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Part I
Prepare for Your New Employee's Success Before You Start Recruiting
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Chapter 1
Understand the Organization-Wide Benefits of a Total Onboarding Program: An Executive Summary
A Total Onboarding Program can dramatically improve the performance, fit, and readiness for the job of every person who takes on a new roleāboth new hires and internal recruits. Onboarding helps to build, sustain, and perpetuate high-performing teams. More important, an organization-wide onboarding program for new employees, promotions, role shifts, and other transitions can be a culture-shaping sustainable competitive advantage.
Onboarding is the process of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating, and accelerating new team members, whether they come from outside or inside the organization. The prerequisite to successful onboarding is getting your organization aligned around the need and the role.
- Align: Make sure your organization agrees on the need for a new team member and the delineation of the role you seek to fill.
- Acquire: Identify, recruit, select, and get people to join the team.
- Accommodate: Give new team members the tools they need to do the work.
- Assimilate: Help them join with others so they can do the work together.
- Accelerate: Help them and their team deliver better results faster.
Effective onboarding of new team members is one of the most important contributions any hiring manager or human resources (HR) professional can make to the long-term success of his or her team or organization. Effective onboarding drives new employee productivity, accelerates delivery of results, and significantly improves talent retention. Yet few organizations manage the different pieces of onboarding well, so most people in new roles do not get clear messages about what the team and the organization wants and expects from them. Even fewer organizations use a strategic, comprehensive, integrated, and consistent approach like the one described in this book.
Why? Because onboarding is not something you do every day, it's hard to get good at it. With deliberate practice, however, you can accumulate onboarding expertise. This book shows you the way, step by step.
In our work helping organizations get new leaders up to speed quickly, we have seen repeatedly that a primary cause of misalignment and disengagement of new employees is the way that most organizations split up their recruitment, orientation, training, and management efforts. In many cases, multiple uncoordinated players oversee discrete pieces of the onboarding process and make poor handoffs across those parts. Almost everybody has a story:
- People showing up to interview candidates without a clear picture of the position they're trying to fill, let alone what strengths they're looking for.
- High-pressure interviews that turn off exactly the sort of people the organization is looking to recruit.
- Closing the sale with a candidate who turns out to be wrong for the organizational culture.
- New employees showing up for the first dayāand there's no one to greet them, no place for them to sit, no tools for them to work with, and no manager around to point them in the right direction.
- New employees getting off on the wrong foot with exactly the people they need to collaborate most closely with.
- New employees left to their own devices after day one because the organization has a sink-or-swim mentality.
I have witnessed a lack of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination between the recruiting lead, the human resource generalist, and the hiring manager, that actually caused a new employee to show up for her first day on the job, without anyone knowing it. I reported to the hiring manager, and was asked to take care of āonboardingā this new employee. I was embarrassed for the company, myself, and her.
āPrimeGenesis Client1
A new employee's failure to deliver usually stems from one or more of four things:
1. A role failure due to unclear or misaligned expectations and resources (preparation miss). For example, a new global head of customer service who was hired before division heads had agreed to move customer service from their divisions to a central group.
2. A personal failure due to lack of strengths, motivation, or fit (recruiting/selecting miss). For example, a new head of marketing who was hired with direct marketing experience that was woefully out of date.
3. A relationship failure due to early missteps (head start/early days miss). For example, a new employee aggressively challenged a colleague before he or she fully understood the situation, making that colleague reluctant to share information with the new employee after that.
4. An engagement failure due to early days' experiences (management miss). For example, a new employee's manager who was not around during the employee's first month due to other priorities.
When any person takes on a new role, there is a risk he or she will be misaligned with the organization. When you compound this with the disruption inherent in all organizational transitions, it's no wonder so many new employees fail or decide to leave in the first six months2 and that as many as 50 percent of new employees fail to deliver what their organizations expect.3 Often those failures or decisions aren't apparent early on. But the seeds have sprouted, and it's very hard to change the course down the road. A new job is a turbulent event for everyone.
We've found that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months. It's expensive in terms of lost revenue. It's expensive in terms of the individual's hiring. It's damaging to morale.
āKevin Kelly, CEO of executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles,
discussing the firm's internal study of 20,000 searches4
Consider this case. A major consumer products company was experiencing high levels of new employee failure. It turned out the organization had three distinct groups each working to improve its own area of responsibility without paying attention to the others. Talent acquisition was focused on cutting expenses by increasing the use of contract recruiters. Human resources was focused on improving the organization's orientation program. Line management was implementing performance-based compensation to keep people more focused on the most important performance-driving activities.
We helped the organization get its hiring managers more involved in recruiting and orienting new employees throughout the process. The results were immediate and meaningful. Recruiting efforts became more closely aligned with hiring managers' expectations. Selection criteria became clearer. Hiring managers took a personal interest in their new employees' orientations and related activities. Candidates and new employees felt better about the organization at every step of the way, which resulted in increases in their effectiveness over time.
Because so many people have heard (or lived) these or similar stories, many organizations are looking for solutions. Many take recruiting, interviewing, and selecting more seriously. Many have utilized onboarding software or portals to manage hiring paperwork and tasks. Many hold managers accountable for the success of their employees.
All these are good things. Do them. But you don't need this book to tell you that.
This book and its Total Onboarding Program (TOP) can take your organization to a new level of effectiveness by improving and integrating the disconnected experiences and messages new employees get during the recruiting and on-the-job learning process. This is a powerful, vulnerable time in the life of an employee. It represents the most important teachable moment your organization will ever have with its employees. If you can plan and get each new employee and the organization in full alignment so that intelligent onboarding becomes part of your culture, you will make a material difference in your business results over time.
We are not reinventing the wheel. Most people understand or can quickly figure out the basics of acquiring, accommodating, assimilating, and accelerating new employees. Our core premise is that things wor...
