Page 35 - Successful Onboarding

24 • Successful Onboarding

at once. As discussed later, the key is to assess which objectives will have
the biggest impact to your company and then devise a customized pro-
gram focused on delivering on those objectives.
Let’s run through the onboarding improvement objectives and explain
how strategic onboarding can make a big difference:

• Knowledge transfer. Today a lot of enterprise value is derived from
the knowledge of existing employees. Firms widely recognize
employee know-how as a company asset, even if it doesn’t appear
on the balance sheet. Many companies have invested a lot in
trying to distill employee know-how into a formal knowledge
management system. When an employee transfers out of a
position or leaves the company altogether, knowledge loss always
occurs. New hires represent a great and unique opportunity to
transfer the most important knowledge of the enterprise to the
future workforce and future leaders. This issue is even more
pronounced given that a large number of experienced Baby
Boomer employees will soon retire. Strategic onboarding helps by
offering mentor and apprentice programs, and developing and
engineering the significant relationships that new hires require to
learn from veteran employees, thus creating an effective
knowledge transfer program.
• Engagement levels. Employee engagement is critical for any
2
labor-dependent business. In fact, engagement affects several of
the business impacts on the right side of Table 1.1—most notably
time to productivity, level of productivity, level of attrition, and
attrition mix. High performers and “high prospects” who are not
sufficiently engaged operate at mediocre levels and soon begin a
job search. Ironically, low performers (or low prospects) also
maintain mediocre output levels, but unfortunately they are more
likely to stay on the job. Both of these are terrible outcomes for
the organization. A study of professional services firms found that
offices with engaged workers were over 40% more productive. 3
Other studies have found that engaged workers are more
customer-focused and profitable, and less likely to leave their