202: How to Onboard New Hires & Address or Fire Problematic Ones with Cherie Ihnen

Andrea Liebross: Welcome to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. Get ready to level up your thinking and expand your horizons. I’m your host, Andrea Liebross, your guide on this journey of big ideas and bold moves. I am the best-selling author of She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary.

I support women like you with the insights and mindset you need to think bigger and the strategies and systems you need to turn that thinking into action and make it all a reality. Are you ready to stop thinking small and start thinking big? Let’s dive in.

Hello, my friends, and welcome back to the She Thinks Big! Podcast. I am honored today to have a very special guest who serves a lot of roles in my life right now. She didn't know she was going to serve a lot of roles in my life, probably in January, but she is serving a lot of roles in my life right now.

I have my good friend here/expert/human resources expert, and also a personal trainer who I like to work out with, Cherie, and she's going to introduce herself, and you're going to be so excited for this episode because I would say we spend a significant amount of our coaching time inside our coaching containers discussing the humans in our lives, either in our personal lives or at work, probably more at work, but Cherie is an expert in all things. All right, introduce yourself, and tell them who you are.

Cherie Ihnen: Absolutely, I'm Cherie Ihnen. I spent the better part of 20ish years in human resources leadership. When I have had kind of ebbs and flows, I've been doing human resources consulting, all different size businesses, sometimes directly to the employee, and sometimes to managers.

Andrea Liebross: She has good ways of saying things, my friends. She can say things in a very diplomatic yet effective way. We're going to talk about that. All right, let's dig in. Cherie and I have been discussing what we're going to talk about now for a couple of weeks, and we never really nailed it down because we just kept coming up with ideas.

But I think let's just start at the beginning, when you bring another human into your business. What did you tell me, you were putting the fun back into human resources? What did you say?

Cherie Ihnen: Making HR great again.

Andrea Liebross: Making HR great again. We're making HR great again. All right, here's something that happens. People say, “I think I should hire someone.” They actually get through the process of hiring, which in and of itself sometimes can be scary. They are ready to “on board” this new person into their business.

Three things can happen. Number one, they haven't spent any time really thinking about this because they were so worried about hiring the right person. Number two, they hire a person and they really don't do a good job. They do like a half-assed job of onboarding them. Or the third thing is they hire the person and they just say, "You're going to figure it out as we go along." What are the problems that you see in all of that, Cherie?

Cherie Ihnen: Several problems. I think sometimes too, just when you were saying that, someone who might seem really right for the job and then a different person shows up at the door, sometimes I think that can actually be HR's fault a little bit, or we have a great recruiter who has sold the business as one way and they walk in the door and it's like not that way.

We in HR are trained to be super excited about the onboarding. We often share some personal stories in the interview process. We're learning different things about the person besides what's on the resume.

Then when they come into work, maybe a manager who doesn't have those same values about, “I want that person to walk in the door and feel loved and hit in the face by the culture.”

That can be anything from just not sending an email to confirm, like, “Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow.” It was always surprising how many times someone on my team would have to like, “I'm going to write an email for you, can you just forward it to them? I just want it to be crafted the right way.”

It has caused some real problems. We've had people who have assumed that we met Pacific time and we met Eastern time. We've had people who get hired for Monday through Thursday and orientations on a Friday.

No one's really thinking about how does it feel to that person as a human. They're either thinking, “My immediate crazy needs are going to be met.” And they're kind of diabolical like, “I can't wait till Andrea starts.” Or they are just like, “You are a spot on the bus and you're just one more person in an empty seat” versus, “I got to make you feel excited to be here and valued and important even on the first day.”

Andrea Liebross: So you do have to make them feel excited, valued, and important even on the first day and we're going to talk about how to do that. But I want to back up one step. Sometimes when my clients or the people listening, they are the business owners and they are HR and all the other, and the CFO and all the things.

