Onboarding

Getting New Hires off to a Flying Start

Christian Harpelund, Morten T. Højberg, Kasper U. Nielsen

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787695825
• eBook ISBN: 9781787695832
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The way people move from job to job is undergoing a massive change, as are their expectations on their future workplaces and their employers. From clear and almost limitless development opportunities to a strong sense of purpose, the demands on the new hire menu card are increasing. Onboarding is a powerful vehicle that can help companies deliver on these expectations. Successfully deployed, it can ensure higher engagement, organisational readiness, better time-to-performance, better retention, lower stress-levels, and better bottom lines. However very few companies adopt a considered onboarding approach and instead rely on a checklist methodology that harnesses but a fraction of the full potential of onboarding. 

Onboarding: Getting New Hires off to a Flying Start provides a clear and structured framework for professionalising the discipline of onboarding new hires. It explains how to work with elements such as culture and rules, how to ensure connection for your new hires, and how to work with pushing performance and development forward in a balanced way. Filled with facilitation tools, real life cases, best-practice recommendations, ways to train your leaders, and ways of tracking and measuring the onboarding efforts in your company, it is a complete manual on how to design a structured onboarding process and how to get your new hires off to a flying start. 

Written for managers and human resource teams, this book will provide clear guidance on how to design a complete onboarding process from the preboarding stage up to 6 month programmes, how to organise central and local designs, and how to involve the leadership of your organisation in the onboarding efforts.

PART ONE

TAKEOFF

1

WHY INVEST IN ONBOARDING?

Onboarding is a matter of emotions. This is our first and most basic claim in this book. We distinguish between the concepts of orientation and onboarding. Orientation programmes are processes where a new hire participates in a series of activities with the primary focus to convey information about the organisation. While orientation programmes can well be a part of onboarding, an onboarding programme is something fundamentally different and more sophisticated. Onboarding is a process that strengthens retention, productivity and engagement. It is a business process that facilitates integration into the organisation, and a personal process that creates direction and set expectations.¹⁴ Despite the fact that we define onboarding so broadly, it is neither the processes nor the programmes that capture the essence of onboarding for us. New hires can watch hours of video films, read the staff manual from cover to cover, have meetings with all the line managers and have ambitious career plans, all without necessarily having the slightest feeling of belonging to the organisation or that they have a meaningful role in it. No matter what activities we build into our programmes, onboarding is all about creating emotions.

Some people will undoubtedly shy away when they hear the word emotions in this context: ‘Now that we’ve invested all this time and money hiring expensive new hires – shouldn’t we get them working instead of stopping to talk about feelings?’ Yes, agreed! Indeed, we will argue several times for activating the new hire early, throughout this book. But getting straight down to work will not guarantee high performance. As we expose our new hires to the requirements they must meet and the knowledge they need to assimilate, we need to consider carefully how they experience that. If we have managed the dosing of content and challenges well, maybe the new hires feel like they have quickly become important players on the team, contributors and performers – maybe even already feel that they are ‘one of us’. If we have designed it wrong or unbalanced, maybe we have newcomers who have quickly run into an emotional wall of self-doubt, who feel ashamed – maybe even already feel that they will never make it, or never become ‘one of us’.

Numerous studies show that, if your new hires come out of the onboarding process with the wrong set of emotions, you will most likely not gain loyal new hires who are an asset to the organisation.¹⁵ That is why it is perfectly rational, even for the most results-and-numbers-oriented employer, to talk about emotions in an onboarding context. Our mission is to get away from the ‘checklist mind-set’ and introduce the understanding that, if you want new hires who perform highly and are loyal and satisfied, you need to introduce them in a way that evokes the right feelings.

Theoretical researchers have named this process – when new hires begin to feel that they belong – organisational socialisation.¹⁶

AN IMBALANCE IN THE NEW HIRE ECO-SYSTEM IS COSTLY

The HR field is in its totality a broad professional operation with a range of different tools that influence each other in many ways. It could be considered as an advanced eco-system – a new hire eco-system – where an impact in one area can affect the entire system (Fig. 1.1).

Large sums of money are spent on finding the right candidate for a position. Recruitment processes are constantly being refined and, as specialists in this field, we have ourselves used considerable resources developing and refining our methods. Regardless of how much you spend on sorting the wheat from the chaff, it could prove meaningless if the field of applicants is quite simply too small. The number and quality of applicants are affected by the reputation of the workplace or the employer’s brand, and it is therefore an important element in the eco-system. The better the employer’s brand, the more desirable candidates you will attract and be able to employ.¹⁷

Fig. 1.1: The HR Eco-system. The HR-field is an Advanced Eco-system, Where Onboarding Appears to be the Least Developed Discipline.

Once the contract has been signed, the organisation will naturally expect new hires to arrive at work fully motivated. And typically, this will be the case. But if the motivation is fluctuating – which sometimes happens – it needs to be nurtured and maintained. Some of the best-known tools for monitoring the level of new hire motivation are satisfaction surveys, milieu measurements and appraisals.

