Page 80 - Successful Onboarding

The State of the Art: Essentials of Strategic Onboarding • 69

sales processes have it. A program that distinguishes world-class compa-
nies requires an administrative system to coordinate the roles that critical
stakeholders play in the onboarding process. If a program is truly systemic,
reaching organically across an enterprise, administration and governance
become the invisible threads that tie everything together. Their presence
is also what gives onboarding the unified look, feel, and utility of a signif-
icant strategic initiative within the firm.
At the United States Marine Corps, onboarding is taken very seriously.
The organization prides itself on bringing in their very best people to
develop new cadets, and then hold this staff accountable for it. By con-
trast, most businesses come up woefully short. How big is your recruiting
department? Five or ten people? Two hundred? Now, how big is your
onboarding department? Probably zero, or a number close to it. We put
people in recruiting because we understand the competitive nature of
finding talent and the importance of filling open positions, but we do not
apply anything near this level of resource to ensuring that our investments
succeed. This has to change.
Giving onboarding the status of a key strategic initiative means demand-
ing results and putting the resources and processes in place required to
obtain them. Individual managers today are held accountable for pro-
ductivity in areas in which we can measure it. We need to start holding
managers’ feet to the fire for additional metrics such as attrition, whether
on a quarterly or annual basis. Our polls show that very few front-line lead-
ers or executives have goals, let alone being held accountable for attrition
of new hires. We need to build this accountability into people’s job
descriptions and individual processes. And we need the proper support
systems in place to help our managers achieve their goals.
Let’s take an example. If managers at a large corporate law firm finish
a case, by our standards they need to close out the project by sitting down
with new hires and discussing various onboarding topics. These post-
engagement consultations should not take place indiscriminately or infor-
mally; rather, managers should receive guidelines about new hires’ needs
and how to have these conversations. At our consulting firm, managers
receive reminders as a matter of course upon completion of an engage-
ment that they have to do a performance review for new hires. It is all built
into our system: Triggers, a template, an instructional guide or framework