Embark, Engage, Experience

The secret to an award-winning training program? Always seeking out feedback, researching new approaches, and not being afraid to make changes, says Sarah Thorrens, VP/talent management at $1.8 billion/179,000-member Baxter Credit Union, Vernon Hills, Ill.

“My department’s work focuses on training, employee and executive development, and mentoring,” Thorrens explains. “Until about five years ago, we had no specific onboarding program, just a two-week training for new hires.” The CU’s research showed many new employees felt unprepared as they started work. Even worse, Thorrens says, the CU was beginning to see a trend of many new hires leaving within two years of starting at Baxter CU. “The rate was about 35 percent, which is not terrible, but we were concerned.”

Baxter CU’s exit interviews provided more information. “We pride ourselves on having a very friendly, casual culture and we tend to assume people will just get it and blend right in,” says Thorrens. But departing staff said this assumption often didn’t hold true: Many new hires felt like outsiders and found the acronyms and nick names confusing and overwhelming. Others coming from more formal businesses such as banks struggled with the casual atmosphere.

To tackle that, Thorrens and her team created a six-month onboarding program with 14 different tracks. And here’s where their emphasis on learning from feedback made a big difference: Thorrens said that by the end of three months, most employees told them the program was no longer particularly helpful. “They said ‘we got it already’ by that point,” she says.

Time to Rebrand

Shortening the program to three months and reducing the number of possible tracks to five or six (with some flexibility to provide additional tracks) was an obvious decision. But Thorrens went one step further: She worked with Jill Sammons, manager/PR and communications, to give the revamped program a fresh look and feel.

“Talent Management came to us with very clear ideas of what they wanted, and we worked together in a very organic process,” says Sammons.

The new program was rebranded with a travel and exploration theme and renamed Embark, Engage, Experience. “It’s all about the journey and the experience of getting there,” says Thorrens. Each new employee is given a leather binder that looks like a vintage travel folder, with print-on-demand documents to guide them through the modules that make up the program.

Thanks to feedback they’d received during the exit interviews, the program includes many opportunities to get to know people early in the process. One early module, for example, asks the new employee to go out for lunch with his or her manager. Others have the employees attend presentations by managers of other departments.

Thorrens says: “I believe it is incredibly helpful that each of the modules are facilitated or taught by the managers, rather than having the new hires spend two weeks in a classroom with a trainer. They are more engaged because each presentation is a new speaker, but just as important, they are really getting to know the people they are going to be working with.”

Sammons adds that the support of management has been critical in the program’s success. “The manager needs to make time for the employee to complete all the activities, and to provide early feedback on how he or she is doing,” she says.

The results have been very positive, says Thorrens: “We have seen turnover in the first two years drop significantly, from 35 percent to the high teens. The program is rated as excellent or very good by more than 85 percent of the staff who take it.”

Plus it won first place in the 2013 CUES Golden Mirror Awards in the “Staff Training Programs” category.

Sammons adds: “The investment you make in those first few weeks pays back many times over the years. Whether you have 50 employees or 500, you get a lot of value from this kind of program.”

Teresa Pitman is a freelance writer based in Guelph, Ontario.