Page 86 - Successful Onboarding

The State of the Art: Essentials of Strategic Onboarding • 75

Figure 2.5 Value Contribution from Distributed Content Delivery

You cannot just dump large quantities of information on new hires all
at once and hope they will assimilate it in anything approximating a use-
ful way. The helpfulness of reinforcing and repeating information means
that in general the longer an onboarding program can last, the better. As
shown in Figure 2.5, pacing the content delivery out as the new hire gains
more context can help the new hire contribute greater value as represented
by the shaded area under the curve.

Four phases

Based on our experience working with clients, we believe that a state-of-
the-art onboarding program should roll out progressively over the first year
in four phases. We call these phases Prepare, Orient, Integrate, and Excel.
Figure 2.6 shows our recommendation for how the content delivery asso-
ciated with each pillar should be distributed across the four phases.