What I see sometimes is they're not clear in their expectations when they're actually even interviewing about what this person is going to do. They start to set promises like, what they really want the person to do is all of the admin stuff that they don't want to do but they dangle these little carrots and say, “But you're also going to get to do some amazing design work and you're going to get to go out and meet the client.”

Then when they get there, when the person starts, they don't last very long or people are upset because they're only doing that admin work and not the fun stuff. So I'm just going to interject here and say, people, be very clear about what you want them to do and I think you should not be dangling them along and saying, “Then maybe eventually you'll get to do some of these amazing things.”

That's my little insert there. My second little insert, which I think you'd probably agree with, is a lot of times we're hiring—and actually, I'm curious what you think about this—a lot of times we're hiring for jobs where we don't really care necessarily when the person is doing the job.

They could be doing this admin stuff at night if we're talking about admin. They could be doing it on a weekend. We don't really care. That's one thing. But if you do want them to be present and available, then we do need to be clear about what the expectations are.

I've had clients who've said, "Oh, I want you to work 20 hours a week." That person's assuming those 20 hours are between 6:00 PM and 10:00 PM and the client gets really pissed because they're not around at noon time when they really want them. Note to self, be super clear on what you're wanting them to do. Do not dangle carrots. Number two, what are the hours?

Cherie Ihnen: I just thought of something that you said that triggered something for me is also don't assume, if you put that out there, let's say you've posted the job on LinkedIn and you're like, “Maybe your clients are all Pacific Coast and it appeals to you,” don't also discard someone because they apply from the East Coast and you make assumptions like, "Oh, they're not going to want to work 7:00 PM to 11:00 PM" or “They don't want to work 5:00 AM to 9:00 AM.”

I've seen great candidates come and they have done the translation of the time zones themselves or what the expectations are and it's perfect for them because they'd like to get all their work done in the morning or when their kids are in bed.

Andrea Liebross: Yep. Yep. That's so true. Don't dismiss. Good idea. All right. What does a really good onboarding process even look like in a nutshell? We could have a whole episode on this, but what do you think, Cherie?

Cherie Ihnen: Consistent, and a little bit of the bells and whistles. One of the things I was really proud of in my last company, we applied for Forbes Magazine. Great place to work. Can be really challenging as a small company. Our feedback on the orientation and onboarding was always really high.

They think that what I saw was their little soft touches. Whatever you call it, we call it like get your gang gear. I'm wearing my logo. I know that you and I were excited for Rebecca when she was getting all these cute things when she started her internship.

Sometimes putting the logo out there and something that's really desirable, hoodies and things like right now is a big deal, a welcome letter. We would put the business owner and a couple of people would sign a card and have their desks all set up, like everything ready, everything checked.

Then it really should just be so smooth sailing, having a consistent process, having the experts explain what they're experts in. If it's a small organization, that might be the COO who is doing everything. But if they're not really comfortable with benefits, and benefits are important to this new person, you can see it on their face.

They want to ask questions, we're saying, “That's not my expertise, but we have really good benefits.” Really just saying, "Hey, this isn't my expertise, but I'm going to introduce you to our vendor. We have support from this person if you have further questions,” so that we're not putting a person out there who's not an expert in the space.

If you're small and it's going to be the same person doing everything, I'd mix in some—so it's not just all day, same personality, same temperament—mix in some things like required trainings, don't make it like eight to six is our orientation and here we are.

Do some of the fun things, as I have found, the littlest thing has made the greatest impact. That's like a favorite sheet. Things like your favorite scent, and favorite gift card. Where do you like to eat lunch? What do you like to do for hobbies? Do you have any pets?

So what can be fun is when you learn that somebody loves Texas Roadhouse, they’re a sponsor of the show, I’m sure, or now will be, then you can say, “Then isn't it cool if somebody put in a really long work day and you went ahead and ordered Texas Roadhouse to go and said, "Hey, on your way home, swing through. They've got your favorite dinner paid up.”

Andrea Liebross: Man, that is a very good idea. Look at you, that was fun.

