Is onboarding just another buzzword?

Link to: Danish version

What the F*** is onboarding!? In case you haven’t come across the word ”Onboarding” so far, in short, it means: The time you invest in integrating new employees into your organisation, helping them becoming a success, faster” (time-to-performance). With that, the course is set.

My first exposure to onboarding, or lack thereof! In spite of the occasional grey hair emerging and the previously top-tuned triathlon body starting to resemble a more comfortable father-figure, i still consider myself relatively young. Even so, i have had my share of job moves. Somewhere between 1 and 5, plus minus…Whatever the precise number is, it’s been enough to conclude that we, as businesses, focus almost exclusively on recruiting and often overlook everything that involves getting our new employees off to a great start, in other words getting them onboarded.

I remember vividly one of my ”better” experiences

One way or the other i had managed to get through the eye of the needle and was hired as an Account Manager for an, for this purpose, unnamed organisation. I remember my emotions on the way to work the first day, feeling like a race-horse waiting for the gates to open. I was READY and PSYCHED. Happy as a clam i was out of the bus and on my way to a new adventure feeling excited, nervous and most of all, super motivated only for it all to end up in a gigantic anticlimax. I was parked in front of my new computer (yes, believe it or not, it was ready), given the usual company pitch (3-4 minutes) and was told to familiarize myself with the products….the sooner i could begin selling them, the better of course. No introduction, no transfer of knowledge, no learning…nothing. At lunch-time things got even worse, i found myself trapped in a parents-teacher like conversation similar to the ones i had in primary school every time i threw a stone through a window, which was more than once. It wasn’t funny and all i wanted was to go home…same shit, different setting. As a result i never became part of the organisation. I did not understand the culture and did not know left from right. I knew my password and that working hours were 8-16. As you would have guessed by now, i was there exactly 3 weeks and never got to sell anything!

Scary numbers. While many organisations, fortunately, are doing a better job at onboarding their employees (a trend i hope will continue), it is, unfortunately, a fact that more than one third of all businesses allocate exactly ZERO dollars, pounds or Euros for onboarding….Let me just repeat that for clarity….. more than one third of all businesses allocate exactly ZERO dollars, pounds or Euros for onboarding. (source below)

It we compare that with all the time, money, resources and focus spent on recruitment, one has to wonder why we feel it is more important to identify the supposedly right candidate, than it is to make sure the absolute best possible candidate gets off a great start. We are obviously not applying the knowledge and fact that one in five new hires leave within the first 45 days and that 4 in 100 never even turn up!! A tsunami of tests, psycho analyses, interviews and reference checks are all lined up to make sure we find the right candidate. Once we do, and with all that investment, why is it then that the promising marriage so often ends in divorce. Should we have even more interviews, more tests or simply accept that the younger generation (of which i am part) the X, Y or Z’s, simply have no loyalty towards their employer. Well, for me it’s about focus on what is important. If you, e.g. google ”recruiting” you get 171 million hits. If you google ”onboarding” you get close to 10 million hits. The 17:1 ratio, in my book, accurately reflects effort and investment ratios as well….it is thought provoking.

It hurts! One thing is that a wrong hire on average costs the company 18 months salary (see source below) another is that the employee spends 50 hours of your existing team members’ time just on the basics, just trying to settle in. These, i believe we can all agree, are staggering numbers and we are seeing them in different versions all the time now. In fact the numbers are probably hiding, and making us forget, the biggest victim in the process, the poor new employee. She has quit her former job to come join you. Perhaps left a comfortable and safe environment and risked everything for this new opportunity. She has involved her friends and family in the process and no doubt been stressed to the limit. Finally she has made the decision to move. She has informed her old colleagues and her network, updated her LinkedIn profile and posted her walls on Facebook that a new adventure is about to begin. She has invested time, energy and resources and is willing to risk her current foundation to come work for you. As her future employer and boss, this leaves you with a huge responsibility, a responsibility you should have seen and taken….a long time ago.

But don’t despair, we are all in the same boat. You wish for your employees an effective and fast Time-to-Performance curve and your new employee only wants to show you that you made the right choice in hiring them in the first place. So the ground is set for something really positive, if only we figure out how to change the old patterns…..Thus in closing, and hold on for this….

Should we have known better!? We study like never before, we educate ourselves until the cows come home! MBAs, mini-MBAs, Midi-MBAs, Diplomas, CBA, CPAs, etc etc so we should know better, you would think. I realize it is easier said than done to change routines and transfer focus. Global leaders such as Kodak, Nokia and Blockbuster are great examples, but if at least we can agree that there is a disparity between our efforts in finding the right employee and in making sure she will become a great success and if at least we can agree that we have a clear responsibility to create the best environment for that to happen, and therefore to start improving these poor stats, we should unite around that and start doing something serious about it.