Onboarding is ubiquitous. Every organisation does it. Some do it with great fanfare. Some make a substantial investment. Some just let supervisors get their new hires up to speed. Unfortunately, most organisations make critical mistakes in onboarding—mistakes that increase turnover, raise costs, weaken employee loyalty, and lower productivity.Fortunately, recent research highlights onboarding best practices. If organisations would just use the wisdom from the research, they’d save themselves money, time, and resources—and employees in those companies would have to deal with many fewer headaches.
Key Outcomes
1. New hires have to quickly and effectively learn their new job role.
2. New hires have to feel a sense of self-efficacy in doing their job.
3. New hires have to learn the organisational culture.
4. New hires have to gain acceptance and feel accepted by their coworkers.
Enabling Factors
1. Be proactive in learning and networking
2. Be open to new ways of thinking and acting
3. Be active in seeking information and getting feedback
4. Be active in building relationships
What the Organisation Can Do
1. Ensure that managers take a very active and effective role2. Provide formal orientations that go beyond information dissemination
3. Provide realistic previews of the organisation and the job
4. Proactively enable new hires to connect with long-tenured employees
The research shows that employee orientations can facilitate onboarding. However, too many organisations think their orientations should just cram tons of information down the throats of employees. Even worse are orientations that have employees sit and listen to presentation after presentation. Oh the horror. New employees are excited to get going. Putting them into the prison of listening—even to great content—is a rudeness that shouldn’t be tolerated. The best orientations help build relationships. They get employees involved. They prepare new hires for how to learn and grow and network on their own. They help new hires learn the organisation culture—both the good and the bad. They share the organisation’s vision, passions, and its strategic concerns.
Training can be essential to help get new employees competent in their new roles, but it is NEVER sufficient on its own. Training should be supported by prompting mechanisms (like job aids), structures and support for learning on the job, reinforcement and follow-through, and coaching to provide feedback, set goals, and lend emotional support.
3—Forgetting the Human Side of Onboarding
New hires are human beings, and, just like the rest of us, they too are influenced by the dynamics of social interaction. They don’t just learn to do a job. They also learn to love and trust a company, a work unit, or a group of coworkers—or they don’t. In return, new hires are either trusted and respected by their coworkers or they’re not. The research is very clear about this. One of the keys to successful onboarding is the strength of the relationships that are built in the first year of a person’s tenure. The stronger the bonds, the more likely it is that a person will stay and bring value to the organisation.
Some companies offer a one week orientation and then cut loose their new hires to sink or swim. Enlightened companies, on the other hand, realise that onboarding is like relationship-building—it takes time. It takes time to really learn one’s job well. It takes time to integrate into the organisational culture. It takes time to connect with people. Realistic estimates suggest that onboarding can take 6 months, 12 months, or even 18 months to fully integrate a person into a new organisation.
Supervisors are the single most important leverage point for onboarding success. You’ve probably heard it said that people don’t quit their companies, they quit their supervisors. Well, the flip side can also be said. People don’t join a company, they join a supervisor and his/her workgroup. Unfortunately, most supervisors just have no idea about the importance of onboarding and how to do it correctly. Where best practices give supervisors training and an onboarding checklist, too many supervisors just wing it. The real tragedy is that the investment in onboarding training and a checklist for supervisors is quite small in the greater scheme of things.
