Page 285 - Successful Onboarding

266 • Conclusion and Next Steps

workforce it wants and needs. We hope hiring managers reading this book
begin to recognize the great opportunity onboarding offers to break the
cycle of “hire, attrit, hire” and transform it into “hire, invest, improve,
and grow” (personal growth and enterprise growth). Finally, and arguably
most important, we hope that business leaders outside of the human
resource function will embrace strategic onboarding and pursue the
Onboarding Margin with the same passion that they pursue lean manu-
facturing, six-sigma programs, and other leading management disciplines.
With global business moving ever deeper into a knowledge-based econ-
omy, the knowledge worker has become the company’s key asset—more
important than production processes and traditional capital investments,
especially given that it is the knowledge worker who will help drive the
smart investments in new markets, customer service, improved produc-
tion processes, and capital projects. Business leaders seem to recognize
this fact—they talk about people as their most important asset—but they
don’t always put their money behind this idea. Onboarding is the neg-
lected stage in the employee life cycle, and it is the most important area
deserving of budget today. By pursuing intelligent designs based on proper
diagnostics, companies can redefine the employer-employee compact to
a mutually beneficial state that supports the modern enterprise in our mod-
ern economy that demands flexibility, responsiveness, and continuous
improvement at ever-increasing rates.
Realizing the Onboarding Margin throughout an organization is no
small task. Yet it’s not a mountain to climb, either. We’d like to conclude
by emphasizing that individual hiring managers can make a real differ-
ence with onboarding, whether or not their superiors in the organization
buy in. Hiring managers can take pieces of the firm-wide onboarding pro-
grams we’ve described and implement them on a smaller scale in their
departments or divisions. Onboarding doesn’t have to happen all at once,
and if worse comes to worse, it doesn’t have to happen everywhere at once.
Take heart. And take charge. With an understanding of onboarding in
your back pocket, you can become an effective change agent in your
organization. You can empower your employees to put their best selves
forward at work, progress their careers, and in the end, drive your business
further.