Practice Good Onboarding

Oh, onboarding. The honeymoon phase.

If you're mid-career, or you've been at an organization for a long time, chances are you haven't been a newbie in awhile. Although it has its drawbacks (deer in the headlights, no idea where information is, or who is who, etc.), it can also provide a bird's eye perspective on what isn't working.

When I work with my clients, I like to work backwards from the goal. This works especially well with onboarding.

Onboarding /ˈônˌbôrdiNG,ˈänˌbôrdiNG/

(noun); the action or process of integrating a new employee into an organization.

Onboarding is one of those organizational building blocks that takes some effort to get right, and can easily flop if nobody owns it, or if things have gotten really comfortable and haven't been looked at in awhile.

There are a lot of statistics on onboarding, so let me pluck a few for your perusal:

• Employees with a good onboarding experience are 2.6x more likely to feel satisfied at work. (Gallup)

  
  

• 7 out of 10 employees are more likely to stay over 3 years at a company if they have a good onboarding experience. (SHRM)

  
  

• Engaged employees resulted in 21% greater business profitability. (Gallup)

In almost every organization I've been at, or worked with, the onboarding is a scramble, an afterthought. Here are some tips to think about how you onboard your new staff, and/or retrain your existing staff (which is also a really great way to practice the change management around some updated expectations.)

1. Start backwards, and think about your end goal. What do you hope each person in each role will know, learn and contribute on Day 1, Week 1, Week 4 and beyond?

   1. Figure out from each department the following:

2. What are you repeating?

3. What are you reinforcing?

4. What are you reinventing?

5. Discuss processes that lack documentation, capture and categorize them. Think about how to best facilitate this knowledge you want everyone to have (If you have Microsoft, use Sharepoint Sites, if you want something new, use Confluence, but there are many options, both free and within your existing tech ecosystem.)

Then, just start! Progress over perfection.

If your team needs support with onboarding, let's chat!