Page 247 - Successful Onboarding

228 • Successful Onboarding

ideas of building durable vehicles and durable careers to its objective of
regaining industry leadership. Or maybe it wouldn’t have even offered a wel-
come packet and instead chosen to invest its greater onboarding budget in
a higher-impact area identified as critical in the diagnostic. In the vast major-
ity of our first meetings with prospective clients, we encounter designers at
the earliest stages of a renewal effort who come primed with action items
spawned from reading about other companies’ tactics.
Taking time to take stock when designing an onboarding program pro-
duces better onboarding because it allows firms to consider solutions keyed
not merely to the opportunities and problems at hand, but to the under-
lying causes of these problems. As part of a strong diagnostic process,
onboarding designers determine the root causes of problems by conduct-
ing an analysis that correlates experiences, existing tools, programs, and
processes with particular outcomes. The designer might ask: Which
experiences and processes of ours have resulted in this level of productiv-
ity for a certain category of hire? In another case, a firm might determine
that a large majority of new hires possess a very limited network after
6 months of employment. The diagnostic process might reveal that this is
because the company quickly deploys new hires on remote tasks and does
not provide them with any real means to build relationships within the
company. The designers of an onboarding program could then incorpo-
rate solutions that address new hires’ lack of proper social exposure and
relationship-building forums.
In many cases, companies can detect specific underlying causes behind
a particular problem rather than the sort of generic causes implied by a
knee-jerk focus on “best practices.” As we saw in Chapter 4, one large
client of ours was puzzled that their young hires were leaving after a year.
The root cause was quite specific—many recruits at the company had to
relocate to the corporate headquarters, and too many found it hard to fit
in culturally and find peers with common interests in the new city. One
solution was to coordinate with other big employers in the region to help
new hires establish social relations and also to invest in affinity groups that
might help new hire segments feel more connected.
Think, too, of the new hire at a tech company we described in
Chapter 3, the one who had a really good idea yet committed a faux pas
in sharing it publicly. The problem in this instance was clear, but not the