Page 24 - Successful Onboarding

Introduction • 13

diagnostic, planning, implementation, and ongoing operations, and con-
clude the book with an extended case study of a successful onboarding
program’s design and implementation.

Rethinking the Metaphor
Before embarking on our journey through state-of-the-art onboarding, let’s
reflect for a moment on this term itself. “Onboarding” is a metaphor, and
a rather obvious one at that; it evokes a process for bringing a person onto
a ship. The staff of a cruise ship, for example, would “onboard” a ship’s
guests by getting all of the luggage to the correct cabins, conducting a
safety drill, showing them around (dining room, casino, movie theater,
etc.), and describing what activities they might enjoy so that they feel wel-
come and familiar.
This book argues that we need to redefine this metaphor if we are to
have any hope of unlocking the potential of this important process. As tal-
ent managers, we’re not welcoming visitors to a company; we are employ-
ing and deploying employees or human capital investments—people that
we should expect to stay and make a difference. We need to go beyond
the superficial and take care to teach new hires things vital to the organi-
zation’s successful performance—how to steer the ship, what makes it go,
the ship’s and the cruise line’s business model and competitive environ-
ment, the intricacies of how one department works with another to create
a good customer experience, the long-term goals of the ship. The only way
a guest can get off a cruise early is to jump ship, and we don’t want our
employees to do that. Rather, we want them to make a big contribution.
Thus we need to do more.
Strategic onboarding is a process by which a workforce is reconstituted
and enrolled to align with a firm’s primary emerging business strategy.
From a new hire’s perspective, onboarding encompasses everything a new
hire experiences that defines his or her entry and orientation into an organ-
ization and that sets him or her up for success. From an organizational
perspective, it’s the experiences and programs that can be designed to set
up employees as well as meet the needs of the new hire manager to have
staff become productive quickly. If you embrace strategic onboarding, your
enterprise won’t see as many new hires frustrated by a boss who knows