Page 255 - Successful Onboarding

236 • Successful Onboarding

In addition to conducting interviews, we also recommend conducting
surveys with hiring managers and recent new hires so that you can quantify
your findings. Later on, you can then use these numbers as a baseline against
which to measure the impact of your enhanced onboarding program.
Ultimately, organizational needs tell us what specific goals our enhanced
program must support. One company we worked with—an electric util-
ity—was expecting 40% of its current workforce to retire within 10 years.
This was a very scary scenario considering how much technical know-how
this retiring base represented. The company wanted to ensure that com-
pany culture, performance values, know-how, and skills survived the tran-
sition from legacy to new employees. To service this need, the enhanced
onboarding program incorporated two key components: (1) an increased
number of opportunities for new hires to build relationships with experi-
enced employees; and (2) a knowledge transfer program enabling these
company veterans to impart their accumulated know-how on a formal basis
throughout the entirety of the first year. Another company forecasted a
200% increase in employees over the next five years in a rapidly expand-
ing business unit. Here the program redesign focused on educating the new
hires on the underlying strategy associated with the growth, the demands
that the growth was putting on the business, and the skills necessary to meet
those growth demands. All of this was achieved by segmenting new hires
into the key areas of intended functional and business growth.
As far as new-hire needs go, many organizations pursuing major pro-
gram redesign efforts lack sufficient onboarding surveys in place to help
guide the redesign effort. Ideally, you would query new hires and hiring
managers at different points in their tenure with the company, most likely
the 30-, 60-, 180-, 270-, and 365-day marks. When setting survey points,
consider time periods that recognize completed business cycles and nat-
ural anniversary milestones. You can also brand surveys to associate them
with formal phases designated for your onboarding program. Surveys need
to include demographic questions (e.g., queries about gender, race, pre-
vious work experience, new hire level, function, business unit, etc.) or they
otherwise need to correlate with respondent data from centralized human
capital information systems. This information will allow you to segment
out responses into distinct groups of new hires, providing necessary instruc-
tion on how to customize your solution.