Page 23 - Successful Onboarding

12 • Successful Onboarding

this example, although a bit extreme, is truly representative of the senti-
ment associated with most solutions and published material in the public
domain.
To many people, onboarding seems to involve nothing more than
handing tools out and then collecting them back during an “off-board-
ing” phase. You can imagine our frustration. A number of human capi-
tal and business magazines have covered onboarding and reported on
“best practices,” but they typically fail to distinguish between a progres-
sive practice and proven best practices, and they also fail to explore the
operating conditions that define which practices should apply when. As
a result, many managers have adopted practices that give the firm a sense
of being “progressive,” but that lack the requisite rigor to make them
impactful. The result, sadly, is a modest to negative return on investment.
We’ve designed this book to give readers at any level of an enterprise
the understanding they need to take advantage of onboarding’s strategic
and financial opportunities. Even when firms recognize their existing pro-
grams’ shortcomings, their redesign efforts often come up severely short;
in framing the new hire’s experience, companies tend to over-emphasize
the fun, the welcome, and the service side of things, often presenting an
unrealistic sense of what the firm is all about and setting unsustainable
expectations. Additionally, companies tend to apply insufficient diagnos-
tic and design techniques and pay insufficient consideration to what is
required to govern, update, and sustain onboarding programs over time.
As a result, many efforts enjoy a great first release before losing energy,
leading to decreasing returns.
Human resources professionals need a deeper understanding of how to
design human capital programs that cut across functional silos to create
value. This book provides that understanding by describing the funda-
mentals of robust, year-long onboarding programs. Chapter 1 presents the
business case for onboarding, while Chapter 2 presents the general char-
acteristics of a world-class, strategic program. Chapters 3 through 7 explore
the contents and administrative features of strategic programs in consid-
erable detail. Presenting examples and anecdotes from our practice, we
describe the best-in-class principles firms are now using to help meet the
pressing needs efficiently and effectively. The final two chapters focus on
how to develop a strategic onboarding program. We discuss elements of