Onboarding Staff in Your Pet Business

With staff shortages and rising costs, it’s important to assess your performance in onboarding staff in your pet business. Keep reading to learn onboarding success stories, how to keep your staff engaged, and how to build the dream team you really need and want. 

Onboarding starts at time of your offer to a new hire through completion of role training. It’s important to think about months and not days when it comes to onboarding new hires. There are some best practices to compare to your current process:

• How are you communicating to new hires post-offer and before their start day?
  • Use this time to show your excitement and appreciation for joining your team
  • Communicate to get to know them vs explaining your rules, policies or uniforms
  • Provide detailed instructions for their first day to minimize their anxiety of the unknown
• Do you have a consistent orientation to your company mission and values that is shared with excitement the first day?
  • Plan a positive day 1 – Focus on making a super first impression by welcoming them to the team; start building a sense of belonging
  • Be prepared for them – Have system sign-ons ready and a locker or secure place to store personal items.
  • Focus on what’s in it for them – Share how you educate them during onboarding and beyond, career path options and professional certifications available.
  • Get to know them as an individual – Ask them to share their favorite things (e.g., snacks, restaurants, hobbies, how spend free-time, family and pets, etc.)
• Is there formal role training for planned for their job responsibilities that is planned for a few months versus weeks? 
  • A formal plan is needed for each position in your business
  • Focus training on the knowledge & skills required to perform their job responsibilities
  • Don’t go too fast – there is a big difference to introducing how to do the job versus mastery to do it consistently without supervision
  • Cross-training is great, but ensure the new hire has mastered their primary role prior to providing additional training for a second role
  • Ensure your training is based on documented SOP’s (either in written or video form) so there is a consistent point of reference for the new hire 

Onboarding is one of the most important systems to get right in your pet business. Be sure to watch our video discussion where we share more ideas and also talk about quiet quitting, done-for-you pet services staff training programs and onboarding seasonal staff.