Page 261 - Successful Onboarding

242 • Successful Onboarding

lot from proper market research, even though they feel from the outset
that they possess an intuitive grasp of consumers. Top tier marketing com-
panies know that relying less on intuition and more on customer insights
makes all the difference in driving results that lead to industry leadership.
The same holds true here. If you can afford the research, you’re better off
avoiding the risk that you’ve missed something big or wasted money on
the basis of a false assumption.

Summing Up

Before your firm can hope to unveil a state-of-the-art onboarding program,
it must take care to gain organizational self-awareness. Do not just grasp at
the onboarding “best practices” you read about online or in trade journals.
Kick off your onboarding redesign process with a rigorous diagnostic phase
that catalogues the onboarding measures currently in place, compares them
with those at competitor and best-in-class firms, and identifies realistic
opportunities that get at the root causes of problems. Pursued with integrity,
the diagnostic phase can help focus a program around a few key objectives
among the many that onboarding can viably help you meet. A diagnostic
phase can also serve as a fulcrum for beginning to generate buy in and sup-
port from stakeholders across the organization.
Once your redesign group has settled on a few key opportunities to pur-
sue with onboarding, you are likely to feel a sense of excitement and
momentum around the program you plan to develop. It is tempting to jump
right in and start putting programs in place. That would be a mistake. Given
how all-encompassing a truly systemic program is, it is vital that you take the
time to develop a highly detailed blueprint of what your new onboarding
program will look like as it is rolled out over multiple phases. You cannot
just put tactics in place haphazardly; you need to create a plan, just like an
architect does when constructing a skyscraper. The next and final chapter
shows you how to create a compelling onboarding blueprint and then begin
the process of transforming your organization.