Now that you’ve hired a new employee with the right qualifications and the right attitude, you still need a process to integrate him or her into your team.

A good orientation procedure is the answer. It ensures that the new hire has a clear understanding of the team’s goals, vision and expectations, as well as of his or her role on the team.

“Sometimes the new person gets right into the day-to-day business of the firm without understanding the big picture,” says Joanne Ferguson, president of Advisor Pathways Inc. in Toronto.

Adds Allison Merrow, a coach at Advisor Pathways: “It’s not good to just throw the new hire on the job and leave him or her. The more you do at the beginning, the better the hire will be in the long term.”

Ferguson and Merrow have done coaching sessions with advisor teams in which the newest members first learned of the team’s objectives during that session. “They had been working with the team for several months,” Ferguson says, “but didn’t have a clear understanding of their goals.”

New employees at Rogers Group Financial Advisors Ltd. in Vancouver go through an orientation and training process that lasts up to six months, says Rogers Group vice president Alan Kotai. “We take a lot of time to make sure that an individual is properly trained,” he says, “and ready to take on more responsibility.”

Most new Rogers Group employees start in support positions and gradually take on more responsibility. A staff member is assigned to assist the new team member with orientation and training. On the new hire’s first day, he or she is given a booklet that outlines the orientation process as well as two checklists of items he or she has to complete before the training process is over. The checklist includes housekeeping items such as getting set up with the firm’s accounting department and getting the computer set up, as well as taking care of marketing tools such as business cards and the team photo.

ASSIGN A TEAM MEMBER

The new Rogers Group employee is introduced to staff members and an e-mail is sent out introducing the employee in case anyone missed the personal introduction. The financial advisor with which the new hire will be working takes the new employee out to lunch to talk about the team’s expectations and the new hire’s role on the team.

Giving the new employee a set of “Bible-like” instructions is important, says Merrow. The document should contain everything from the firm’s investment philosophy and client-meeting procedure to intake processes for new clients, team meeting schedules, telephone answering protocol and hours of business.

“It usually takes 90 days to get someone properly oriented with our way of doing business at the firm,” Kotai says, “and with the computer system, processes and procedures.”

Ferguson and Merrow offer these tips to make your next recruit more productive sooner:

> Assign one person to do the training — someone the new person can go to during the first few weeks when he or she has questions. “It’s more efficient to deal with one person,” says Ferguson.

> Provide a clear idea of the team’s vision and the goals you want to achieve.

> Make your expectations clear: put them in writing. “Give the new person an actual document, a position description,” Merrow advises.

> Make sure your new recruit knows who your top clients are. Give the new employee an overview of some of the bigger clients immediately, so he or she recognizes top clients when they call.

> Make sure the new person understands the team’s investment strategy.

> Explain the team’s standards of client service.

“The more time you take to do these things up front, the better the new person will be integrated into the team,” says Ferguson. “If you hire someone and then say the person is not productive, it means you haven’t given that person what he or she needs in order to be productive.” IE