Page 259 - Successful Onboarding

240 • Successful Onboarding

decide which of these the company might plausibly (and profitably) apply
throughout the organization. It is important to determine investment
priorities, balancing the potential impact with the cost or degree of diffi-
culty in implementation. You should also consider which opportunities
might lend themselves to early wins, since these can help to build or gain
momentum and thus make buy-in for later phases more likely.
In evaluating possible opportunities, team members should take care
to identify operating and business model constraints that limit an onboard-
ing program’s shape or scope. Constraints are helpful since they focus the
design process; it is just as important to know what cannot be changed in
implementing a new program as it is to know what can or should change.
A new onboarding program needs to challenge some organizational
assumptions, but clearly some things will remain untouchable.
One financial services firm we have worked with realized it had two
constraints as it went about re-defining its onboarding program: It knew
that company field representatives would remain in the field; and it
knew that growth opportunities for employees would remain limited
given the fairly flat organization required by the firm’s business model.
Recognizing that the firm had few sales management positions, and that
most new hires therefore faced limited long-term career prospects of
upward mobility and increasing responsibility with the firm, this com-
pany could focus on offering most new hires career training and net-
working as a part of onboarding. Meeting other sales personnel in the
company who have had long, prosperous careers without moving into
“management,” and gaining access to the communities they would serve,
new hires could understand and feel better about their careers while
simultaneously beginning to build relationships that could turn into
future sales prospects.

Organizational validation and buy-in

Even as your redesign team tries to diagnose problems and come up with
possible onboarding solutions, you should begin the work of selling the rest
of the organization on onboarding. The earlier you can get leadership,
stakeholders, and broader system participants to buy in, the more support
you will obtain for implementing the kind of broad change that a strategic