Page 20 - Successful Onboarding

Introduction • 9

We were once onboarding skeptics ourselves. We came to the disci-
pline as business consultants whose Organization Development practice
focused first and foremost on improving companies’ strategic and busi-
ness performance—bottom line stuff. Earlier in the decade, one of our
clients—a Fortune 50 company—asked us to help conceive a state-of-the-
art onboarding program. We were not all that familiar with the term
“onboarding,” and the very concept seemed a bit lightweight and over the
top to us. Early investigation on supposed best practices highlighted—as
an example—attention to providing “white glove” service to new hires.
As we saw it, our client was supposed to be hiring mature and responsi-
ble adults, people who were motivated to perform and who would be
faced with all kinds of job requirements and standards. Why should the
company spend money designing a sophisticated system to bring these
employees into the organization? Shouldn’t a reasonably intelligent new
hire be able to figure things out for him or herself? That’s what we—and
most people that we knew—had done upon starting our own careers.
We told our client that they were going down the wrong path. They
should work harder on hiring better people rather than integrating new
hires. In this, we took inspiration from Howard D. Schultz, Starbucks’
long-time leader, who has been reported by management guru Tom Peters
to say, “We don’t train our people to smile, it is far easier for us to hire peo-
ple who smile.”
But it was not long before we changed our tune. Howard Schultz does
not leave the customer experience to chance, nor does he leave the
employee experience to chance. Instead, Starbucks and other leading
companies apply “design thinking” to ensuring winning outcomes. Ana-
lyzing the process of integrating new hires as well as the needs that new
hires brought to the table, we realized that onboarding was actually a
tremendous business opportunity, even more exciting for being virtually
unexplored by the large majority of firms. What most people associated
with onboarding—the initial welcome and the initial orientation, getting
new hires familiar and set up—turned out to be the least of the opportu-
nities that a solid program could address. New hires will forgive you for
not showing them where to park, or how to locate the supply rooms or the
company’s history and mission statement; this we know from our research.
But if they fail over the first year to discover enough that will excite and