Page 12 - Successful Onboarding

INTRODUCTION

How well would your company be doing if less than a third of new cus-
tomers felt positive about their first year of interactions with your company?
How would you feel if after six months a full third of your customers
were seeking a new place to buy their products or services?
Would your Senior Vice President of Manufacturing have a job today
if a third of new manufacturing plants were not working (and he repeated
this performance year after year)?
At many companies, such outcomes would prompt a shareholder to call
for new management. We believe that onboarding of new hires should
meet the same, if not higher, standards. Over the past 10 years (and espe-
cially during the past five years), a number of Fortune 500 companies and
small- to medium-sized businesses have reviewed traditional orientation
programs and begun to embrace “onboarding” as a means of increasing
employee productivity and engagement levels, reducing turnover, and ele-
vating a company’s employment brand in the eyes of prospective hires. Yet
despite millions spent on these initiatives, many firms have experienced a
modest return on investment. Companies continue to absorb new hires
less effectively than they otherwise might, and as a result they experience
longer new hire time-to-productivity, higher attrition, frustrated hiring
managers, and a mediocre return on investment. Consider these facts:

• A full third of external hires are no longer with the organization
after two years.
• Less than a third of executives worldwide are positive about their
onboarding experience.
• Almost a third of executives who join organizations as an external
hire miss expectations in the first two years.
• Almost a third of employees employed in their current job for less
than six months are already job searching. 1

• 1 •