Page 210 - Successful Onboarding

194 • Successful Onboarding

system in place for measuring stakeholder performance and holding
players accountable for fulfilling their onboarding functions. Like the
system of blood vessels assuring that muscles in the human body
have the oxygen, nutrients, and other elements they need to perform,
administration and governance serve as the life support system for a state-
of-the-art onboarding program. They allow enlightened organizations to
integrate new hires and prepare them for success, so it is imperative that
as a program designer you get them right.
There is a more fundamental point here. The new hire compact that
we discuss in this book implies that the entire enterprise cares about the
new hire’s future, not just his or her boss. To enact this compact, we have
to build into an enterprise’s system a model that ensures that the entire
enterprise will attend to the new hire’s success. Organizations have to com-
mit themselves at the deepest levels to retaining the people they bring
onboard. They have to put the onus on themselves to identify at-risk peo-
ple and take steps to remediate problems and turn them around, so as to
retain new hires as strong, productive employees.
In the end, the goal becomes to reduce recruiting activities—not
because of company stagnation, but because we are more successful with
the ones we already brought in. This means putting senior leaders in
charge of overseeing the program’s success. It also means that companies
should make sure they’ve devoted sufficient administrative and governance
resources to onboarding—not just dollars and people, but tools and tech-
nology. What those resources are and how a progressive enterprise might
deploy them to greatest effect is the subject of the next chapter.