What Is Your ‘Re-onboarding’ Plan?

Are you finding it hard to work with some of the staff you hired during the pandemic?

For many nonprofit leaders, the people they hired during the early phase of the pandemic were a gift. They came on during an uncertain time. And they jumped in and started doing the work.

But the work they started doing wasn’t the normal work of your organization. Many leaders were more intentional about focusing on team well-being and making sure people were staying safe. They may have even started during the pandemic lockdown when they couldn’t do things safely in person.

These employees were onboarded to the season the nonprofit was in. But they may have missed the more traditional onboarding to the overall work of the nonprofit.

Help New Hires Effectively Re-orient to Their Work

Starting a new position is the foundation for that person’s experience in their job. The clues you learn in those early days help you orient to the norms and culture — both spoken and unspoken.

But if that onboarding happened during a crisis, the lessons learned early in the job stop being effective.

It might be helpful to think of your nonprofit as a boat. When you hire someone while in a storm, no matter what their position, you may just need that person to grab a bucket and start bailing out the boat. So they bail and bail. They help others bail. And you are grateful that they excel at seeing where water is getting in the boat and rushing to that spot with their bucket.

Eventually the storm passes. The boat stabilizes again. But the foundation of that person’s role was so strong that they may still identify their job with bailing out the boat. They may continue to vigilantly look for water. And even go through the motions of bailing out the boat even though there isn’t any water.

As a leader, it is frustrating to see them still walking around with a bucket. You may find yourself asking, “Why aren’t they doing their job?” But you may realize that all the new person knows is the boat in the storm. They need to be introduced to the boat itself.

They just need to be reminded about what their job really is. You need to help the person re-orient themselves to the work.

Onboard Again

It’s easy to get frustrated with the need to re-orient. After all, the person has their job description and their title. Why aren’t they smart enough to just get to doing what they were hired to do?

If you like feeling frustrated, you can choose to stay there. But if you want to move forward, you have an opportunity. Here is how you can frame a reorientation conversation.

1. Celebrate the Recent Past

First, acknowledge how hard the last few years have been. And celebrate how the team members have really stepped up and pulled together.

If you have team members who have been around since before the pandemic, you might ask them ways they saw the nonprofit’s work change during the first couple of years of the pandemic.

2. Affirm That Things Are Changing

Acknowledge that things are changing, and the organization needs each team member to move back into the positions they were hired to do. This can be framed as a gift. The gift of having more normal expectations.

It may be helpful to talk about things that you want to keep doing differently. Perhaps you will be open to more work flexibility and to having virtual meetings. Or, perhaps you will have more candid conversations about bringing equity to all aspects of your work.

But it is important to explain what will be coming back too. The expectations. The goals. The outcomes.

3. Agree on Recommitting to Job Performance Measurements

Then have conversations about the job the person was hired to do, and what outcomes the nonprofit needs that position to accomplish. These conversations would be more effective if they were actual conversations. As the leader, go into the conversation with the outcomes you expect the position to have. But also go into it with a curiosity to see if there are new ways to accomplish the same goal.

For example, a fundraising event position may now need to do more in-person events. The nonprofit may need the community building that comes from people being in the same space. But these events may now be done as effectively with an online component or in a less gala-like way.

Time Invested Now Will Save Time Later

While we continue to live with lots of uncertainty, many of our organizations need to be re-setting job expectations for our team. This isn’t about a return-to-office mandate. This is a conversation about the reason a position exists and how that position can best accomplish its expectations.

These conversations can be done in your one-on-one meetings or collectively with the team. They will take time. But taking the time to reset expectations now will save you much more time in the long run.

People who were hired before the pandemic may be getting back into the groove more easily. But as the leader, you may need to help them not take up activities just because that was the way it always used to be done.

And people hired during the pandemic need compassionate leaders who’ll help re-orient them to the bigger picture. Perhaps reminding them that the nonprofit is the boat, not the storm.

You might even pass out buckets to symbolize the phase from which you’re needing them to recover.