Page 73 - Successful Onboarding

62 • Successful Onboarding

To understand just how comprehensive onboarding content might be,
it helps to think of the many “firsts” new hires experience that materially
affect how they view their new organizations. New hires integrate into the
firm through their experience of their first customer visit, that first time
they get pushback from a customer, learn that the commission schedule
was more complicated and less remunerative than they had initially
expected, complete an expense report (and find the system more painful
than at their last job), have a question about benefits, and quite signifi-
cantly, receive informal and/or formal performance reviews. Onboarding
includes that first stretch assignment, that first time they are working with-
out direct oversight, the first meeting, and that first time they have access
to confidential information; and the list goes on and on.
Companies can enhance some of these first experiences; others they
cannot. Some of these firsts involve HR processes, whereas the far greater
majority constitutes normal business processes. Resources are limited,
so companies must prioritize which of these experiences are most worth
shaping. But they need to recognize what is happening to the new hire as
they experience these firsts—all of the impressions, intake and opinions
formed)—and they need to address these firsts so that the experiences
become educational and carry moderate risk.
Consider this: What if your boss personally hand delivered your first
paycheck with a letter saying how happy he or she was to have you? On
the other hand, what if you got that first paycheck with too much money
deducted for health insurance (you signed up for the individual plan, but
in error had deductions taken out for a family plan), and the next pay
period the mistake was not fixed, even though you brought it to the pay-
roll department’s attention? Clearly these experiences matter. To do
onboarding right, we need to figure out the business processes and expe-
riences to which a new hire is exposed, determine which have an impact
on success or failure, distinguish which of these it makes sense to try to
influence and which the new hire or hiring manager alone can more effi-
ciently address, and then design an approach for exercising that influence.
We need to be highly selective and very smart.
For a sense of how a more experiential approach to onboarding works,
consider the practice of delivering performance reviews. Virtually all
firms regularly review employees, yet most do not deliver reviews to new