Page 21 - Successful Onboarding

10 • Successful Onboarding

enable them, that’s where you suffer your loss. Lost insight. Lost produc-
tivity. Lost ideas. Lost retention. In other words, lost profit and prospect.
The more we probed into onboarding, the more we understood that this
nascent discipline was actually, at its core, about business performance and
the prospect for improving profit and profit potential. Our research into
the state-of-the-art confirmed that most companies’ onboarding approaches
were disconnected from the actual needs of new hires (their personal needs
and their needs associated with their ability to deliver against the com-
pany’s aspirations). Also, these programs lacked buy-in from managers out-
side of human resources and unfolded over too short of a period to have
any meaningful impact. If we could make our clients better at onboard-
ing—if we could help them develop a program that was more compre-
hensive, systemic, and strategic than other firms’ programs—we could truly
give them a sustainable competitive advantage (the Holy Grail for man-
agement consultants) that would affect their top and bottom lines.
We’ve since engaged in more exhaustive best practice research, study-
ing the operating conditions at firms such as Microsoft, Procter &
Gamble, Deloitte Consulting, Target, Booz Allen Hamilton, Boston Sci-
entific, Lockheed Martin, Verizon, FedEx Office, IBM, Best Buy, Ernst
& Young, Deutsche Bank, and John Deere, among many others, includ-
ing smaller firms. We’ve met with and collaborated with organizations in
the public sector and diverse private industries and have addressed issues
for both corporate knowledge workers as well as front-line employees. At
each step, we’ve concerned ourselves with designing programs that sup-
port the companies’ human capital needs based on their strategic plan
and operating environment.
Findings from our broader organization development practice and
our study of onboarding effectiveness have pushed us toward develop-
ment of a strategic approach to onboarding. We learned early on that
onboarding actually includes every experience that the new hire has in
the course of the first year, not just the few that are owned and managed
by centralized HR functions. It is this full set of experiences to which
the new hire synthesizes and responds. Virtually all large and medium-
sized organizations could benefit by creating onboarding programs that
bring together stakeholders from across the enterprise, span at least the
entire first year of the new hire’s tenure, provide a comprehensive,