Page 19 - Successful Onboarding

8 • Successful Onboarding

accelerate time-to-productivity of new hires, but also to elevate standards
of productivity for all employees. The average organization replaces half
of its employee base over a five- to 10-year period (because of 5 to 10%
annual attrition). Imagine the impact if all of these new employees were
better developed and prepared with a more comprehensive set of role
expectations. Elevating new hire productivity levels through robust
onboarding programs helps companies do more with less—a key business
imperative in our dynamic, hyper-competitive 21st century economy.

Elevating Onboarding … and Human Resources

Despite the strategic importance of attracting, retaining, and maximizing
the productivity of top talent, too many companies continue to neglect
onboarding. Human Resources in general remains somewhat marginal-
ized in the boardroom, all too often seen as a “soft” discipline. Some firms
publically proclaim human resources a critical function only to limit the
investment behind closed doors, treating human resources as a functional
necessity rather than a true strategic value-add. This is a huge mistake; as
our book argues, talent management and onboarding in particular should
be on the radar of cross-functional managers as well as a firm’s senior lead-
ership, up to and including the CEO.
Many North American companies invest as much or more on new labor
every year as they do in manufacturing infrastructure, yet management
devotes far less time figuring out how to drive performance from this labor.
This is true, even though, and probably because, it is actually far harder to
engineer a positive outcome from human capital than from traditional cap-
ital investments. Management is simply more focused on areas that are per-
ceived to be easier to tackle. Let’s look at the situation in another way.
A 10% attrition rate means that, not even considering growth factors, your
1
company will turn over nearly one third of its workforce in 3 / 3 years (i.e.,
40 months)—a timeframe approximately in line with many firms’ product
line refreshment, and also in line with average capital investments (with
many assets having a 10-year life). Annual recruiting and intake has become
the normal course of business, yet we don’t see company leadership rec-
ognize the fantastic strategic opportunity this investment represents, nor
have they developed the management techniques to take advantage of it.