What happens when you don’t train new-hire mentors and other stakeholders involved in the onboarding experience :

Many of our client conversations start by clients asking us for best practice activities to do with new hires in the first weeks or months of employment.  These are fair questions, but they also imply that the organization may be taking a very narrow approach to onboarding (e.g., focusing all available time and resources on only the new hires themselves).

We know that to be effective, you need to take a more systemic approach to onboarding – one that takes into account training and programming for all of the stakeholders and “actors” involved in the onboarding experience. Examples of these other stakeholders and actors involved in the experience include mentors, functional and business unit leaders, hiring managers, benefit administrators, IT, etc.

Programming for…

Our work (as covered in our book Successful Onboarding) promotes the idea of attending to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in the design of your Onboarding Program in order to impact primary objective productivity gains (see Figure 1.1 below).

In a new book titled Flourish, Dr. Martin Seligman (University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology) outlines a set of thoughts associated with the Positive psychology movement and speaks to a model of well-being termed PERMA: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

To us, this sounds like a model that can serve as an effective frame for new hire onboarding.  Check out this recent article in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/ljUVxe) describing Seligman’s latest work and let us know what you think.

Figure 1.1 Potential of Recruiting and Onboarding to Satisfy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Onboarding is, and will continue to be, a critical business imperative this year as the economy continues to recover. In April 2011 alone, the Private Sector added 268,000 jobs, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. In this current economic climate, getting a higher rate of return from new hire investments and determining more effective means to engage, deploy, develop and retain critical human capital investments remains a priority for HR professionals.

Please join us for another interactive one hour session to learn how to establish and sustain an effective new hire onboarding program by which your organization can:

1. Drive increased performance from your new hires
2. Establish yourself as an “Employer of Choice”
3. Reduce attrition levels, and improve attrition mix (i.e., keep more of the ones that you deserve to keep)
4. Reduce time to productivity, and increase level of productivity for all of your new hire investments

You will come…

One of the key tenets of our new hire onboarding philosophy is the importance of context before content.    While many orientation programs take a “drinking out of a fire hose” approach of inundating new hires during their first days / weeks with all of the information they will need to become oriented, we subscribe to a very different school of thought.

We recommend that onboarding programs deliver information and resources to new hires over time, with the content distributed over the full course of year one but ideally with the greater majority of the content delivery and associated discussion occurring 3-4 months after entry, when the new hires have the context to absorb and truly understand the content.   The additional benefit of reserving rich content for closer to the end of the first year is that it provides you with a wonderful opportunity to re-engage your new hires and regain…

We are continually on the lookout for new hire onboarding best practices and examples of world-class onboarding programs to share with you.

Human Resources Executive Online (HREO) profiled IBM’s refreshed, 24-month new hire onboarding program, Succeeding@IBM, in a recent article: http://www.hreonline.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=533098421&sub=false.    The HREO article shares some of the highlights of IBM’s updated onboarding program, which incorporates many of the recommended practices and program elements discussed in our book, Successful Onboarding (McGraw Hill, July 2010).

Content with Context

First of all, we commend IBM for recognizing that the company’s legacy program “Your IBM”, a 30-day orientation experience, delivered too much content too soon (e.g., content delivery when new hires did not have sufficient context to fully appreciate and absorb the material, as illustrated in the far left column of the graphic below).

Understanding the value of delivering…