Page 241 - Successful Onboarding

222 • Successful Onboarding

As consultants, we have witnessed too many initiatives fly out of the gate
only to falter for lack of sufficient administrative resources. Often a proj-
ect team is assigned to develop a process, and then the team disbands for
the next assignment without leaving resources in place to maintain the
program with up-to-date information about strategy, organizational struc-
ture, resources available, etc. By contrast, best-in-class firms assign people
with senior authority, experience, and knowledge to determine if every-
thing is aligned, and they also put mechanisms in place to upgrade the
program as necessary. Someone must do these things; otherwise, they do
not get done, and programs suffer.
We have examined the four pillars covered by our model for successful
onboarding as well as the underlying organizational requirements for
bringing them to new hires. Yet deciding which program elements to
include, how precisely to execute them, how to link them to one another,
when to roll them out, and who to involve is by no means an easy task.
Given limited resources, how should a firm weave onboarding elements
together in a way best suited to the organization and its own strategic goals?
The two chapters that follow outline a process for successfully conceiving,
designing, and selling in a strategic onboarding system. We start in the
next chapter with what we regard as that ever-important, but frequently
neglected, initial phase, diagnostic investigation and analysis.