Page 39 - Successful Onboarding

28 • Successful Onboarding

Onboarding and Enhanced Productivity:
A Closer Look

Although well-designed onboarding programs have many components
and objectives, optimal programs have one leading goal in mind: to
maximize the productivity of an organization’s employees. In this way
they contribute to an organization’s bottom line. Improving output per
employee maximizes the revenues created by or operating costs reduced
by each employee, while minimizing the cost of employing these value-
creating strategies. This section provides a framework for analyzing pro-
ductivity and understanding the impact onboarding can have.
Onboarding drives productivity by serving as a multiplier of the key vari-
ables that contribute to employee output. Let’s first define these variables
and describe how they come together to yield output. We developed
the following expression to describe employee output—or New Hire
Contribution—as a function of four primary elements:

New Hire Contribution
Capability Context Connectedness Drive

Capability is a combination of an individual’s intelligence and skills,
including the capacity to develop and improve on these traits. Context is
an individual’s understanding of his or her organization, business, indus-
try, etc., based on an accurate education and experience base. Connect-
edness represents an individual’s internal and external relationships to the
organization that are relevant to the business, function, and role of the
new hire. Finally Drive, in simple terms, is the employee’s level of pursuit
of excellence.
Let’s examine Capability a little more closely. Although individuals are
born with a level of innate intelligence and have valuable natural or devel-
oped skills, there is substantial room to develop both of these traits through
continued development and encouragement. The capacity to develop
know-how and skill, therefore, may be just as important, if not more, than
an individual’s innate level of both traits.