statements, and company-specific intellectual property.
✅ Access and hardware—Organize access to the required hardware and systems, e.g., laptop, phone, email, building access, etc., and include any L&D systems needed for their role.
✅ Team—Let your colleagues know about your new hire and set up onboarding meetings to strengthen social integrations and help them get comfortable in their role.
✅ Content refresh—Ensure that all organizational content and materials are up-to-date, including:
An onboarding presentation to introduce your new hire to your organization, their colleagues, and their duties.
After completing the preparations, focus on making a great first impression for your new hire before they come on board. You can achieve this with a well-planned preboarding process.
✅ Sending a welcome package—Motivate them with company merchandise or other items to get them excited about joining their new role.
✅ Sending a welcome message—Set the tone of your relationship upfront with a welcome message that:
Gives them helpful information.
Demonstrates your organization's culture and perspective.
Answers commonly asked questions.
Initiates a sense of belonging with your organization, particularly for remote or hybrid roles.
➡️ Need suggestions for a memorable welcome package? Check out ten welcome package ideas to excite and inspire your new hires.
Day 1
On your new hire's first day, give them an engaging start:
✅ Arrange a welcome reception—Greet them with warmth and openness and team introductions. Spend time with them, and introduce them to an onboarding buddy who will guide them through their first day (and beyond).
✅ Sort out access logistics—Ensure they have access to the business premises, systems, hardware, and tools they need.
✅ Take them through orientation—Finalize admin work, discuss your organization's mission and vision, take them on a workplace tour, arrange any mandatory training, and acquaint them with your company's L&D systems and procedures.
Week 1
After a welcoming first day, continue helping your new hire settle in over their first week.
✅ Have 1:1 conversations—Discuss expectations and how you'll work together, build rapport, and answer any questions they have.
✅ Establish role clarity—Set out and explain the specific responsibilities of their role, including tasks, deliverables, processes, goals, and KPIs, such as:
Identify and develop training needs.
Manage training policy and procedures.
Support third-party training vendors.
Plan and facilitate a minimum number of training sessions per month.
Develop and schedule continuing education workshops.
Supervise training staff.
Onboard new training hires.
✅ Communicate a role plan—Discuss their 30-60-90 day plan and make them aware of expected milestones and deliverables.
✅ Encourage networking—Highlight meetings that they should attend, introduce them to stakeholders, and engage them to get to know their colleagues through coffee or lunch roulettes (in-person or virtual).
✅ Initial assignment—Give them an early project. For example, they can evaluate and suggest improvements on an existing training course, supported by a business playbook that outlines your organization's L&D framework, processes, and goals.
✅ Celebrate—Cap off their first week with a message or quick meeting to celebrate their progress and build enthusiasm for the weeks ahead.
Exemplary 3-day Onboarding workflow on Zavvy
First 30 days
During the first month, focus on helping your new hire become proficient in their role.
✅ Communicate regularly—Check in with them regularly, e.g., using Slack, Teams, email, or in-person, and offer useful tips to help them be more effective in their new role.
✅ Check goal progress—Help them meet the core deliverables discussed in week 1.
✅ Onboarding buddy—Check in with their onboarding buddy and offer guidance.
Ask for feedback—Solicit feedback to clarify their expectations, build rapport, correct any misconceptions, and reinforce positive behavior.
➡️ Use our handy onboarding survey template to get efficient and effective feedback from your new hire.
First 60 days
By the second month, your new hire should make good progress and work well with their stakeholders. You can support them by:
✅ Offering training—As a training supervisor, your new hire knows all about the benefits of training. So give them access to them in-house or external training to boost their knowledge and skills.
✅ Reviewing and reiterating—Review their progress, answer any outstanding questions, reiterate the scope and purpose of their role, and check in with their onboarding buddy.
✅ Promoting strategic thinking—Ask them for feedback on your organization's training framework, their early impressions, and suggestions for future direction and improvement.
First 90 days
After three months, your new hire should be fully settled in and be working independently:
✅ Ask for more feedback—Solicit updated feedback and check in with their onboarding buddy.
✅ Recognize their contribution—Motivate and encourage them through recognition of what they've achieved to date
A final step and essential part of the onboarding process is to monitor actionable onboarding metrics to assess the effectiveness of your onboarding program and identify areas for improvement.
➡️ If you need more help with onboarding, check out these practical and helpful onboarding templates.
👀 What does an effective training supervisor onboarding process look like?
As we've seen, there's a lot that goes into onboarding! It's not always clear, therefore, what effective onboarding looks like.
A simple way to clarify this is to consider the4 phases of onboarding and how they relate to training supervisor roles.
1. Preboarding
The paperwork, access rights, documentation, and welcome messages are done in this phase.
Tip: For training supervisors, be sure to include L&D system access and information about your organization's training framework.
2. Orientation
This is the welcoming phase and includes meet-and-greets, general company information, office walkarounds (or virtual show-arounds), and an introduction to your company culture.
Tip: Training supervisors should also meet third-party training vendors and focus on how company aspirations are supported by training.
3. Role-specific training
This phase includes activities that are specific to your new training supervisor's role:
Define clear expectations and deliverables.
Assign early projects.
Outline the scope and intent of your organization's training framework.
⚙️ Why you need to automate your training supervisor onboarding process
Proper onboarding takes time and effort. And to do it well, you need a structured and thorough approach.
So, how can you create a consistent, repeatable, seamless onboarding experience for all your new hires?
💡 Automate!
Employ a structured and guided process by automating employee onboarding. You will save time, boost productivity, and create better, more reliable onboarding experiences for your training supervisor and other new hires.
➡️ See how our customers, Alasco and Storyblok, boosted their onboarding productivity and enhanced their new hires' onboarding experience (in-person and remote) through automation.
"[Zavvy's] Slack integration is so cool - and we want to get everything out of it: From automatically creating channels for new cohorts to reminding and engaging all stakeholders involved." Nina Hübner, Recruiting Manager at Alasco.
💪 Training programs that deliver step-by-step content instead of overwhelming learners.
Book a free demo to see how our automated employee enablement tools will take your employee experience to the next level.
Alexander Heinle
Alex is a marketer at Zavvy. On this blog, he mainly shares insights gained from discussions with selected experts and from helping our customers set up and improve their onboarding or learning programs.