Cherie Ihnen: Yeah.

Andrea Liebross: All right, so I do think, friends, that swag matters. I think that asking about their favorite things totally matters. It creates some excitement. I get that question too, “Do I really have to get them a branded logo T-shirt?” Yes, you do.

I will say that my daughter this summer got tons of, I'll call it “swag,” when she first started. She even created a TikTok video about it as she popped everything out of her backpack. It put a smile on her face. I think that is super important.

I love the favorite sheet because I think once you get that information, you can use it now, you can use it later, you can use it forever and ever. Really good tips. All right, let's go talk about benefits a little bit.

A lot of my people are really just hiring or wondering whether they should hire people as employees or if they should hire them as 1099 contractors. I know you're not a lawyer nor do you play one on TV, but give me your two cents on that. How do you figure that out?

Cherie Ihnen: My two cents would be, I've met some of the women that you work with, scaleability is the most important thing. You never want to start it and have to walk it back. Where are you trying to go? Just an easy example would be, let's say you have a business and you're going to have project managers or traffic managers.

If you're ever going to have two or three or four, maybe starting them as independent consultants isn't the best idea because then you're going to have to fish in that pond time and time again.

As you grow, you want to be able to have a little more leverage and control. I would say that in a kind type of control. You want to be able to say when I need you to work, where I need you to be, what training I need you to have, and that takes independent consultant classification off the table.

If you have one as a consultant and one as an employee doing what looks to be the same amount of work, then you can get yourself in some sticky situations. Now if you have one and you maybe are going to hire a half-time consultant because you don't have a full board workload, those are all like one-off scenarios, but I always just would say think scalability and think about what's going to be important who's going to carry the vision of your growing company as an ambassador in the community.

Andrea Liebross: That's a good point. Scalability, which we're always talking about, do we want them to be 1099s? Do we want them to be employees? How are we going to repeat or duplicate what we're offering each person as we grow if we're putting more people into that role?

Cherie Ihnen: That's right. Good idea.

Andrea Liebross: Okay. All right, so let's move. Let's say they're on board. They have gotten their Texas Roadhouse. We are, I'm going to say four to six months into this and we're not feeling so great about this person, which happens. We could be feeling really great, but we might not. What do we do? How do we handle people that we're not happy with? There's a whole other thing about them not being happy, but what if we're not happy with them?

Cherie Ihnen: Start so early.

Andrea Liebross: Start early. Okay. Tell me.

Cherie Ihnen: Yeah. My experience, and it's any level in an organization up to C-suite, is people wait until the last minute and then they come and they vomit all of the things that are wrong with this person.

Actually, I was going back through looking at some of my notes where it's like I could get lists of 50 things and nobody is going to become successful if you chase them down with a list of 50 things.

In some cases, there could be something else going on and maybe this is a salvageable employee, so wouldn't it be worth it to give the feedback that can push them in the right direction?

Andrea Liebross: Mm-hmm. It would be. It would be worth it. All right. I have this like one-three-one thing. There's one problem, but first of all, I guess, let's even start there. Tell me about your buckets theory, your buckets way of solving problems because I heard this at 6:30 in the morning, but I want to hear it now at 1:30 in the afternoon now that Cherie's in a different role.

Cherie Ihnen: I actually have my little pretend list that I had with me. As an example, some of the things I might get, and again, this could be all levels of employees: they're late. Their work is incomplete. They're sloppy. They come in late to work.

Those are all meaty things on their own, but it's just overwhelming to say, “These are the things we're going to fix.” We might say, in using year 131, quality of work is the bucket.

The three things I need you to change are being late to work, being late with your work or having it incomplete, and having work that's not neat. In other, maybe a higher level position, we might say work product compliance is important and that might be IT security practices, compliance violations, not completing required trainings.

