Get Onboard

The first day at a new job is always a time for excitement, perhaps a little anxiety, and a set of customs as familiar as the dishes served at Thanksgiving: meeting new coworkers, filling out HR paperwork, settling into a workspace. But just as  Thanksgiving dishes vary widely from table to table, each company’s onboarding experience is unique. And all too frequently, it seems, onboarding is far from helpful or satisfying for new employees.

“The IT guy showed me how to log onto my computer, and that was it.”

“I wasn’t even sure who my supervisor was for the first month.”

“The orientation video was a good overview of the company, but it gave me no sense of how to do my actual job.”

The cause of these less-than-ideal experiences isn’t hard  to fathom. Designing and implementing an effective onboarding program can be difficult, especially for HR professionals facing seemingly endless demands for their finite time and resources. Successful onboarding requires employees at multiple levels of the company to participate in formal and informal teaching and mentoring. It requires a deep understanding of the company’s culture, and a plan for how to meaningfully impart those cultural priorities. And it requires the ability to carefully balance time spent on big-picture thinking with the natural desire to ramp up new employee time-to-productivity as quickly as possible.   

Given these challenges, it's not surprising that many companies feel their onboarding program could be significantly improved. Thirty percent of C-level executives at small and mid-sized companies list successful onboarding as one of the most pressing human capital issues facing their business; among large companies, this figure rises to 35 percent. Developing a more effective onboarding program may be daunting, but doing so has been proven to pay enormous dividends in terms of employee retention rates, time to productivity, organizational commitment, and job performance.

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