Page 244 - Successful Onboarding

8

GETTING STARTED:

CONDUCTING

A PROGRAM DIAGNOSTIC

Most organizations have a distinct set of onboarding needs. Some battle
high attrition or low time-to-productivity, whereas others need to ensure
effective knowledge transfer between legacy and new employees. Still other
organizations are spending way too much on onboarding (or more specifi-
cally, the front-end administrative piece of onboarding) and need to make
processes more efficient to wring cost out of the system (see our Onboard-
ing Objectives table in Chapter 1). Because every organization’s circum-
stances and goals are different, it’s important when designing an onboarding
program to catalogue what a company currently does to orient employees
and assess the best opportunities for improvement. Unfortunately, the
vast majority of organizations do not devote enough time to taking stock of
problems and opportunities. As a result, they either fix the least important
problems, or they come up with improper solutions to the right problems.
Their redesigned programs fail to meet expectations, and they wind up with
poor returns on investment and decreased organizational commitment to
address onboarding as a performance improvement opportunity.
To succeed with onboarding, organizations should begin the design
process with a diagnostic assessment that identifies the main problems
onboarding can address, the size of the opportunities, the root causes behind
the problems, and the most practicable solutions given the organization’s
unique circumstances, operating conditions, and constraints. Performing

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