Page 161 - Successful Onboarding

148 • Successful Onboarding

A few progressive firms have ventured beyond traditional skills training,
offering more intense initial training experiences relevant to a new hire’s
career. The home products retailer The Container Store puts all new hires
through a five-day “Foundation Week” that teaches them about products,
values, and processes. New hires go on to apprentice with top employees
in the firm, and also continue training in “different functions and units”
to “gain a broader perspective and to learn about the company’s strategic
challenges.” The firm provides a minimum of 241 hours of training dur-
ing the first year—far more than the seven hours accorded on average to
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new hires in the retail industry. Yet as extensive as such training is, even
this program fails to offer employees exposure to a broad range of career
development resources that a state-of-the-art onboarding program would
include so as to achieve the maximum impact.
A 1994 article in the Harvard Business Review called for business to
move toward a “career-resilient workforce.” Observing that the “longtime
covenant between employee and employer,” under which big firms like
IBM offered lifetime employment in exchange for loyalty and decent job
performance was a thing of the past, the article exhorted companies to
enter into a new covenant “under which the employer and employee share
responsibility for maintaining—even enhancing—the individual’s employ-
ability inside and outside the company.” In practice, this would mean pro-
viding employees with tools, opportunities, and an environment conducive
to develop their skills and career potential, as well as managers who “show
that they care about their employees whether or not they stay with the
company.” It is quite clear that companies have not embraced this
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covenant as far as new hires are concerned.

The case for early career support
Today the need for a new covenant or compact is even more pressing than
it was almost a generation ago. If the old covenant was on the way out
in the early 1990s, to workers today it is on par with long-playing records
or the Big Band sound—a relic of the past. New hires no longer think
much about their long-term tenure with a company when they shop for
jobs. Instead, they try to get the best salary as well as a job that sets them
up for a better job with any employer down the line. In recessions, they
take any job they can get or try to keep the ones they have, but when good