Page 215 - Successful Onboarding

The Onboarding Margin Life Support System • 199

according to required standards. It is simple: You can have sufficient
administrative resources in place, and all the right content, but if you do
not have governance, your program will fall short of delivering the value
the enterprise deserves with this human capital investment.
This chapter provides general guidelines for governing and adminis-
tering a strategic onboarding program. It also relates practices we have seen
applied to great effect at our clients’ companies and at other leading-edge
onboarding organizations. Putting state of the art administration processes
behind the programs you choose and executing these programs with excel-
lence clearly means accruing some cost. By now, though, we hope you
will consider these costs in their proper perspective, seeing administration
and governance as enablers of the great opportunity that onboarding
represents. Program administration and its continuous improvement are
the foundation for implementing a new employee compact, and as such,
a worthy and important investment in your company’s long-term future.

Onboarding’s Administrative Needs

Here is some great news: Your enterprise already possesses the skill set it
requires to administer onboarding properly. One thing many successful
companies excel at is operational excellence—repetitively doing the same
thing over and over again with efficiency and reliability. Large companies
are especially adept at simplifying and making routine processes for scale
and scope advantage, which is precisely why they often cannot undertake
dramatic change all that well (often the skill set of smaller firms). Yet the
majority of big companies have not applied this skill to the particular func-
tion of bringing onboard its new hires. They’ve refined and systematized
processes that relate to production or serving customers, but where
onboarding is concerned, the slate remains largely blank.
For processes to become routine and effective, in the sense of deliver-
ing consistently great outcomes, you need to:

1. Determine the process objectives.
2. Document the necessary steps for the process.
3. Simplify and optimize the process for cost, service level, and time
objectives.