I come from pharma, we had to sit in on a lot of training for our clients. If you were behind on some of those, you couldn't work on the projects. If you were clocking hours to it and you hadn't completed the training, it's a real problem. That might fall into a bucket of work product compliance.

Then there are oftentimes where people say, “I just don't like them. They don't come to lunch with us. They are resistant to feedback. They're hard to coach. They are argumentative.”

I oftentimes call that bucket the culture detractor because there are so many things that can go in there. Their customer service, their participation as an employee, how they receive feedback, deliver feedback. I try and get it into the big buckets with just a few things that we're going to work on, and then the last thing being, how am I going to measure that and with what frequency?

Andrea Liebross: How are you going to measure it with what frequency? But what about the complaint that they don't take initiative? This is a frequent complaint I hear. I wish they would just do it, instead, they're just avoiding the hard things. They're asking me too many questions. What is that? Is that the culture bucket, would you say?

Cherie Ihnen: I think it would be culture. If you have a culture of empowerment where it's appreciated that you're grabbing more work and just, “Hey, pick me, pick me, is there more I can do?” I think a lot of small companies expect an entrepreneurial spirit.

To your point earlier on, writing interview questions or asking someone to share a specific time when, can really help you understand a little bit about that early on. But also, I would say that's probably not going to be the only thing that's driving somebody baddie.

If they're not taking the initiative, then they probably are requiring double the time of the manager to sit down and go through what they need them to do. But I do think you could very easily sit down with someone early on and say, “In this culture, it's like being a parent, this is our house rule and we want to give you the opportunity to feel empowered.”

My old business owner that I worked for said, "Fail fast." I need to see what that looks like in you. I want you to feel like if you see something that you take ownership of, you have my permission. Do you understand some of the things that you could take ownership of? Are you seeing them? Because that might be the bigger problem is, “I didn't even realize that giant pile of whatever over here needs to be done.”

Andrea Liebross: Yeah, so true. Okay, that is so true. We identify these problems. We put them in the buckets. Now, how do we document progress? How many one-on-ones should we be having? I know it varies. But what are your basic guidelines on that one?

Cherie Ihnen: If I have these buckets, I have like a standard document I use and I say, “This is the problem. Here are examples.” To your point about taking initiative, if we're in an early conversation about that, I'm probably just giving some examples of things that they didn't do and helping me understand if you need me or where you're just looking for permission.

If we're down the road and we're looking at using this document to really turn somebody around, then I might say, “Not taking initiative and here are three things that happened and what the consequences to that are.”

Then my follow-up might be, it's going to be relative to those things that I brought out. I, as the manager, have to watch when is my next opportunity for Andrea to be successful or fail at this.

Some things where there's not a due date. We might say, “We're going to give somebody like 60 days and we're going to be doing weekly sit-downs. I want you to come to me and tell me how you thought you were proactive or where you took initiative. As a manager, I'm going to do whatever I need to do, sending myself an email, writing things down.”

They are going to see things that you didn't see and vice versa, so when they are preparing for that meeting, it helps with some of the things you might not have seen, especially if it's somebody you really want to turn around and you're looking for ways to say you did accomplish this last week.

Andrea Liebross: Yes. You want them to come to you with examples of how this has changed or what they're doing. I like that.

Cherie Ihnen: Yeah. I think if you're doing a weekly review as a manager, you have that documented and then when you finish that review of the buckets you're working on, then I'm sending emails as a confirmation that the conversation happened because my calendar might look like I sat down with you, but I was on a call, I never talked to you, and the next thing you know, we go to sit down and terminate someone—which is always when those calendars are wrong—the employee points out, “Well, no, Cherie took a call, remember, don't you remember?” “It wasn't that this time.”

So I come back and I say, “Andrea, thanks for coming prepared to our meeting today. I loved that you brought up these examples. Please remember this is something that we said we still hadn't gotten to. Oh, by the way, I want you to go back and revisit this training and this training before we sit down next week. We'll meet with this person.”

Andrea Liebross: Okay. I don't think you can ever over-document, do you?

