Welcome to TalentMgt.com, the online home for Talent Management magazine.
How Important Is Onboarding at Your Organization?
I was just reading about how an individual tackled her first job in HR with little or no help from anyone at the company. She was told by a manager that he couldn't show her the ropes and that she would need to read a stack of books in her office to figure out how to succeed at her job.
The individual in question stressed the need for better onboarding processes to be established since it would likely improve employee retention.
How important is onboarding at your organization? What are some best practices?
Replies to This Discussion
-
Permalink Reply by Primadonna Bridges on -
Onboarding is one of the best gifts a new employee can receive from a supervisor or manager. I still have the outline my manager supplied me with upon entering the organization. The outline provided me with actionable steps to take to get acclimated up and running in a very short time. I had various areas and people to meet and observe. I created a binder with all of the valuable information that I collected along the way. I am happy to say, I believe the extra steps my manager took rather than just hand me a copy of my job description made all of the difference in the world.
-
Permalink Reply by Mike Byrnes on -
Onboarding is so important to my part of the organization that we have institutionalized the process. We have:
* A scheduled call with their manager and the Learning & Performance department to discuss their new hire program.
* Weekly 30-minute calls with their trainer to bring resources to bear when needed and discuss and extend the online training they have been doing.
* Their manager has a coaching guide which provides guidance to the program and how they should be coaching specific content.
* This program is 13 weeks and is tied to activities on their job and we see them in face to face training for two weeks during the 13 week program.
It took a long time to build, and we are faced with the challenge of improving on the program to increase performance of our new associates each year, but we get excellent response and increased productivity out of our new hires that we did not see prior to the program.
Mike
-
Permalink Reply by caroline esterson on
-
Two real extremes here illustrate the danger if inadequate onboarding procedures and the potential if the right questions are asked to help steer a successful outcome. My question is how quickly do organisations expect new hires to start making a contribution and what do they do to help with that? With the speed of change in our world right now, what is the impact if we don't challenge that speed of contribution? What would we need to do to help new hires making significant contributions in their first week and feel great in doing so?
-
Permalink Reply by Diane Bailey-Boulet on
-
It's very important. I've seen this from both sides--as the one newly hired and the one doing the hiring. The costs of attracting and hiring good people are high. A clear onboarding process definitely makes sense. Even in a small company I've seen that it helps weave new people into the organizational fabric more quickly. It short-circuits the risks of lower productivity and poor morale (think simmering resentment that starts early and lingers over time) and higher turnover.
Many of my clients have made onboarding a priority in recent years. They are reaping real benefits in higher morale, productivity, and retention rates. It doesn't have to be overly complicated. It's a good way to provide structure and support to what can otherwise be a haphazard, demoralizing affair.
-
Permalink Reply by Emily Nichols on
-
As a talent management vendor, we see a lot of value in on-boarding. The challenge we will often see is two-fold:
First, the human-process is not as well thought out as other more standard processes, such as the performance or goal setting process.
Second we also see that getting the different systems involved to be consistent and share information easily is a big hurdle.
As some others have pointed to here, what we see helping a great deal is integrating what our customers learn in the recruiting process (say proficiency level at key skills) and leveraging the information to help create a development or learning plan for the first 90-days. The results are very measurable both in employee satisfaction/engagement and in more hard-dollar terms, such as near term ROI on the investment to hire people. Invariably doing this effectively is more than just a technology integration exercise. Actually getting the human process sorted is often as much work as any technology effort required.
Emily Nichols
www.softscape.com
-
Permalink Reply by Chris on
-
I'm the onboarding manager for a US based, global corporation. I am in the process of researching best practices to potentially revise our current homegrown onboarding program. Has anyone recently researched and/or implemented an onboardiing program with global reach, in multiple languages and for several product divisions? If so, I would be VERY interested in knowing what you learned in terms of complexity, cost, building the business case, etc. etc. Thanks for any info.
© 2010 Created by Administrator.