One of the reasons that motivation has become an important HR topic is that it seriously impacts the performance levels. This can be measured by introducing performance management, which is yet another area of focus and investment for many of our clients. It is not merely a case of measuring performance, but a way of identifying where the shoe pinches if there are any problems. If a team member at the help desk only solves 10 issues per day when they should solve 20, this is not necessarily due to a lack of motivation. It could also be due to a need for training or something completely different. And so on.

All the disciplines in the new hire eco-system interact, and the business world has, to a large extent, invested heavily in most of them. Nevertheless, problems persist – with unsuccessful appointments, job dissatisfaction and poor performance. We believe one of the main reasons is because onboarding is not yet a prioritised part of the new hire ecosystem. To continue with our analogy, there is an imbalance, and regardless of how much money you spend on recruitment, for example, this imbalance and its consequences will remain, unless we become better at onboarding. In this context, it is important to mention that there is very clear statistical evidence showing that organisations that have invested in onboarding succeed noticeably better in retaining their new hires.¹⁸

An imbalance in the new hire eco-system does not necessarily mean that an organisation needs to spend more money. It could equally be a case of having to re-evaluate some of your investment. Is there disparity between how much you are spending on performance management or engagement, in relation to how much you spend on onboarding? Can you reduce expenditure somewhere or other, so that these resources are freed up to achieve a better effect?

ONBOARDING WILL BECOME AS IMPORTANT AS RECRUITMENT

As already noted, the discipline of recruitment is well developed, and most larger organisations and companies spend large amounts of money on this. Of the components in the new hire eco-system we mention above, recruitment is clearly the largest. This makes sense. Most of us have either personal experience, or have heard about, the cost of employing the wrong candidate – both financially and to the individual.¹⁹ Add to this the frustration of having to turn away new customer projects due to a shortage of staff. In other words, we no longer need to write extensive books about the business sense in investing in recruitment and HR. Regardless of whether it is a case of using resources to conduct three interviews per candidate instead of one, or to establish the organisation in an area where access to skilled new hires is better. Recruitment and talent management has long enjoyed the attention of top management.

Our prediction is that onboarding will reach the same status and focus as recruitment in the coming years and will become an important strategic area in every organisation. There will be a growing realisation that good onboarding affects the other elements in the new hire eco-system. Onboarding is still an immature discipline,²⁰ but, when we study the figures, it is difficult to doubt that it makes good business sense.²¹

FAR TOO MANY RESIGN PREMATURELY

Let’s begin by looking at some salient facts about the ability of organisations to retain new hires (Fig. 1.2):

Twenty-Five Percent of New Hires Leave Their New Job within a Year

Studies suggest that the cost of employing a new member of staff has a break-even point after six months.²² Only then have the costs of hiring and training the new hire been recouped, so you should subtract half a year before you calculate how long a new hire needs to be on the team before beginning to contribute positively to the organisation’s finances. If every fourth new hire reaches for a parachute and leaves the flight in less than 12 months, this gives very few months for the new hire to offer any net value to the organisation.²³

Fig. 1.2: Retaining New Hires. Far too Many New Hires Resign Prematurely.

More Than Half of Newly Employed New Hires Regret Their Decision

Six out of 10 new hires do not believe the job lives up to their expectations and feel ‘cheated’. The morale and culture of colleagues, particularly, differ from what new hires believe they had been led to expect. The studies behind these figures do not indicate whether the new hires feel they have deliberately been misled, but they do show clearly that differences in expectations can have a devastating impact. It is obviously not good practice for an organisation to air their dirty washing in the presence of their recruitment hopefuls, but on the other hand it does have consequences when they discover that things are not quite as they were described.²⁴

Twenty Percent of New Hires Who Leave, Do So within the First 45 Days

When new hires start to doubt whether the job is right, their engagement wanes. While some can take quite a while before resigning, even if they have admitted the job is not right for them, a fifth act promptly and resign within 45 days. Considering the above break-even time, it is obvious that this is not good business.²⁵

Four Percent of New Hires Never Return after Their First Day on the Job

Four percent is not the end of the world, but for this small group of new hires the organisation has not even been able to present the safety regulations before, so to speak, the candidate has left the plane. You could ask whether there is anything you can gather about the quality of your onboarding programme from this statistic. But the fact is, even the first day plays an important part in the overall introduction.²⁶

THERE IS A LOT TO BE LEARNED – AND EARNED

With the above data in mind, let’s look at what specifically can be gained from developing a satisfactory onboarding programme. There is quite a bit to work on, but luckily also a lot to expect in return: not wasting valuable time on an introduction programme that is poorly put together; getting people to perform sooner and stay in the job longer; and creating the emotional impact which will create a longer-lasting connection and loyalty from our new hires.

A Smart Onboarding Design Saves Time

Once we’ve got past the recruitment stage and everything which that entails, what does it then cost to welcome the new hire, and how can we do this most efficiently? This calculation can be approached from different angles. What you will see in below examples is that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Introduction
• Part One: Takeoff
• Part Two: In The Air
• Part Three: Landing
• Bibliography
• Index