Cherie Ihnen: No, and an employee who's documenting on their end, when you get into the worst situations, which is legal situations or sometimes an EEOC charge and you're actually sitting down with a judge, the last thing you want is the other person to come because that is admitted as evidence and it's true.

Whether you can argue it or not, if they've got it written down. Sometimes an employee might reply and say, “That's not what you said. You didn't say how to do that training. The squirrely ones will.” Then you have that. Then you have your backup documentation and potentially have to say, "Well, we're going to sit down and revisit this afternoon at three o'clock because I'm not going to get in a battle with you over email."

Andrea Liebross: Okay. All right. How do we know though when it's really time to go?

Cherie Ihnen: There are times when we have seen people who are just truly not a fit. Maybe they lied, “I want this job so bad,” and they realized they were not the right fit. Maybe we have seen the other side of Jekyll and Hyde.

I think the introductory conversation as well as the timeline that you give people can really drive that. People who don't love confrontation can still typically have a conversation.

Let's say, Andrea, you’re the employee name today, “Andrea, you're really a problem. We know you're not going to be a long-term fit for numerous reasons. We're ready to have a conversation and say you can take 30 days maybe.”

Some of that's going to be based on tenure, what the problems are, has the job changed, your HR professional can guide that. But a lot of times I'll start that conversation saying, “Andrea, we're going to sit down and talk about your performance today. We've got some issues we really need to address and we're going to hit them hard and we're going to have a high level of follow-up, a high level of communication. In the next 30 days, if we don't see the changes in the things that we're going to talk about today, we're going to need to start having a conversation about you not working here anymore.”

Oftentimes, people are looking to self-select. The delivery of that is like, “I know that you were excited in the interview.” And oftentimes I'll pull notes like,” I remember you telling me the story about how proud you were about this or that. You were the bomb when we did the campaign for XYZ, but I don't see that light in your eyes anymore and that might be something that has changed with us. We're a small company. We're growing super fast and it might be that we told you the best we could what the job would look like and it's changed and you don't love it. Before we sit down and go through all this, I want to let you know we can talk about it beforehand or we can look at the document and see what you think. But if you don't want to do this, this plan is how you retain your job.”

But if you say, “You're right. I'm not happy. You're not happy, then let's have a conversation about the exit strategy that you feel good about.” Sometimes it's that whole fear of like, “ I don't want to be fired so I'm going to say I'm going to participate in an action plan, but then I'm really just looking for a job.”

But if they say, “Do you think I can do this?”, “I'm not really sure.” “Let's take a look at the document and see, do you think you can do it? I don't want you to say yes, so that you can scramble in the background and try and find something different. I'd like to have a conversation about what we might be able to do that works for both of us.”

Andrea Liebross: See. You are so good at that little termination corner.

Cherie Ihnen: I am good. I want to be thanked if I have to fire someone. I like to see the relief in their eye when I say, “Look, I think you could hold down the fort for us in a lot of ways that you're good at. Give us the time to backfill your role and we'll stay in close communication about what that date looks like and how we announce it to the broader team when that time comes.”

Andrea Liebross: So good. All right, so I'm just going to interject here a little fun tidbit. When Cherie and I are working out, there's a little corner in the gym that has two very comfy chairs that really look like they shouldn't be there. We call that the termination corner.

Cherie Ihnen: The private conversation.

Andrea Liebross: The private conversation corner. I just had to add that in, because that's what I'm picturing this conversation that she's describing, picturing it happening in that little corner.

Okay, I was on a tangent. So here is a question for you. A lot of the businesses that I work with, and probably the people that are listening, their business is like 10 people or less, or not all like that, but most of them are 10 people or less. Is any business too small to have professional HR support in them? Tell me your thoughts on that one.

