Page 51 - Successful Onboarding

40 • Successful Onboarding

long term, leading them to give more of themselves. Managers seeking to
affect organizational change thus need to figure out how to help people
chart a path toward the achievement of their overall needs. To help an
organization move toward success, managers must articulate customized
paths toward employee self-fulfillment that take into account the unique
strategies, visions, and organizational capacities that individual firms adopt.

Summing Up
Onboarding today remains relatively new, little known, and underap-
preciated. To help encourage firms to make the investment, this chapter
has sought to convince organizational leaders and operational managers
that onboarding is well worth a company’s time, energy, and dollars. It
has been argued that such programs can deliver astonishing value in an
area of the business where none was thought to exist. Onboarding isn’t
just about delivering efficiencies in a traditional orientation process;
rather, by going well beyond orientation and striving to meet new hires’
needs throughout the entire first year of their tenure, strategic onboard-
ing can deliver clear improvements across a variety of metrics. These
improvements add up, measurably affecting firms where it counts—the
bottom line.
That’s not to say that onboarding will improve your company’s reten-
tion or other metrics by 50% or 60%. Rather, the gains to expect are in the
neighborhood of two to six percentage points, say from 10% to 8% or 4%.
Yet these gains wind up giving firms a perceptible boost in financial meas-
ures such as revenue, cost, net income, or market capitalization—as
detailed in an analysis in this chapter’s appendix. They place onboarding
on par with lean manufacturing, innovation, focus on core competencies,
outsourcing and other progressive disciplines that over the past 20 years
have helped companies run better, compete, and create new value. Just
as these disciplines have boosted broader economic performance, so too
might onboarding. Also consider its prospective importance given that
today we are competing on the back of human capital, not manufactur-
ing capital.
In some ways, it makes more sense for firms to invest in onboarding
going forward than it does in these other value-creating disciplines.