Interjecting Fun Into OnBoarding

Hmm. When There's None to be Found in the Job Itself??

Story 1

Back in 1979 my new boss and co-worker shared a story with me in my first job out of college about the time they revamped an existing new hire training program - what today we'd call OnBoarding.

They had decided that this 2 week-long program, which they had inherited due to a reorganization, was just too dry and dull - so they interjected all sorts of fun activities and games with prizes into it.

Their internal client was supportive and really liked it until they all discovered that instead of new hires quitting the program in the early days of their initial training they were now waiting until after a few days on the job. And as the compensation for those in the new hire training program came out of the client's budget, they were spending more now training people who were leaving 2 weeks later than usual.

The lesson to be learned, my very experienced boss and co-worker shared with me, the new kid, was that the training they had revamped no longer reflected the realities of the job, and it fooled the new candidates longer, costing their client a boatload of money.

Story 2

That lesson has stayed with me. In 1987 I did a Curriculum Architecture Design for AT&T Network Systems Product Managers - and designed both a T&D Path and a T&D Planning Guide. In the early portion of the Path was a "module" that I titled "The PM Novel" - the story of 3 new Product Planners onboarding and adjusting to their new jobs.

The Curriculum was updated twice by me after the first in 1986 - due to the tremendous changes happing in that part of AT&T.

At first, my clients and stakeholders on the Training Advisory Board (TAB) that I had encouraged my client to form - high-level managers from the Marketing organization and the 4 Strategic Business Units (SBUs) - were very skeptical of that particular module, "The PM Novel."

But they soon warmed to it after a dinner conversation when they decided to grill me on that - and why I had included it into the overall design - which they all loved except for that one module.

I related to them that after dozens and dozens of interviews with new and experience Product Planners, and dozens of higher-level Product Managers across the 4 SBUs - that I had become very sensitive to their people's fears - expressed by many - that they weren't doing their jobs appropriately. They all had looked around at their peers in the cube farms as they were called and saw that everybody else, with the same job title, was doing something different than they were.

I told these TAB members that it had taken me a while to figure that out as well. The variation across the 800 people in the jobs - soon to be 1100 - was due to where their product was in its Life Cycle and the complexity of the Product itself - which was often a complex System composed of many Products - some of which came from other SBUs - as well as external resources.

That's why the front end of the Curriculum Architecture was so modular - to accommodate the variation of Training/Instruction due to the variation in the jobs themselves.

I saw many heads nodding affirmatively at that dinner. And so they decided in the meeting the next day to somewhat reluctantly fund the development of that module - and take it from what I called Un-Structured OJT (nowadays Informal Learning) to Self-Paced Instruction/Training.

I hired a subcontractor who reviewed my outline, interviewed me and some others, and drafted The PM Novel.

It was a huge hit - the most purchased model of the entire curriculum - as they operated on a charge-back basis.

My client, a 4th-level manager in the Marketing function, decided that HR should begin to use it as part of the Recruiting & Selection System - pre-Training & Development - to help some possible candidates decide before joining the PM function - that the job described in the PM Novel wasn't "their cup of tea." They had been experiencing a lot of dropouts a few weeks or months after hiring people into the job - as they were intentionally growing the SBU organizations - and I had shared with him at another dinner the story my first boss and co-worker had shared with me about their inappropriate revamp of that new hire program.

The "Novel" shared the stories of 3 new hires into a fictitious SBU, and their experiences and weekly commiserations with each other at the local watering hole. The intent (Learning Objective) was to explain why each had a different set of job responsibilities despite sharing the same job title as well as explain the nature of the general ambiguity of the job itself - which some people might love and thrive on, while others would detest and bail on.

The PM Novel was the part of the modular "Advance Organizer" I built into the design - to try to help new hires and existing Product Planners rationalize why their jobs were so different - to ease their minds - so that they could focus on their assignments without worrying all of the time that their bosses didn't know what they were doing. And their bosses wouldn't worry so much that their bosses didn't know what they were doing. Which was the case at the time I did the Analysis effort.

The first module of the Curriculum Path - was this video - and the script was written by Mark Bade - who also authored the PM Novel.

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