Cherie Ihnen: I think—and I'm biased, of course, and I work with companies of all different sizes from getting off the ground—I think an important thing is that there's a lot of process in the upfront, like we talked about in the interviews, consistent interviews, legally applicable questions, job descriptions, all those things on the very front end. Communication around benefits, policies, and procedures is usually going to be more precise and concise from an HR professional. Then performance management.

It is astounding how many little mistakes can be made that, in the wrong hands, really be taken up the flagpole and cause a lot of devastation for a small organization because they just didn't know they couldn't do this or they didn't know that they had to send a letter if they were considering XYZ. Or how to do a layoff? Or restructure a job?

It is really common in small companies, that they hired somebody and now they realize they don't need it or they need this person to bolt on another responsibility that they don't think they have.

Those conversations, if held wrong, can be really dicey and cause exposure. That's where a lot of times, even if it's outside HR, we're just putting talking points together. I write scripts for people and some people read them verbatim, which is fine.

Other people want bullet points because if they can turn around and say, “I just said these things,” and I give them “How do you end a conversation when the employee doesn't want to end it?” kind of okay strategy. Then they can come back and say, “I didn't leave this script at all.” We can say, “It was legally compliant. This is the conversation we had.”

Andrea Liebross: So good. Yeah, a script. I never thought about that. I love scripts. I'm always giving people scripts indirectly, but you're going to really give them one. Okay, last thing, exposure.

You just said that word exposure. That can be in a legal sense but I know that sometimes people are afraid to have difficult conversations or let someone go because they feel like it's going to impact their business because people are going to start talking or this person's going to go to some competitor and trash talk the company they left.

My thought on that is, if you're doing everything correctly, like we've been talking about, then it's probably hurting you more to keep the person than to let them go, and worrying about exposure while real is not literally a reason to keep someone. Do you think I'm right about that?

Cherie Ihnen: A thousand percent right. People quit and stay. It's out of fear. You actually can build yourself a worse pattern in the other direction by keeping those people and then eventually getting rid of someone else.

Employees are watching all the time. They're crafty. They have people soliciting them, “Let me help you. Sue your employer.” These big lawsuit settlement claims really are never happening, but they are a big pain in the ass ankle biter for a business owner to have to manage.

Andrea Liebross: Hmm. All right. My friends, you need help in this category, you need a professional. This is just as important as marketing, finance, or anything else. But when you look at the organization of any large corporate structure, there always is HR. Why isn't it in all small businesses? This is an excellent question. But I urge you to consider talking to your closest and favorite HR professional.

If the listeners wanted to get in contact with you, what would be the best way? I'm going to put things in the show notes, links and things.

Cherie Ihnen: Absolutely, yes. My email, I keep it easy. It's first name and last name at Yahoo. It helps people find me and they can take a wild guess at what my email is and I find a lot of strangers that way.

Send me an email. I always like to sit down and meet with people. I like to study the business a little bit ahead of time. I think that you should never engage with any HR professional that's not interested in understanding the ins and outs of what you do and how you make money and just the exact specific need that you might have and then take it from there. One size doesn't fit all and that's okay too.

Andrea Liebross: That's really true. Okay. I'm going to put Cherie's email and her LinkedIn profile. She's very good at LinkedIn. If you would like a new LinkedIn friend, I suggest that you reach out to her and I will put that link in the show notes, too. Thank you for being here.

Cherie Ihnen: Thank you.

Andrea Liebross: This has been super fun. We could have more conversations and we will, so stay tuned, friends.

All right. I will see you all next week, right back here at She Thinks Big! If you are not thinking big about your business and thinking about the HR component of it and getting yourself to a level where that truly is one of the most important things, that is a sign that you are thinking bigger. You need to have this in there. Let me know how we can help. We will see you next week.

Thanks for tuning into the She Thinks Big! Podcast. If you're ready to learn the secret to unleashing your full potential, don't forget to grab a copy of my book, She Thinks Big: The Entrepreneurial Woman's Guide to Moving Past the Messy Middle and Into the Extraordinary. It's available on Amazon and at your favorite bookstore.

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