On-Boarding

I’ve on-boarded quite a few people into their new highly technical roles over the course of my career.? Since one of my colleagues left for a higher-paying job recently, I'm thinking about how to on-board a new co-worker.

An employee’s effectiveness at work depends on his or her familiarity with the work to be done and the tools and processes used to perform each task.? If the work is an entry-level job like stocking store shelves or sweeping floors, on-boarding often means explaining basic goals and turning the new employee loose on the job.? When the new employee completes a portion of their work, the co-worker might review and offer suggestions on how the new employee needs to adjust their method for greater effect.? This isn’t on-boarding in my view.? It’s just turning someone loose at a task that needs to be done and expecting them to do it.? Most careers involve specialized knowledge and many require far more knowledge than an employee can gain in a few minutes.

On-boarding must occur when an employer cannot reasonably expect a new employee to know how to effectively perform their job due to several factors including business culture, tribal knowledge, proprietary business processes, and organizational complexity.? New employee on-boarding isn't complete before these factors get addressed.

Business Culture:

Culture can be loosely defined as what individuals expect of others and what others expect of individuals.? Cultural harmony happens when these expectations mesh, and cultural clashes often surround missed expectations.??

I'm fortunate to have worked at companies with a strong sense of business ethics.? These companies train their employees regularly on corporate culture and their employees understand what the company expects from them.

A new employee who knows what's expected will start their job with less stress and greater satisfaction with their results.? On-boarding a new employee to the business culture involves showing them what to avoid and when kudos are deserved.??

Tribal Knowledge:

Tribal knowledge is a euphemism for undocumented practices and processes. All undocumented or poorly documented business processes fall within this category, and they happen due to a combination of armchair engineering and sometimes a degree of self-protectivism.??

Armchair engineering might happen when a problem is creatively solved "on-the-fly" using an iterative, adaptive try-fail-try process.? Creative problem solvers might not document the actual requirements that the solution needs to resolve, nor the steps involved in resolving the problem.? The overall solution architecture might be altered many times and in disparate places, making it difficult to understand how the pieces fit together and interact.

Self-protectivism takes many forms, and usually consists of complex knowledge that's locked safely away in someone's head.? Territorial coworkers may just volunteer to do the work themselves rather than train others or document the processes.? They may try to learn what others know but ignore requests to teach their peers.

If the job requires employees to perform complex tasks, the new-hire needs to know how to effectively and efficiently perform those tasks.? Tribal knowledge directly impedes the process of on-boarding a new employee and making them efficient and effective at their job.

It's appropriate to limit access to trade secrets that give your company a competitive advantage. ? But, if the new employee fits within one of the roles that requires the knowledge, you need to quickly teach them how to do their job.

Proprietary Business Processes:

Highly-skilled work relies on a shared understanding of conventions and common practices.? Overly simplistic examples of this shared understanding include how to navigate a computer operating system or how to send an email.? A software developer in today’s workplace may need to understand how to use the git software version control repository, agile or dev-ops management processes, or how to write software in Java or Python. A business process architect may need to understand the use of UML and other modeling diagrams.

Every organization I’ve been a part of has created one-off processes to fill the gaps when their current business processes were originally defined.? Proprietary process examples include: help-desk system configuration that optimizes for a previous philosophy of how to organize a help desk; approvals processes created to address s particular commitment or budgetary need; or variations on a standard to add a required or desired element of process transparency.??

Your new colleague may be familiar with multiple industry best practices, but they won't be familiar with the details of any one-off process.? These non-commodity processes become a major element of a new employee’s job familiarization. If the new employee is a contractor, implementation partner consultant, or an outsourced worker who can only be expected to stay for a limited time, providing well-documented and clearly defined procedures can make the difference between the employee's effectively accomplishing their assignments vs.frustration among all involved parties.?

Many one-off processes can be replaced with effort by off-the-shelf tools and industry best-practices, but the current process often has so many other proprietary bits built around it that any effort to adopt “off-the-shelf” standardized practices will require an organization-wide business processes revamp.??

This article doesn't address the benefits and pitfalls of homegrown business processes.? Some proprietary processes offer a competitive advantage and others just add to the on-boarding effort.? Either way, your new coworker isn’t fully on-boarded until he or she can execute all of the business processes that the job requires.??

The on-boarding “buddies” must either train the new employee on these proprietary processes, or the new employee will need to learn them as they go and make mistakes along the way.? Each area of proprietary business knowledge in the job requirement adds to the time and effort needed to on-board a new employee.?

Organizational Complexity:

A new employee is unlikely to start their job with an understanding of how to navigate the organization.? Some individuals are gifted with an innate ability to walk in the door and immediately make a splash.? More often than not however, the new employee is given tasks that rely on others whose job goals and priorities don’t much allow time for jumping to the aid of the new person.??

For an on-boarding employee, organizational complexity goes hand-in-hand with the old adage, “Who you know is more important than what you know.”??

Most of the time, a new employee doesn’t know anyone at the job, and will benefit directly from a list of names associated with relevant topics, along with introductions to the people they need to work with in order to perform their work.? This list’s size grows in direct proportion to the number of employees in the workplace because as companies grow, their internal roles become increasingly specialized.?

The person or persons tasked with on-boarding a new employee greatly simplify their task by introducing each new co-worker or employee to the people they need to work with and providing them a list of who-to-go-to for different bits and pieces of tribal knowledge.? It’s a good idea to have this list written down or in a spreadsheet, because “who you know” is also a type of tribal knowledge.

Quick Wins:

Successful on-boarding likely involves a certain amount of assistance that I call “bull-dogging.”? It’s the process of requesting help and following-up when the people you need help from are too busy to provide the assistance you need.?

Navigating this complexity may involve knowing who to go to along with understanding how to work within the organization's internal structure and decision-making processes.? A veteran employee might possess this knowledge, but a new employee needs guidance.??

If the new employee is filling a recently opened vacancy or if they were brought in to provide a newly needed skillset, they might need help to navigate the maze of getting the right people together to accomplish task that they can’t complete by themselves either because the tasks are outside their skillset or because the organizational structure doesn’t allow them to perform all elements of the task.? By guiding your co-worker through this process, they will gain the organizational experience of seeing how it gets done and will better be able to accomplish the next effort on their own initiative.

Note that I didn’t say that the new employee needs it done for them.? Effective on-boarding means the new employee is able to deliver their job requirements without frequent co-worker intervention.??

This article doesn’t attempt to address all areas of on-boarding, but rather, to identify a few parts that I’ve needed to address repeatedly within my career.??

- DW